Gov. Kathy Hochul doubled down on calls to end New York City’s “right to shelter law,” insisting it created an “untenable situation” — as another busload of dozens of migrants rolled into the Big Apple from the southern border Friday.
The Democratic leader said Friday that he and Mayor Eric Adams need to sit down and “take a look” at a decades-old mandate that requires the city to provide beds to anyone who asks for one as immigrants continue to flood the city’s already overburdened shelters.
Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said the law was “never intended to be a universal, unlimited opportunity to protect the world,” but rather to keep homeless people off the streets.
“There is a limit to who we can accommodate,” he said, adding that the city still receives about 3,000 migrants each week.
“That’s totally unsustainable,” Hochul said.
“We worked hard, spent millions of dollars, state dollars to house 3,000 here, 2,000 here, 1,000 here. So that word needs to be removed [while] New York has always been a welcoming place for immigrants — we all came from somewhere, our parents and grandparents — but there’s a limit to the people we can accommodate at this time.
“And we need the whole country to step up.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul doubled down on her call to end New York City’s “right to shelter” mandate Friday, blasting President Biden.MSNBC
It came as a bus carrying 47 asylum seekers, including families with children, arrived at the Manhattan Port Authority bus terminal Friday morning.
The migrants, who had traveled from Del Rio, Texas, were quickly loaded onto another bus and taken to the mega-shelter The Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown.
The Adams administration is currently challenging the “right to shelter” rule in the state Supreme Court, arguing it needs to turn some people away because the city’s resources have been strained by the arrival of more than 110,000 asylum seekers since spring 2022.
Legal Aid, however, has challenged that push, claiming in part that it will only lead to more people sleeping on Gotham’s streets.
Meanwhile, Hochul also called on President Biden to find a permanent solution to the country’s migrant crisis, arguing that there should be a two-step approach.
“One is more enforcement at the border,” he explained. “It’s a broken system there.”
Under New York City’s “right to shelter” mandate, the city must provide a bed for anyone who requests a bed.Seth Gottfried
Hochul said that NY needs “the whole country to step up” in helping the migrant crisis.Getty Images
Another part of the plan, Hochul said, is for the Biden administration to create a comprehensive strategy to reduce illegal immigration — though he claims the bottleneck in getting any policy “driven by Republicans in Congress.”
“This rests on their feet as well,” he said.
But Hochul said he knows Republicans and Democrats can come together to create a solution “because as a young attorney for Sen. [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan [D-NY] in 1986, I worked on the last major immigration reform and it was a bipartisan compromise,” he told “Morning Joe” host Willie Geist.
“That was the last time we really saw nationhood in Washington, and that’s what I’m calling for right now.”
His remarks came just a day after the Biden administration gave Venezuelan asylum seekers a path to expedited work permits.
Hochul called on the Biden administration to create a comprehensive solution to the border crisis.AFP via Getty Images
The United States has seen record-breaking illegal border crossings in recent months.AP
Hochul previously told NY1 that granting temporary protected status and expediting work permits for the thousands of Venezuelans who entered the US before July 31 is an “important first step” in obtaining expedited work status for all immigrants.
He said he has been pushing for more than a year to get temporary protected status that would allow them to work in the US, and now the working immigrants will start living independently instead of relying on the city’s shelter system.
Extending temporary shelter status to immigrants allows them to work within 30 days instead of 180 days, meaning they will be able to leave shelter sooner.
About 41% of immigrants coming to the Big Apple from the southern border are Venezuelans, according to City Hall data released last month.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
