Fewer migrants are crossing the U.S. border, but that hasn’t slowed influx to NYC

Fewer migrants have been crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, but even more are coming to New York, fueling the city’s eye-popping new spending projections on asylum-seekers services – over $12 billion through the end of June 2025.

“That's what's made it so hard for us to be able to keep up with finding (shelter) options where we would place people,” Ted Long, a senior vice president in the city’s hospital system, told a City Council oversight hearing on Thursday.

The accelerating pace of new arrivals was one of the main takeaways in a week jam-packed with new developments on the migrants’ front in the city, where some 100,000 asylum-seekers have landed since spring a year ago. More is in the works, as the city in coming days is poised to open two new emergency shelter spaces.

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams announced the new spending projections, and city agency leaders told councilmembers more migrants could end up sleeping on the sidewalk – notwithstanding City Hall efforts to find more shelter space. That’s after scenes of hundreds of migrants sleeping outside the city’s main arrival center made national news.

“Nobody's hearts were more broken than ours when that happened,” said emergency management Commissioner Zach Iscol. “And we are still fighting every day to keep that from happening.”

The increasing numbers of asylum-seekers in New York aren’t explained by what’s happening nationally.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of illegal crossings in June was 42% lower than the prior month. Border Patrol arrested 99,545 migrants without legal authorization crossing between ports of entry along the Southern border — the lowest level since February 2021. The trend follows months of record-high border crossings.

Against that backdrop, the number of new migrants arriving in New York City over the past month was more than double what the city projected. The city estimated that about 40 new asylum-seeker households on average would seek shelter each day. In practice, the daily average was 98 households.

More buses transporting new arrivals from Texas is the main reason for the sharp rise, Long told councilmembers. In one 24-hour period in recent days, he said, five such buses arrived. Long added that more migrants also are coming on their own and from other cities. New York’s novel “right to shelter” rules obligate the city to provide beds to homeless residents requesting assistance.

The Adams administration in recent months has stepped up its outreach to migrants — both at the Southern border and New York. The city has distributed notices in border states seeking to discourage migrants from coming to the city; it's also sent notices to migrants already here, advising them of a new 60-day cap on migrant stays. The policy applies to single adults and aims to free up shelter space for migrant families and new arrivals.

But the decline in illegal crossings has been driven by the Biden administration’s toughest border restriction policy to date, implemented in May. The new rule generally bars migrants from receiving asylum if they cross illegally, or fail to apply for asylum in another country they traveled through before arriving in the United States.

It replaced Title 42, a previously little-known public health rule invoked by the Trump administration during the height of the pandemic to immediately expel most asylum-seekers.

After a federal district court judge struck down Biden’s border restrictions late last month — ruling the measures contradict federal immigration law allowing migrants to seek asylum regardless of how they arrive in the U.S. — a federal appeals court has temporarily permitted the restrictions to stay in place.

A new emergency migrant shelter is planned to open this week in the city – at the campus of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, officials said in the Thursday hearing. They said a tent city on Randall’s Island soccer field for 2,000 adult migrants will open the following week.