Mayor Adams is heading to Chicago next week for the Democratic National Convention — and hopes the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, will take time at the event to talk about the country’s migrant crisis despite ongoing sensitivity in the party around the issue.
The migrant crisis, which has had a disproportionate impact on New York City over the past two years, is widely seen as a political vulnerability for the Democrats ahead of November’s election battle against former President Donald Trump.
To that end, Harris has largely avoided discussing the issue since she became the party’s de facto White House nominee when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race last month, though her campaign appeared to pivot a bit last week in releasing ads listing ways it believes Republicans are blocking progress on immigration reform.
Against that backdrop, Adams, a centrist Democrat, said Tuesday he plans to highlight the migrant crisis while in Chicago next week for the DNC, where Harris is scheduled to formally accept the party’s presidential nomination.
“I’m excited about going there and speaking with the other Democrats, particularly those national leaders who came to the city and saw what we were doing around migrants and asylum seekers, and really applauded us to state that no one in the country is doing what we’re doing, and I’m planning to meet with a few of them,” Adams told reporters at his weekly City Hall news conference. He didn’t elaborate on which leaders he plans to meet with.
Asked specifically what he wants to hear from Harris during the DNC, Adams said he hopes she can broker a “bipartisan, long-term agreement” related to border security and migrant relocation efforts inside of the U.S.
“But in addition to that, you know my number one chant: We need to find ways to allow the migrants and asylum seekers to work,” added Adams, who has long called on the federal government to expedite work permits for new arrivals.
A spokesman for Harris’ campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The DNC is playing out in Chicago between Monday and Thursday. Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said the mayor expects to arrive in Chicago on Wednesday and stay through Friday.
Adams’ plan to put the migrant crisis front and center at the DNC could anger some Democrats.
The mayor landed on the Biden team’s bad side last year after repeatedly criticizing the president in public for what he saw as a lacking White House response to the influx of migrants from the U.S. southern border. Amid the migrant-related friction, Biden’s team last spring removed Adams from a group of high-profile U.S. politician who were expected to serve as official surrogates for the president’s reelection bid.
The national migrant crisis — and addressing the root causes that’s driving it — has been among a raft of issues in Harris’ portfolio as vice president.
Republicans have blasted her for not taking a more aggressive stance on border security, but Democrats say the GOP is to blame, especially since its Trump-loyal congressional members killed a bipartisan deal last year that would’ve added hundreds of new border agents.
Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News
Dozens of migrants/immigrants families are seen arriving from Texas at the Port Authority Bus Terminal early Wednesday September 6, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
In New York, the migrant crisis has had especially severe consequences, with tens of thousands of new arrivals, most of them from Latin American countries, still housed in city-run shelters to the tune of millions of dollars a month. Due to the ensuing fiscal pressure, the mayor enacted deep cuts to various city services last year, though he has since undone many of those spending reductions.
At Tuesday’s briefing, the mayor said he hopes “the worst is behind us” as it relates to the migrant crisis, though he told reporters a recent trend of asylum seekers carrying out gang-related crimes is concerning him.
“We are not out of the woods, we still have to deal with the small number of violent gang members that are in our city,” he said. “We have to make sure we are monitoring them.”
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