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Nearly 70,000 migrants crammed into hundreds of emergency shelters. People sleeping on floors, or huddled on sidewalks in the December cold. Families packed into giant tents at the edge of the city, miles from schools or services.

And New York City is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a month to care for them all.

This fall, an official in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams referred to the citys obligation to house and feed the 500 new migrants still arriving each day as our new normal.

It is a normal that could scarcely have been imagined 18 months ago, when migrants began gravitating to the city in large numbers from the nations southern border.

The migrant crisis in New York is the product of some factors beyond the citys control, including global upheaval, a federal government letting migrants enter in record numbers without giving most of them a way to work legally, and a unique local rule requiring the city to offer a bed to every homeless person.

But the dimensions of the problem the $2.4 billion cost so far, the harsh conditions, the number of migrants stuck in shelters can also be traced to actions taken, and not taken, by the Adams administration, The New York Times found in dozens of interviews with officials, advocates and migrants.

As the city raced to improvise a system that has processed more than 150,000 people since last year, it stumbled in myriad ways, many never reported before.

For most of the crisis, the city failed to take basic steps to help migrants move out of shelters and find homes in a city famed for its sky-high rents. It waited a year to help large numbers of migrants file for asylum, likely closing a pathway to legal employment for thousands.

The city has signed more than $2 billion in no-bid contracts, some with vendors that have been accused of abusing migrants. It has paid more than twice as much to house each migrant household as it did to house a homeless family before the crisis.

And again and again, Mr. Adams, a Democrat with a prickly streak, seemed to make his own job harder by berating state and federal officials whose help he sought.

The timeline is a series of late responses and antagonistic postures, said Christine Quinn, head of the citys biggest network of family shelters and a former City Council speaker.

City officials note that New York has received far more migrants than any big city outside the border states and that only New York must shelter them indefinitely. It has met that obligation over 99 percent of the time.

While all of us have expertise in serving an aspect of this crisis, none of us are experts in essentially running a refugee system, which is what we are doing, Molly Wasow Park, the mayors social services commissioner, said in October.

But too often, critics say, the city has made avoidable mistakes.

On the warm spring morning of April 13, 2022, shortly after 8 a.m., a bus pulled up to a corner in Washington, D.C. Passengers got out looking lost, clutching manila folders of paperwork after a 26-hour ride from the Mexican border.

At least six men continued to New York City, in a van hired by Catholic Charities.

They were, in a sense, pioneers: passengers on the first migrant bus sent north by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas as a stunt to protest border policy, and the first group of those migrants headed to New York.

More migrants came as the coronavirus pandemic subsided, fleeing destabilized countries. Venezuelans, whom the United States did not deport in the early days of the influx, arrived by the tens of thousands. Others came from Ecuador, Senegal, Mauritania, China.

Some found their way to a Catholic Migration Services office in Brooklyn, where employees found them sleeping outside. Aid groups sent them on to the citys homeless intake offices.

As the vacancy rate at family shelters dropped below 1 percent, officials scrambled to avoid defying the court decree guaranteeing a right to shelter.

Julia Savel, then a spokeswoman for the citys social services commissioner, Gary Jenkins, said that Mr. Jenkins pressured her to hide a looming disaster from the public. We dont have a single answer on how we were going to deal with this, she thought.

(Mr. Jenkins, who later resigned, said last week of Ms. Savels assertion, That is not true at all.)

By July 12, 2022, the situation was dire. On the phone with a relative, Ms. Savel broke down in tears: I really think were about to break the law.

A week later, Mr. Adams made his first extensive comments on the migrants. He said the city welcomes newcomers with open arms. After all, from New Yorks historical perspective, this influx was unexceptional. What was unusual was how many migrants had no connections here and ended up at shelters.

The mayor added that the city had a moral and legal obligation to house anyone who is experiencing homelessness. He was confident help would come soon from Washington.

Ms. Savel visited the family intake office in the Bronx and found chaos. Everyone coming in spoke Spanish; everyone working there spoke English. There was a woman in labor nine months pregnant sitting on the floor, she said. Children were crying because they were starving; we did not have enough food. It was wall-to-wall bodies.

The city had violated its duty to house everyone. When the story broke, it had a minor scandal on its hands.

At one City Hall meeting that summer, nonprofits told officials that they should interview all the migrants to figure out what services could get them into permanent housing, according to three advocates who attended. The city and its contractors began doing some of this, but city officials acknowledged it was a year before they undertook a more comprehensive effort.

Without doing basic case management, critics said, the city did not know migrants immigration status, what benefits they were eligible for or whether they might have relatives they could live with.

Mr. Adams accused Mr. Abbott of manufacturing New Yorks migrant influx. Mr. Abbott insisted he had sent buses only to Washington. It never became clear whose version was true.

But the governor did shift focus: Governor Abbott decided that if Texas was going to get blamed for recent migrant arrivals to New York City, we may as well be sending them ourselves, Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott, told The Times.

Early on Aug. 5, the first official Abbott bus arrived at the Port Authority terminal, the citys main bus station. By months end, the city was sheltering nearly 6,000 migrants.

Most were grateful for a place to lay their heads. They came because the buses were free, but also because New York was an international symbol: the place where immigrants could make it.

One day in early October 2022, it rained in the Bronx.

Less than an inch fell. But puddles formed in the parking lot at Orchard Beach, where a city contractor who had built part of the Trump-era border wall was erecting a tent complex for migrants.

Critics had warned that the lot was flood-prone and impractically remote. But the migrant population had doubled, to 12,000. The city, desperate for emergency housing, had looked at 50 locations and found the best location, the mayor said.

Besides, he said, People live in flood zones.

The citys first solution was to drill holes and pump water out. Then it discovered that the parking lot was built on old lumber, landfill and barges, and at risk of sinkholes.

City Hall about-faced and found a new spot: Randalls Island, farther south. But then migration temporarily slowed. The facility sat mostly empty for a month until the city took it down.

It was a herky-jerky, costly approach to crisis management that would come to typify the citys struggle to keep up with the ebb and flow of migrants.

That September, the agencies that might have been expected to run a homelessness emergency, the Department of Homeless Services or the Office of Emergency Management, said they were too overwhelmed. City Hall held a meeting and asked agencies to volunteer.

There was a pause.

Well do it, said Mitchell Katz, the head of the citys public hospitals. Early in the pandemic, his agency ran isolation hotels. This seemed like a very similar undertaking, he noted.

The hospital operator had been praised for its Covid response, but it had also made costly mistakes. As the hospital agency built tent dormitories and converted hotels into shelters, it returned to many of the same companies it used during the pandemic, though they lacked experience housing homeless people or serving migrants.

The Adams administration, in consultation with state officials, also explored an outside-the-box solution: cruise ships. To Frank Carone, then the mayors chief of staff, they were the best of the worst options.

Mr. Carone got an estimate from an Estonian company that had housed Ukrainian refugees. He spoke with Norwegian Cruise Line. But when the administration floated the idea publicly, it was ridiculed. Some said the idea was cruel. Others argued it was too luxurious.

Then there was the question of sewage. Cruise ships, said Jackie Bray, the state commissioner of emergency services, empty their sewage and things at sea, and so you have to either have a way to do that on shore or you have to put them out to sea every once in a while.

The idea was abandoned but soon resurfaced in another form: a thousand-bed shelter at the cruise terminal in Brooklyn. The mayor spent a night on a cot there. The team at the terminal is giving new meaning to the words love thy neighbor, he said.

By January, the migrant shelter population had doubled again, to 27,000. The city was offering people tickets out of town, including to the Canadian border.

Rosiel Ramirez, from Venezuela, was among those who wished for a warmer welcome elsewhere. Her family headed north, hoping, she said, that a new country would finally be our Israel.

Canadian officials angrily accused Mr. Adams of trying to export his migrant problem, just as Mr. Adams had accused Mr. Abbott of doing.

In January, a White House official met with a national mayors group. Conversation quickly turned to migrants.

During the closed-door gathering, Mr. Adams said the federal government seemed to have no plan to address the tremendous burden its immigration policies imposed on big cities, according to three people who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly: an official who was present and two who were told about the interaction, including one briefed by the mayor.

The White House official, Julie Chvez Rodrguez, director of intergovernmental affairs, pushed back strongly.

Three months later, before meeting with White House officials, the mayor declared at a news conference, The president and the White House have failed New York City on this issue.

A White House statement at the time said that it was proud of the significant investments weve made in New York City.

As the mayors rift with the White House widened, his pleas for money and help were mostly ignored.

City Hall has argued that it was only after the mayor ramped up his rhetoric that the federal government began paying attention and sending aid. But even that was scant $156 million for a problem that the mayor said will cost $12 billion over three years.

City officials decided to look within the state for help. In May, Mr. Adams told Steven Neuhaus, the Republican executive of Orange County, that he planned to send several dozen migrants to a hotel there. Mr. Neuhaus recalled that the mayor promised to do nothing until he gave him details.

I never heard anything back, Mr. Neuhaus said. Soon, two buses of migrants, with New York City police escorts, arrived at an Orange County hotel.

That week, Mr. Adams castigated upstate officials on a conference call. Every state lawmaker should have been in Washington, D.C., with me on my trips to say, This cant happen to our state, he said on a recording obtained by The Times.

The county executives did not respond as he hoped. More than two dozen issued orders to stop the city from housing migrants on their turf.

In July, there was a brief rapprochement when upstate officials shared a vegan dinner at Gracie Mansion with the mayor. But within weeks, the city sent more migrant buses upstate, and officials again felt they were not given adequate warning.

It angered everybody, said Daniel McCoy, the Albany County executive.

Since then, City Hall has made a concerted effort to communicate better, he said. City Hall has argued that with thousands of migrants arriving each week, officials provide notice as early as they can.

For months, the mayor demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul send more help. But his teams tendency to describe the migrant situation as worse than Covid alienated public officials who had helped manage the response to a pandemic that has killed 81,000 New Yorkers.

Tensions spilled into public view in August, when the state criticized the city for not making use of shelter sites the state had offered and for shipping migrants upstate with little-or-no notice.

The state has committed nearly $2 billion to the migrant response.

In May, a reporter asked Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom how many of the 72,000 migrants who had passed through the portals of the shelter system had applied for asylum. Very few, she answered, adding Were going to be working on that.

Why so few, the reporter asked.

They probably didnt know where to get connected to services, didnt know who to give their paperwork to, Ms. Williams-Isom said.

It was a surprising admission for City Halls point person on the migrant response.

Applying for asylum a complex, lengthy process with a one-year deadline is one of few paths for people who cross the border to work legally.

The city had begged the federal government to expedite work authorization. But for a year, the city did little itself to get migrants on track to work, opening an asylum help center only in late June. If it had acted sooner, state officials wrote, It is likely that thousands more migrants would be able to work today.

The sluggishness was part of a pattern. For most of the crisis, the city seemed to ignore calls to provide more services to help migrants move out of shelters faster, a lapse that grew more costly with time.

Keeping a migrant family in a shelter for a month costs about $12,000. Moving 10,000 families out of shelter would save over $1 billion a year. But the city often appeared so overwhelmed trying to find a bed for everyone each night that it had little bandwidth for planning.

City Councilwoman Diana Ayala described the process like this: You get here, they put you in a shelter, you stay in a shelter and a year passes.

City Hall says that the asylum help center, staffed with lawyers, had not been made before and has become a national model.

We are a municipality doing the federal governments job, said Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayors chief adviser. They need to do their jobs.

The Legal Aid Society had urged the city to file public assistance applications for migrants who had submitted asylum applications, since that income would help them obtain housing.

They say they dont have the staff to do that, said Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney for the group. We said, Why dont you hire temps? and they kind of stare blankly.

A city official said the city was prohibited from using temporary workers to process benefit applications and that Department of Homeless Services contractors are already supposed to help migrants in its shelters apply for benefits.

Outside a jail-turned-shelter in Harlem in August, three friends spoke about the grind of finding work and a home. One, Gregorio Velasco, 40, was on crutches after wiping out on his delivery motorcycle in the rain. His friend Obson Bruteis, a 29-year-old from Haiti, said they struggled to stay optimistic as they searched for odd jobs.

So far, everything has been temporary, he said. But we keep going out every day to look for it.

It was only when hospital officials opened an arrival center in May at the Roosevelt, a faded but once-grand Midtown hotel, that the city began more thoroughly canvassing migrants to find out what they needed to become self-sufficient.

Were starting to have those conversations now, Dr. Ted Long, who leads the hospital agencys migrant response, told the City Council in August.

Obscured by the migrant crisis was another factor crowding the shelters: rising homelessness among people who already lived here. According to a Times analysis of city data, the non-migrant population of the main shelter system is up 20 percent under Mr. Adams.

On a warm July day, a line formed outside the Roosevelt Hotel. Inside, beneath a sparkling chandelier, families were signed in and vaccinated. Dr. Long said he imagined the old luxury hotel as a new Ellis Island.

But for some migrants, the doors did not open.

Men stood outside for hours, waiting to be assigned a shelter bed. Then they sat.

And then, as hours and then days passed, they slumped to the ground, onto the backpacks they had hoisted on their backs for weeks, or onto each other. Some shielded themselves from the summer sun with cardboard boxes.

One migrant, Abdelkerim, 30, from Chad, said he had expected better from New York. Weve been sleeping on the floor since we got here, he said. Its really pathetic.

Mr. Adams said the system had finally broken. From this moment on, its downhill, he said. There is no more room.

In truth, there were hundreds of empty shelter beds, but the city said it had to reserve them for other homeless New Yorkers.

Conditions at some shelters were desperate. Migrants were housed for weeks in respite centers that sometimes lacked basics like showers. One shelter in a converted Manhattan office building had no air conditioning.

In September, Mr. Adams said that without more federal aid, this issue will destroy New York City. He called for a 15 percent city budget cut, citing migrant costs.

But the mayors critics said the budgetary damage was partly self-inflicted. Throughout the crisis, the city has relied heavily on no-bid emergency contracts with private companies that increased costs dramatically. Of course, the migrant crisis is an emergency, and extra spending is inevitable. But the amount, City Council members have said, was not.

Before the migrant influx, the city paid an average of $188 per day to shelter a family with children. Now it is paying nearly $400 for each migrant household, which includes single adults.

Some of the more eye-popping charges have been from DocGo, a medical services firm enlisted by the hospital system to run services at the Roosevelt. During the pandemic, DocGo swabbed half a million noses for the citys testing program. For the migrants, the hospitals paid DocGo millions to handle jobs far beyond its expertise, including security, casework and school enrollment.

DocGo was allowed to charge $33 a day per migrant for shelter meals, triple some other vendors rates. It charged $150 an hour for registered nurses while another provider, MedRite, charged $80.

See more here:
Chaos, Fury, Mistakes: 600 Days Inside New York's Migrant Crisis - The New York Times

Republicans wont pass aid to Ukraine without a so-called border deal, and although Democrats dont agree on how to do it, they have already agreed with the Republicans restrictionist goal to let fewer people into America. But nearly everything that politicians now use to justify immigration restriction can be traced to the restrictionist policies already in force.

In other words, immigration restrictionists create the problems and then demand ever more restrictions to fix them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The main problem they assert is simply that people keep entering the country illegally. An inquisitive person might ask: Why dont they come legally?

The answer is quite simple: Legal immigration is impossible for them.

There is no path, other than requesting asylum at the border, that is available to the people who are coming up through Mexico to the United States. If ending illegal immigration was the goal, the government could simply let them come legally.

But thats not the goal. Politicians are saying that the country is overwhelmed and cant handle any more immigrants, legal or otherwise. What nonsense.

The United States has among the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and U.S. population growth in the 2020s has never been lower. America needs people to fill its nearly nine million open jobs and support its growing retiree population.

Immigrants arent the problem. The politicians are the problem.

Border communities are declaring states of emergency because they have so many immigrants sleeping on their streets. Its a real problem, but why are they sleeping on their streets? Because politicians wont let them enter legally and line up transportation in advance, so when Border Patrol unexpectedly releases them, they sleep next to bus depots waiting for the next bus out of town.

Rural border hospitals are begging Congress for bailouts. But many migrants end up needing medical care because Border Patrol intentionally uses walls to direct them to cross through deserts or across rivers where they can become dehydrated or drown. The wall has only added to the chaos with record numbers falling from the wall and severely injuring themselves.

Dont blame the immigrant risk-takersnah, theyd happily enter legally. Blame the politicians who want immigrants to have to jump walls to come.

What about the rise of migrant homelessness in cities across the United States? Surely that proves that we need restriction? Not at all. These immigrants desperately want to work to support themselves, but Biden officials are too scared to let them do so legally because then more will come.

Our political class is choosing to create a homeless crisis, which then creates the justification for more restrictions at the border.

Freeing up Border Patrol would allow it to target criminals who cross the border. But politicians are explicitly not focused on the criminals. They want to keep out those immigrants who the Border Patrol screens and releases, not those who avoid arrests.

Even if more restriction isnt needed, couldnt it fix the problems? No, it would exacerbate the crisis.

Lets review whats on the table. House Republicans want to ban asylum completely at the southwest border and to send a lot more people to Mexico. But we just lived through this exact combination of policies under Title 42 health authority and it was a disaster. More people tried to enter, and more importantly, more people tried to sneak past Border Patrol leading to record numbers of deadly chases.

With no reason to turn themselves in, record numbers tried to evade detection and enter without being screened by Border Patrolthats the opposite of increasing security.

House and Senate Republicans also insist on banning the only legal ways to enter the country for these people by restricting the presidents authority to parole them in at ports of entry. Biden is already capping his use of this authority at such a low level that illegal immigration is continuing anyway, but getting rid of it altogether would unleash a deluge of people who would have otherwise entered the right way.

When restrictionists get their way and all this chaos predictably plays out, theyll go back in their tool bag foryou guessed itmore chaos-inducing restrictions! Theres a better way. Legalize immigration.

Let people come and work legally and contribute to this great country, just as immigrants have for centuries. Thats the border plan of Americas founders. It was our tradition for most of our history.

David J. Bier is the associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.

Read the original here:
Want to Solve the Border Crisis? Legalize Immigration. - The Daily Beast

Nationwide, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, has nearly 1.6 million pending applications for work permits, which are granted only to those with permission to be here.

Efforts to improve the slow, cumbersome process are taking shape. Massachusetts has launched what it says is a first-in-the-nation program to provide legal assistance, case management, and other services for new migrants, sending legal professionals into shelters to help people apply for permits and holding two weeklong clinics in Reading in conjunction with federal authorities. Free job training for those waiting on work authorization is also taking place, including one initiative partnering with local employers that will pay shelter residents a $325-a-week stipend during the three- to six-month program.

Similar clinics have been held in New York, Chicago, and Denver. These endeavors to solve multiple problems at once getting migrants into the workforce, out of overflowing shelters, and onto the payrolls of employers desperate to fill jobs are part of a push to address the broken immigration system.

Were doing all that we can to make up for the failings of federal immigration law, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll said during a visit to the clinic in Reading in November. People cant wait to work and weve got employers that are hungry for workers.

There are more than 228,000 open jobs in Massachusetts, many of them in health care more than twice the number of unemployed people in the state.

Federal immigration authorities said that as of Oct. 1., they accelerated the application process for migrants who use the Customs and Border Protection app or come from certain countries, including Haiti. In those cases, the median processing time has dropped from 90 to 30 days, USCIS said. The agency said it adjudicates each [employment authorization document] application fairly, humanely, and efficiently on a case-by-case basis, but did not say what accounted for otherwise long wait times.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and a coalition of state attorneys general sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security urging more action, including allowing migrants to apply for work authorization at the same time they request permission to enter the country, granting provisional authorization to work at the time they apply, eliminating fees, and automatically renewing their ability to stay in the US if their allotted time expires while theyre waiting for work permits.

But these changes are mostly aimed at new arrivals. Those who came earlier this year are still waiting six months to a year for their work permits, which must be continually renewed. And without authorization, migrants are in limbo; they cant enroll in most training programs or English classes geared toward getting a job.

Thelemarque, who has been waiting nearly nine months for his permit, has been staying with a cousin in Mattapan. He studies English and practices his trombone, which he played professionally in Haiti, and watches his cousins daughter. But hes frustrated he cant do more. Its very difficult for me as a young man full of strength, he said in Haitian Creole, through a translator.

Applying for work authorization which, without a pending green card or asylum, typically lasts no longer than two years is too complicated for non-English speakers to do on their own, immigration specialists say. Migrants have to fill out a seven-page form outlining their arrival details and eligibility status, and if someone forgets to check a box or accidentally selects the incorrect eligibility category, they may have to apply all over again.

They get rejected for ticky-tacky things all the time, said Jill Seeber, executive director of Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice in Boston. Theres a million ways for things to go wrong.

Applicants must find a way to Revere or Lawrence or possibly Rhode Island or New Hampshire, depending on where theyre living to have their photographs and fingerprints taken at a predetermined time. If they dont make the appointment, their application could be denied. Something as simple as changing their mailing address, not uncommon among migrants without a permanent home, could further delay the process.

For most new arrivals, the application costs $410, which can be waived by filling out yet another form, this one 11 pages long involving household income, assets, and poverty guidelines. Theres a lot of math, Seeber said. The biometric information photos and fingerprints cost an additional $85.

Migrants streamed into Massachusetts this year, many fleeing violence and poverty, escalating the states longstanding housing crisis. The influx is being felt nationwide, punctuated by migrants being involuntarily shipped north from the southern border, including two planeloads of Venezuelans who were sent to Marthas Vineyard from Texas last year.

In August, Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency due to the skyrocketing shelter numbers more than 5,600 families at the time, roughly half of them migrants. In October, she announced a capacity limit of 7,500 families, which was quickly hit, causing people to be turned away for the first time. In a letter to the US secretary of homeland security, Healey cited the burdensome barriers facing migrants seeking work authorization as a primary reason for overloaded shelters.

During the clinic at a National Guard facility in Reading in late November, migrants in winter hats made their way around a cavernous room bustling with Red Cross volunteers, immigration lawyers, and translators. A National Guard member in camouflage fatigues blew bubbles for a toddler pushing a folding chair along the floor.

In addition to serving as a one-stop shop for applying for work permits free of charge, including biometrics, the clinic offered vaccinations, child care voucher applications, registration for the MassHire employment center system, and drivers license information.

Most of the 2,000 migrants bused to the clinics from around the state were Haitian, including a couple who appeared to have been duped by a notario who showed up at their shelter at a Residence Inn in Worcester. Notarios, based on the term for legal professionals in Latin America, charge migrants for providing services they arent qualified to perform. The couple, there with their 3-year-old son, thought their work authorization was in process, but clinic volunteers determined it had been done improperly and helped them refile.

Several migrants at the clinic may have been defrauded in this way, based on the number of rejected permits from the same shelter, said Susan Church, chief operating officer of the states Office for Refugees and Immigrants.

This is a monumental change, the role that the state is playing, said Church, who has been an immigration lawyer for more than 25 years.

Pastor Dieufort Fleurissaint, executive director of the nonprofit True Alliance Center in Mattapan, has never seen such an intense need in his two decades helping Haitian migrants. Following the Reading clinics, he said, he knew of at least several dozen people who got their work permits within a few weeks.

Those people are assets to the government, not liabilities, he said.

One migrant hes assisting has been caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare trying to get her work permit. Claire Petion first applied for temporary protected status, or TPS, and a work permit in August of 2021, and finally got both more than one year later. But her Social Security number wasnt issued, forcing her to apply for that separately in order to work legally. While she was waiting, her TPS and work permit expired, so she applied again. Her Social Security card finally arrived a few months ago, but her new TPS and work authorizations have not.

A former straight-A student, Petion, 21, lives with an aunt in Randolph. She wants to apply for jobs and health care training, and was accepted to several colleges, but cant attend because of her paperwork problems.

When she called up her case on the USCIS app, there were no red flags: Last update: 264 days ago, it read. When she dialed the automated number (which some immigration attorneys derisively call 1-800-USELESS) and tried to connect with a person, the recording said: If you continue to ask for an agent, I will need to disconnect the call.

And then it did.

Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.

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Migrant crisis: Work permit waits leave some in limbo - The Boston Globe

The village of Fox River Grove found itself as the latest suburban community affected by the migrant crisis on Saturday, as a bus driver dropped off more than 30 migrants, who thought they had reached Chicago.

In a Facebook post, the village said 38 migrants from Texas arrived at the Metra station along Northwest Highway in the early morning hours, and disembarked their bus after being told they had arrived in Chicago. In actuality, they were more than 45 miles from downtown.

Village police officers responded to the station and provided the migrants access to a warming shelter. By 7 a.m., arrangements had been made for the group to obtain Metra tickets and continue to Chicago, the village said.

"FRG is not the only collar county municipality grappling with such situations," the Facebook post read, in part. "Several other communities have encountered similar challenges, highlighting the need for a coordinated regional approach to ensure the safety and well-being of migrants and residents alike."

Another busload of approximately 40 migrants arrived in suburban Westmont on Saturday. As was the case in River Grove, the migrants were dropped off at a Metra station, where they took a train to downtown Chicago.

The drop-offs mirror similarsuburban drop-offs this weekin Aurora, Manhattan and Elburn, where migrants were told to board trains to Chicago after being dropped off.

In the instance in Manhattan, they learned that there were no more Chicago-bound trains for the evening and headed to a station in Joliet to board a train to the city.

One drop-off in Kankakee took officials by surprise, when abus driver told migrants they had arrived in Chicagowhen arriving at a gas station in the rural city over 60 miles south of the Loop.

Some migrants who traveled on the bus began to walk on the expressway covered in blankets, with officials in Kankakee County arranging for a local bus company to transport the migrants to Midway International Airport.

Police are still trying to identify those responsible for abandoning the group at the gas station.

The sheriff's office said it filed an emergency declaration with the Illinois Emergency Management Agency "due to concerns about potential future incidents," saying the department has "limited resources available to accommodate such situations, comparable to the assistance provided in Chicago."

The increase in suburban drop-offs comes as buses try to circumvent policies recently implemented by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson that aim to crack down on buses arriving outside of designated arrival times.

Meanwhile, in suburban Aurora on Friday, the City Council passed an ordinance that calls for drivers and bus companies to notify the appropriate agency at least five days prior to a bus's arrival. Those who don't comply could be subjected to fines of up to $1,000 per passenger.

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Bus drops off asylum-seekers in Fox River Grove; migrants were told they had arrived in Chicago - NBC Chicago

Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday complained that he has been unable to obtain a meeting with President Joe Biden amid the surge in migrants his city is experiencing.

During a press conference, the mayor said he has not met with Biden since 2022.

"It baffles me. You know, New York City is the economic engine of the state and the country," Adams said. "I am really pleased that we are now getting a chorus of other cities that are joining us, who are now part of our coalition."

Adams has traveled to Washington, D.C., several times to meet with members of the Biden administration about the surge in migrants. His request for supplemental funding to aid the city in processing migrants was joined by other Democratic mayors in November, including Los Angeles' Karen Bass and Chicago's Brandon Johnson.

Adams has predicted that the cost of providing housing and services to New York City's migrant population, which includes roughly 126,000 asylum seekers who have arrived since last spring, could cost the city more than $12 billion in the next three years.

Read more:
NYC Mayor Adams Says He Can't Get Meeting With Biden Amid Migrant Crisis: 'It Baffles Me' - The Messenger