People who thought Mayor Eric Adams might opt for discretion when the stakes got high are now learning in real time that is not how this mayor rolls.
For more than a year, Adams has been embroiled in an emergency of epic proportion. About 74,000 migrants have streamed into the city since he took office and more than 47,000 of them remain in the city’s care. Administration officials project the total bill for this will come to more than $4 billion within a year’s time — as the city’s homeless shelters and emergency relief centers have already reached capacity.
In the face of this, Adams has housed migrants in hotels, public school gymnasiums and churches — and he’s used his bully pulpit to attack those he believes aren’t doing their part. That list that grows longer with each passing week and includes President Biden, the City Council, Comptroller Brad Lander, Republicans both inside and outside the state and an array of left-leaning advocates.
Whether such rhetoric hurts or helps the city is still an open question. But this much has been clear: Adams’ targets have been the very players he needs to build a coalition with in order to solve a vexing and complex problem.
In April, the mayor assailed Biden for providing too little to migrants in the Big Apple and proclaimed that the president had “failed the city.” More recently, he attacked Lander for not traveling to Washington D.C. to plead with the federal government for more aid — a broadside that included a biting impersonation of the fiscal watchdog.
And even when he does offer praise, as he did when asked about a Council delegation’s recent trip to D.C., the mayor often couches it in criticism. In the Council’s case, he made sure to note how many months it took members to lobby the White House and congressional leaders on the migrant issue in person.
“He hasn’t yet learned the political discipline of a seasoned leader,” one well-placed congressional source told The News.
Speaking his mind
Some view the mayor’s approach as a hallmark of honesty and an indication that he views the politics around the migrant crisis as secondary — and the actual nuts and bolts of managing it as the priority. Others believe it reveals a lack of discipline or perhaps, even worse, a lack of seriousness.
Frank Carone, Adams’ former chief of staff and current campaign manager, falls into the first category. From his perspective, Adams’ primary focus when it comes to migrants has been management, funding and infrastructure — and that everything else, including the political heat and rhetoric around the crisis, is secondary — as it should be.
“The mayor is being intellectually honest,” Carone said. “When you’re actually in the trenches, when you’re actually moving progress forward, you’re worried about that first. And when you’re asked a question, you’ll answer it accordingly, but you’re not worried about how my optics are or what my message is.”
None of Adams’ critics who spoke to the Daily News suggested the mayor should bend the truth about the facts surrounding the migrant crisis — and many sympathized with the difficulty of the situation he finds himself in — but they suggested Adams might get better results by exercising more rhetorical restraint.
“The mayor hasn’t been good when it comes to discipline,” the Congressional source told The News.
That doesn’t absolve Biden of responsibility either, said the source, who framed the issue from both a national and foreign policy perspective, noting Biden’s failure to immediately assign a point person to deal with cities like New York that have been forced to manage through the crisis.
“If the mayor and the Biden administration were a car accident, I think the insurance company would say there’s shared negligence here,” the source said. “The mayor has made mistakes, and the administration has made mistakes.”
Adams’ allies and officials in his administration are quick to point out that after a year of little to no response from the White House — and before the mayor criticized Biden — the city had been allocated a grand total of $8 million in relief for migrants. Since Adams called out the president by name, the federal government has set aside more than $130 million in relief funding for the city.
The proof of Adams’ rhetorical effectiveness, they argue, is in the pudding.
Doug Muzzio, a political scientist at Baruch College, suggested that perspective might be shortsighted, though.
“Him going after Biden may satisfy his frustration with the administration, but it can have short- and long-term consequences beyond the migrant issue,” he said. “I don’t think in any respect it’s deft. But obviously it remains to be seen because we’re in the midst of the crisis.”
Others believe the assessment that Adams lacks discipline is far too charitable and say it’s not a lack of discipline that’s animating his rhetoric — but a misdirection of it. One former city official who worked in the Adams administration pointed to the mayor’s recent attack on Lander as a prime illustration.
The reporter’s question that prompted Adams to attack Lander made no actual reference to Lander — it focused solely on the City Council — a fact which suggests the mayor was simply waiting for an opportunity to counter the comptroller’s criticisms, which include digs on Adams’ transparency around the cost of the crisis and what Lander views as the administration’s failure to put enough money toward legal assistance for asylum seekers.
“The problem isn’t that he isn’t disciplined. The problem is that he’s not serious,” the former City Hall official said of Adams’ attack on Lander.
Blame game politics
Another perspective is that Adams would be completely with his rights to constantly point the finger at both Biden and Gov. Hochul, who allocated $1 billion to the city for the migrant crisis in her most recent budget.
Adams has argued, both internally and publicly, that both have the ability to do more.
“This is one of the few instances where playing the blame game makes a lot of sense,” said Richard Flanagan, a CUNY poli sci professor. “He’s getting jacked around by all these red state politicians. The president doesn’t want to hear about it, and the governor isn’t doing enough about it.”
While not ideal, Flanagan added, the blame-game gambit may be better than some of the ideas Adams has trotted out in public — like the failed plan to house migrants on Randall’s Island or putting them up in people’s private residences.
“This is the hand he’s been dealt, and a politician either succumbs to it or gets a handle on it,” Flanagan said. “And he’s not getting a handle on it.”
Many advocates and City Council progressives share that view.
But Evan Thies, a long-time political adviser for Adams, said it isn’t accurate when you look at the effect the crisis has, or hasn’t, had on the daily lives of people already living in the city.
“The vast majority of New Yorkers have not felt its impact because the mayor housed, fed and clothed more than 70,000 newcomers by putting people before politics,” he said. “Behind every prominent critic of the mayor’s response is a political agenda — and a person or organization that did not want him to be elected mayor two years ago for self-interested reasons, and does not want him to be elected two years from now.”
While that may be true — the political left is often at odds with the more moderate mayor — many critics of Adams contend it isn’t the full story when it comes to the mayor’s dynamic with the Council or the city’s advocates when it specifically comes to migrants.
They point to what they view as the administration’s lack of transparency when it comes to quantifying the cost of the crisis and the number of migrants coming into the city each day. This became apparent last month when the Council’s Finance Chairman Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn) whipped off a rare on-the-record rebuke of Jacques Jiha, the mayor’s budget director, after Jiha pushed back against questioning during a Council budget hearing.
“It is important to remind Director Jiha that the Council’s charter-mandated responsibility is to hold the administration accountable,” Brannan said at the time. “That means examining and questioning their assertions and numbers. It’s not personal, it’s our job. The Council is not a rubber stamp, nor is this a monarchy.”
Many Council members, Brannan among them, believe the city has more money at its disposal than it’s admitting and have used that as a basis to argue that some of the cuts Adams has put forth in his latest budget plan aren’t necessary.
The political right has a different view of the situation. They blame Biden for policies that failed to prevent the surge of migrants into the country in the first place, and some, like Councilman Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), question why Adams hasn’t spoken about what the endgame is for the situation in the city.
Borelli believes many migrants aren’t actually seeking asylum and, instead, are coming to New York for economic reasons and to enjoy the city’s right to shelter law — a provision that’s rare in the United States and which requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who requests it within a proscribed timeframe.
Lawyers for the city have filed court papers asking a state judge to narrow the law and allow the city to suspend it, with the migrant crisis in mind.
But Borelli sees that as insufficient.
“They’re coming here because they know the getting is good,” he said of the migrants. “The fact that there’s no end in sight to this — [Adams] can’t accept that, and that’s what he’s doing.”
