New York Mayor To Visit Colombia, Ecuador for First-Hand View of Migrant Crisis as City Buckles Under Influx of Border-Crossers

Mayor Adams will be traveling to Mexico and South America later this week in part, he says, to investigate the causes of the city’s migration influx and to see some of the major migration routes south of the border. On the trip, Mr. Adams is scheduled to visit the Darien Gap, the roadless patch of jungle separating Colombia and Panama that has become a major throughway for migrants making their way to the United States. The trip to the Darien Gap will be the last stop of a four-day visit to Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. The mayor will depart for Mexico Wednesday. He will attend a business conference at Mexico City where he will speak with “local and national leaders to learn more about the issues at the southern border,” according to his office. The mayor also will go to Puebla, the city of origin for many Mexican immigrants in New York.After Mexico, the mayor will travel to Quito, Ecuador, where he will meet with local community organizers and tour an asylee integration program. He will then venture north to the Darien Gap via Bogota, Colombia and return back to New York City on Sunday. The trip is being sponsored by a business association, the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Mexico Foundation.More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Darien Gap this year so far, according to the United Nations. The area consists of a relatively lawless tropical forest lorded over by smugglers and criminal groups, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report on the area, and is routinely cited as one of the most dangerous places on the planet.Mr. Adam’s visit comes as the city buckles under the pressure of the thousands of migrants arriving in record numbers after crossing the southern border. Many of these border-crossers are ending up at New York and other cities in the interior of the country.Fox News and other outlets covering the border reported over the weekend that Border Patrol officials recorded more than 260,000 migrants crossing the border in September, a new all-time record for one month. If accurate, the figure would put the total number of such encounters for the fiscal year that ended September 30 at more than 3 million.In an interview on Face the Nation this Sunday, Governor Hochul broke from her fellow Democrats and conceded that, “the border is too open right now.” Ms. Hochul lamented that, “People coming from all over the world are finding their way through, simply saying they need asylum, and the majority of them seem to be ending up in the streets of New York, and that is a real problem for New York City.”Currently, the city is spending around $10 million dollars a day and is on track to spend $12 billion dollars providing services, including housing, over the next three years for the 115,000 migrants who have ended up in New York so far. Over the summer, Mr. Adams announced a 60-day limit on free housing for adult males in the city after the influx overwhelmed available shelters.Discussing the current crisis with the Sun in late August, Eric Adams lamented that the current situation was “not sustainable” and demanded further action by the federal government.

New York Mayor To Visit Colombia, Ecuador for First-Hand View of Migrant Crisis as City Buckles Under Influx of Border-Crossers

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