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Mayor Adams denies he struck deal with Dem El Paso mayor to ‘welcome’ 200 migrants a day

September 17, 2022 | | Print Article

As New York City Mayor Eric Adams continues to claim his city’s system is on the verge of collapsing under the weight of busloads of illegal immigrants arriving from Texas, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser praised Adams for “stepping up” and agreeing to “welcome” as many as 200 migrants to the Big Apple a day.

The deal comes after Adams announced last week that he would be sending a group of senior advisors to the Lone Star State on a “fact-finding mission to…get the real answers we’re not getting from Texas,” the New York Post reports.

Speaking on Monday at an El Paso City Council work session, Leeser stated that he had spoken about El Paso’s relocation program, which began sending migrants — mostly from Venezuela — to Adams’ doorstep on August 23, amid what one local pol claimed was “a scene that you would see in a third-world country.”

“We’re very thankful to Mayor Adams from New York that really stepped up to help us and, you know, he did tell me when I, when I spoke with him that there is not a community there within New York from Venezuela,” Leeser said. “But he will welcome them into his community and then work with them to get them to a community where there is, there are peers, so they can continue to be there and that’s really important to him.”

Leeser dismissed the notion that New York City couldn’t handle that many new arrivals each day, claiming that the swarm of migrants to El Paso was “very manageable” when his city faced “two, three hundred a day.”

The Texas mayor pointed to how that number has increased, necessitating the help of other communities.

“Now, we have 1,400 a day. It’s easy math: multiply 1,400 times 30 and that’s 42,000 in a month period,” he said. “So that’s a really big number and we need assistance.”

According to Leeser, “the mayor of New York has been very proactive with us and we’ve had the ability to talk to the mayor of New York.”

“He has actually sent four people to El Paso to make sure that they understood the process,” he added.

It all sounds very amicable until you listen to Mayor Adams and his office.

Adams hasn’t stopped slamming Texas Governor Greg Abbott since he began busing migrants from the border to New York City months ago. Just last month, Adams said of Abbott, “He is a anti-American governor that is really going against everything we stand for.”

And if a deal has been struck between El Paso and NYC, it appears Adams’ office didn’t get the memo.

On Friday, Adams spokesman Fabien Levy denied that any such agreement exists.

“This is an intentional misreading of Mayor Leeser’s comments,” Levy stated. “As anyone who listens to the recording can hear, that’s not what the El Paso mayor said and Mayor Adams certainly didn’t offer to accept additional buses, let alone ever even intimate that.”

“The truth is clear,” he continued. “We’re dealing with an unprecedented crisis that has pushed our city’s system to near its breaking point.”

Undaunted, Leeser’s office seems intent on killing Mayor Adams with kindness.

In a statement released by City Hall, Leeser said, “We greatly appreciate the assistance and cooperation of Mayor Adams, his team and the people of New York as we address this developing situation that is changing on an hour-to-hour basis. We are also working with our federal counterparts and [nongovernmental organizations] as we work to treat all individuals humanely while following the laws of the United States.”

At least one of those charity organizations is not impressed with how Adams is handling things.

According to the executive director of Artists Athletes Activists Inc., a non-profit based in Lower Manhattan, New York City isn’t doing nearly enough.

“We are getting absolutely no help from the city,” Power Malu said. “Whether it’s the food that we’re feeding them with, whether it’s the clothes being donated, we’re taking people to the places where they need to go — everything that we’re doing is coming out of pocket.”

Melissa Fine
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