(Bloomberg) -- Texas has boasted of busing more than 45,000 migrants to New York City. Some are going right back.
New York has issued 4,507 one-way tickets to Texas through a voluntary program that transfers asylum seekers out of the city, according to Mayor Eric Adams’ office. That’s almost 10% of the 47,000 trips that New York has paid for starting in 2022 amid an influx of more than 200,000 migrants that strained public services.
The ticketing program has helped slash the number of asylum seekers reliant on the city, as have application assistance for work authorization and a policy limiting shelter stays, Adams said earlier this month. The top destinations for migrants asking to leave the Big Apple also include Illinois, Florida and Colorado, as well as other parts of New York. Most travel on planes.
“These are not chartered buses,” said Fabien Levy, New York’s deputy mayor for communications, distinguishing the city’s program from Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s practice of sending busloads of migrants out of his state. “These are individual tickets we are purchasing after sitting down with migrants and hearing what they want to do.”
Abbott’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
New York’s shelter population has dwindled so steadily — recently falling to less than 60,000 by City Hall’s count — that Adams pledged to close one of its largest housing facilities by the end of February.
The temporary structure on Randall’s Island became the site of occasional violence, including fights among residents and a fatal shooting outside the shelter. Recently, dozens of people pitched makeshift tents nearby after some were left homeless by new rules capping their shelter stays at 30 or 60 days.
Migrant flows into New York have also slowed amid a decline in crossings at the US’s southern border, after President Joe Biden issued an executive order in June limiting asylum claims.
Since April 2022, Texas has bused about 120,000 migrants from its border towns to cities around the country, according to a statement last week from the governor’s office. Some of the people requesting tickets to Texas from New York originally arrived on those buses, according to City Hall.
In places such as New York, which guarantees a right to shelter, the arrivals snowballed. Adams has sought to strip some of those rights as he warned that the wave of migrants was costing billions in government resources.
Even with the crisis easing, Adams extended the lease for another shelter at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field for a year. That raised criticism from some Republican members of Congress who cited concerns about public safety, while migrant-rights groups have said the shelter is no place to house families.
--With assistance from Julie Fine.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.