Mayor of America's biggest city thanks Trump for crackdown on criminal immigrants

Speaking at a press conference Monday, Adams called the migrant crisis "probably the largest humanitarian crisis the city has ever experienced," adding, "I am in alignment with whatever we have to do legally to keep our city safe." 

In response to criticism from his party and the media for cooperating with Trump, Adams said, "They are helping me with the agenda that I stated the previous administration should have been helping me with, and I thank them for helping me with it."

As of Monday, he said, the number of migrants arriving in the city has dramatically dropped from 4,000 to just 350 a month.

"This is what we called for and advocated for, and the American people have communicated, 'We need to secure our border,'" he said. "There's nothing humane about having individuals into the country with no place to go, no sponsors here, no ability to take care of themselves. And pushing the cost of it onto cities is just wrong."

Adams said the Roosevelt Hotel shelter would be closing sometime in the "coming months."

"The Roosevelt Hotel opened May 2023, during the height of the crisis, when we received 4,000 people a week," he said. "You just got to just really think about that. Four thousand people a week. And, thanks to our policies, we were down to an average of just 350 new arrivals."

New York is a "right to shelter" state, which means that the government is obligated to provide shelter to anyone who has no other means. But Adams said changes to the shelter program limiting the amount of time certain groups, like single adults, could stay to 30- and 60-day periods "allowed us to get over 180,000 people out of our care and off taxpayers' payroll."

He said the more than 223,000 migrants who entered "went through a well-organized process of getting them through the system and processing almost 75% of the individuals that came into our care."

"We are helping asylum seekers take the next steps in their journeys, and we are saving taxpaying New Yorkers millions of dollars," said Adams.