More illegal migrant asylum seekers are being housed in New York City shelters than homeless people, according to NBC News 4 New York.
According to the report, the number of illegal migrants surpassed the local homeless population in city shelters, 50,000 to 49,700.
Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom told the news outlet that while it's important for the city to welcome the surge of illegal migrants with dignity, the numbers are "unsustainable" due to limited resources.
"My heart breaks a little bit, and I have these conflicting feelings," Williams-Isom said while touring a new arrival center at the Roosevelt Hotel. "[The staff] are working 12-hour shifts. We thought that we would see some relief. But there is no relief coming. There is no cavalry coming."
Dr. Ted Long of New York City Health and Hospitals told NBC 4 that the city is getting around 400 new migrants each day and that a small number can be temporarily housed at the hotel as staff tries to find family and friends for them throughout the country.
"[This housing is] to give you that critical period of time to enable us to get through to those friends or family members across the country, and then rebook you so you don't have to enter the city system," Long, whose organization runs the arrival center and other humanitarian relief centers said in the report.
According to the report, some 80,000 illegal migrants have entered New York since the spring of 2022, meaning that 30,000 have left in the past year.
Although the city is set to receive a $104.6 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with costs, the tab is expected to reach $4.5 billion, which Mayor Eric Adams wants the Biden administration to pay, the New York Post reported June 23.
"Everybody is scrambling to deal with the fallout from the Biden administration's policies," Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian told the Post. "The thing that Mayor Adams and others are culpable for is not clearly calling for a change to immigration policy. Adams and other big city mayors are begging for more money from Washington, which solves nothing."
According to the report, housing and food costs total about $8 million a day as an estimated 13,000 new migrants were reported coming to New York in the past month.
The Post estimates the city will have spent about $1.6 billion on the crisis by July 1.
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