A flood of migrants is likely to arrive in New York City next week once Title 42 expires, so Mayor Eric Adams said that the city would transport voluntary migrants to other adjacent New York cities.
A statement from Adams on Friday, May 5, indicated that the new program "will provide up to four months of temporary sheltering in nearby New York counties, outside of New York City, to single-adult men seeking asylum who are already in the city's care."
According to CNN, the mayor said the plan would begin with two hotels in the tiny towns of Orange Lake and Orangeburg, with the possibility of expansion. Adams' spokesman Fabien Levy told the media that the two hotels had an initial capacity for up to 300 individuals, with room to expand.
Prospect Locations
The little town of Orange Lake is found in Orange County in the state of New York. The population in the year 2020 was reported as 9,770.
In Orangeburg, According to the US Census, there are around 4,600 people residing in the hamlet of Orangeburg, which is located inside the town of Orangetown in Rockland County, New York.
New York City has been left without the essential resources for dealing with this problem, despite Adams' calls for a decompression plan throughout the state and the country since last year. "With a vacuum of leadership, we are now being forced to undertake our own decompression strategy," he said.
Adams confirmed that both cities' mayors and county executives were made aware.
Expression of Dissatisfaction
On Friday, Rockland County Executive Ed Day voiced his disapproval of Adams' proposal.
"This is absurd and we will not stand for it," Day said in a statement. He added, "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."
The Rockland County executive claims that he was first given "few other details" regarding the City's plan for asylum seekers beyond the fact that they would be kept at a nearby hotel. Upon more investigation, he learned that New York City "plans to house about 340 adult males" in Orangeburg for four months while they try to get work permits for them so that they may better adapt to society.
A work permit may take up to six months to get for asylum seekers, and the County is doubtful that it will be completed in four months, as stated by Day. "There is nothing coordinated about the situation but rather its duplicitous of Mayor Adams to surprise a locality that busloads of migrants are heading to their town."
It goes on to suggest that the Rockland location where the migrants would be dropped off is inadequate since it has no resources within walking distance.
