Mayor Eric Adams is responding to the growing outcry over budget cuts by calling on everyday New Yorkers to travel to Washington, D.C. and express their anger at the federal government, a risky, politically charged tactic that could further strain his relationship with President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat.
Adams has repeatedly blamed the city’s budget woes on the multibillion-dollar cost of caring for tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived by bus over recent years, and at one point the mayor claimed the crisis would “destroy” the city.
“New Yorker must understand this is not an Eric Adams issue. This is a New York City issue,” Adams said on Wednesday during an interview on FOX5. “I have the obligation of solving this as the mayor, but I need all New Yorkers to know I can’t stop buses from coming in by law. I can’t deport anyone by law, and I’m required by law to provide them with the food, the housing and all these other items.”
Adams later said he was conversing with local clergymembers about meeting with lawmakers in D.C. In an interview with Gothamist, the Rev. Edward-Richard Hinds, who serves as a youth pastor at Rugby Deliverance Tabernacle in Brooklyn, said he and as many as 50 faith leaders sought to travel there by bus next month.
He said it would not be a protest, but “conversations with key persons in Congress.”
Hinds could not say whether he believed all New Yorkers needed to make a trip to Washington, D.C., but he said he believed the city’s faith-based community — which has donated food, clothing and other necessities — had a role to play.
“Not only are we seeing it, we are also doing work to alleviate the strain,” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More than 150,000 migrants have arrived in the city since last spring, and over 67,000 of them are staying in the city’s shelter system, according to City Hall statistics.
Biden, who is up for re-election next year, has increasingly distanced himself from Adams and dropped him as a campaign surrogate. Adams said he and the president have not spoken to one another in roughly a year.
During Adams’ last visit to the White House earlier this month, meeting with the president was not on his agenda.
Some Republicans have also seized on Adams’ criticisms of the federal government’s handling of the crisis and used them to lash out against Biden’s immigration policies.
Political experts told Gothamist they did not think the mayor’s latest gambit would ultimately help the city secure more funding or immigration policies to address the migrant crisis.
“I don’t know if it works,” said George Arzt, a political consultant who was an aide to Mayor Ed Koch. “D.C. has seen many protests and this would be just another protest.”
Joseph Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College, said the mayor’s strategy struck him as unusually aggressive.
“For a Democratic mayor to organize protests against a Democratic president in the midst of his re-election campaign is highly provocative, especially on an issue where Biden has drawn criticism from Republicans,” Viteritti said.
“The mayor certainly has cause to lobby the White House for aid as he works through his own budget crisis,” he added. “But there are more productive ways to proceed through intermediaries.”
Although mayors and presidents have publicly sparred in the past, they have tended to be from different parties.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio and ex-President Donald Trump were enemies from the start – a relationship that worsened when the pandemic struck and de Blasio criticized Trump for a lack of federal aid. In the late 1960s, Mayor John Lindsay, a Republican, criticized Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War and called for a truce. Some elected officials at the time accused Lindsay of using the war as a “diversionary tactic” as he sought re-election.
Adams, who is halfway through his term, faces multiple challenging headwinds including a federal investigation into his campaign, a progressive and increasingly emboldened City Council, and a fiscal deficit brought on by the migrant crisis and the expiration of federal pandemic aid.
Recent polls also show his popularity plummeting, even among his base of Black and Latino New Yorkers. A Quinnipiac survey found Adams had only a 28% approval rating, the lowest for a mayor since Quinnipiac began the poll.
The mayor has been vexed by repeated questions about budget cuts, which have affected a wide array of services from pre-K seats to libraries. During a town hall in Queens on Monday, a woman asked Adams how he planned to address the community’s concerns amid the spending cuts.
The mayor said he needed to find “a sweet spot” of cuts. He then turned the tables on the woman and asked her if she had gone to protest in Washington. (She did not.)
“I need for people to hold me responsible but we have to hold each other responsible,” he said. “Everyone who says ‘Eric, you should not be cutting the budget,’ they should be showing me their bus ticket or plane ticket that they went to Washington and said, ‘You should not be doing this to New York City.’”
The woman, who gave her name as Tanya, later told Gothamist that she was still “processing” what the mayor had told her.
She then added, “I felt like it was a little bit of a joke, you know, a schtick or whatever.”
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