White House, NYC fail to provide any details on promised migrant liaison

Sep 19, 2023

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Federal and city officials have yet to provide any details including even the name of the liaison promised by the Biden administration to help ease the Big Apple’s migrant crisis — five days after the White House offered the paltry solution.

“This is so comical, it’s beyond absurd,” City Councilman Bob Holden (D-Queens) told The Post on Tuesday.

Mayor Eric Adams met Thursday with federal Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who promised to send a staffer from his office to the city to help as it grapples with housing tens of thousands of newly arrived migrants from the southern border.

Adams said Monday that the offer was a start — but what the city really needs is for President Biden to foot the bill, among other things, for the crisis, which Hizzoner estimates will be more than $4 billion over just two years.

On Tuesday, neither City Hall nor the DHS could further elaborate on the White House’s promise to send a federal migrant liaison to the boroughs, much less name the person.

The DHS dodged questions from The Post about the liaison and instead provided a vague recap of last week’s meeting.

“Last week, Secretary Mayorkas met with members of the New York delegation to discuss assistance to communities supporting migrants, including DHS grants,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement.

“The Secretary also highlighted the challenges of managing a broken and outdated immigration system that only Congress can fix through bipartisan legislative action.”

City Hall did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the record.

It also remained unclear when Mayorkas plans to visit the city as promised last week to get a firsthand look at the bursting emergency shelter systems across the boroughs, where single men will now be evicted after 60 days.

Migrants have been sleeping for days on cardboard outside Manhattan’s temporary intake center, the historic Roosevelt Hotel, to even get processed in the first place.

“We don’t need a liaison, we need a plan: What do we do with 90,000-plus migrants who are unvetted and now in New York City?” Holden said.

“Biden is asleep at the wheel, has been and continues to be — obviously — not engaged and not trying to solve any of New York’s problems,” Holden said. “You want to speed this up, check these people out, see if they deserve to get the status of asylum, and that should be the No. 1 priority.”

More than 93,000 asylum-seekers have come through the city’s intake center since last spring, officials said.