As New York City prepares for what could be a large influx of migrants in the coming weeks, Mayor Adams has signed an executive order that would relax some requirements that newly arrived asylum seekers be immediately placed into housing. This comes as he pushes ahead with more creative solutions, including housing migrants in hotels in suburbs to the north. 

Under the city’s right-to-shelter rule, those who do not have a place to stay are entitled to shelter and a bed within a certain time frame, and families are guaranteed to have shelter with access to a bathroom, kitchen, and refrigerator. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Adams temporarily suspended those provisions. 

The executive order states that New York City “faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that requires it to take extraordinary measures to meet the immediate needs of the asylum seekers.”

His order comes as America prepares for the end of the pandemic-era Title 42 policy that allows the federal government to immediately expel migrants at the border. The measure allowed both Presidents Trump and Biden to turn migrants away on public health grounds.

Border towns aren’t the only ones declaring states of emergency and girding for the influx of migrants. Just north of New York City, suburban Rockland County declared an emergency after Mayor Adams announced that he is planning to move migrants into hotels in the county. 

The county executive, Ed Day, said on Saturday that he has adopted a resolution that bars other local governments from sending migrants to Rockland County and forbids hotels from housing those migrants without a license.

“This is absurd, and we will not stand for it,” Mr. Day said in a statement. “There is nothing humanitarian about a Sanctuary City sending busloads of people to a County that does not have the infrastructure to care for them. It’s the same as throwing them in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to swim.”   

The chairman of the Rockland County Republican Party, Lawrence Garvey, tells the Sun that Mr. Adams is demonstrating disregard for the law and his fellow New Yorkers. 

“It’s horrible, it’s ill-advised, it’s presumptuous, and it’s arrogant,” Mr. Garvey says. “New York City got $1 billion from Kathy Hochul’s budget to handle the migrant crisis as a result of all these folks coming in. They have something like 125,000 hotel rooms in New York City, and before sending them up to Rockland County, they should consider filling their own hotel rooms first and see how those neighborhoods feel about the process.”

Mr. Garvey shared with the Sun a copy of a pamphlet that New York City officials are handing out to migrants detailing the lodging and amenities — including medical consultations, in-house laundry service, and housekeeping — available to them in Rockland County. 

On Friday, Mr. Adams announced he would send a little more than 300 adult migrant men to Rockland and neighboring Orange County for housing. The mayor said it is a necessity born of his city’s shelters already reaching capacity before Title 42 has ended. On Thursday, the Albany Times-Union reported that the first bus of migrants — all of them adult men — arrived in suburban Orange County. 

The migrants are arriving at New York City, in part, because some red state governors — Like Texas’s Greg Abbott — have been sending buses full of them up to the Empire State. Mr. Adams, though, has blamed the influx of migrants on the lack of comprehensive immigration reform due to gridlock in Washington. 

“It is not about the asylum-seekers and migrants — all of us came from somewhere to pursue the American Dream,” Mr. Adams said recently. “It is the irresponsibility of the Republican Party in Washington for refusing to do real immigration reform, and it’s the irresponsibility of the White House for not addressing this problem.”

After criticizing President Biden for his handling of the situation at the southern border, Politico reported that Mr. Adams has been dropped by the president’s 2024 campaign as a national surrogate. 

The Sun recently reported that as many as 150,000 migrants are amassed on the Mexican side of the border, hoping to cross before the policy expires on Thursday night. Some cities and towns, including the west Texas city of El Paso, are declaring states of emergency to prepare for the inflow of migrants. 

Tens of thousands of migrants have illegally crossed the border just in the last two days, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Localities along the border are turning schools and churches into temporary shelters and the border patrol is holding migrants by the thousands, well beyond the agency’s capacity.