Weekly migrant arrivals in NYC dip below 1,000 for the first time since 2022

The number of new migrants seeking shelter in New York City has slowed to fewer than 1,000 per week for the first time since October 2022, according to Mayor Eric Adams' office.

Just over 900 new migrants registered with the city in the first week of July, and some 800 did in each of the three following weeks, data provided by City Hall shows. As recently as mid-February, twice as many newcomers — over 1,600 in one week — registered for shelter, per the data.

The decline comes as President Joe Biden’s administration enforces sweeping new restrictions on people applying for asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border and as the Adams administration institutes stricter limits on shelter stays for migrants.

"Those executive orders ... we are seeing the benefits of them right now,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said at a City Hall press briefing last week where the migrant data was discussed.

Adams administration officials took some credit for Biden’s new restrictions on asylum-seekers, noting the changes followed Adams' repeated pleas for more help from Washington. Mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia also attributed the decline in new arrivals to the mayor’s “crackdown on out-of-state bus companies” hired to transport migrants to the city, including many sent by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.

Adams signed an executive order in December that required the companies to provide 32 hours' notice before migrant buses arrived in the city, and restricted when buses could arrive. He also sued 17 charter bus companies the following month, demanding they repay over $708 million that the administration says it incurred for housing migrants bused by the companies.

A state Supreme Court judge on Monday dismissed the Adams administration's request for a preliminary injunction in the court case, including requiring the companies to post a bond to pay for migrants already transported to the city, and to pay for those transported in the future.

Nonetheless, about half of the bus companies have stopped sending buses of migrants to New York City since being taken to court, according to Garcia.

Adams' office said it’s too soon to gauge whether the decrease in arrivals will warrant closing any of the more than 200 emergency shelters that the city has opened for migrants over the past two years. They include a set of controversial migrant mega-shelters in Clinton Hill that have drawn the ire of neighbors, who held a protest last week that called on the city to reduce the size of the sites, which together house about 4,000 people.

“Not there yet,” Adams' chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, told reporters at the press briefing. But the administration has been able to slightly shrink the number of migrants at some shelters, she said.

Varlack added that city officials' goal was to “reduce the census” of some larger migrant shelters over time. She and other Adams aides said their focus was on encouraging migrants to leave the shelter system, with 30- and 60-day stay limits in place.

The recent drop in new arrivals in New York City coincides with a steep decrease in unauthorized crossings along the southern border, which reached a three-year-low in June. U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 130,000 migrants after they illegally crossed the border last month, a decrease of 23.6% from May, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

The decline follows the rollout of a federal executive order in early June that essentially seals the border to new asylum-seekers after unauthorized border crossings reach a certain threshold. Previously, migrants who claimed fear of persecution or harm in their homelands could seek asylum, regardless of how they entered the United States.

The flow of migrants into New York City slowed even before Biden’s executive order, indicating other factors could be at play.

Roughly 1,100 to 1,500 new migrants sought shelter in the city each week between March and June, which the New York Post reported earlier this month and Gothamist confirmed with data provided by City Hall. That followed a busy 2023, when city shelters regularly accommodated 2,000 to 3,000 — and sometimes upwards of 4,000 — new migrants weekly.

When Biden signed the executive order on June 4, Williams-Isom welcomed the sweeping restrictions, telling WNYC’s Sean Carlson on "All Things Considered" that “this would be an opportunity to have our [shelter] census right now level off.”

The number of migrants living in city shelters has hovered around 65,000 since February, after peaking at 69,000 in early January, according to weekly data obtained from the city comptroller’s office.

The Adams administration restricted shelter access for migrants in May by capping stays for many single adults to 30 days, with limited options to reapply. Migrant families must reapply for new shelter space after 60 days. Before recent modifications, the city’s unique right-to-shelter law required shelter beds to be made available to anyone who needed one.

Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow and director of the Migrant Policy Institute office at NYU School of Law, has said that policy was “a huge pull factor” attracting migrants to New York City.

Local immigrant advocates have sharply criticized Adams’ shelter limits for migrants and Biden’s latest asylum restrictions. The New York City Council is considering a bill that would end the shelter limits, which some decry as cruel and inequitable.

The city’s current restrictions only apply to asylum-seekers. They do not apply to non-migrant New York City residents.

Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the nonprofit New York Immigration Coalition, told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer early last month that Biden’s executive order was “straight out of the Trumpian playbook on anti-immigrant policies.” The ACLU has since sued the Biden administration over the executive order, calling it an “anti-asylum rule.”

In recent weeks, the number of migrants exiting New York City shelters has met or exceeded the number of migrants entering them, according to city comptroller estimates.

As of last week, more than 64,500 migrants were staying at city shelters, the latest City Hall data shows. More than 209,000 migrants have funneled through city shelters since spring of 2022, though most have since left.

At a press conference earlier this month, Williams-Isom said "64,000 cannot be our baseline, that is not sustainable." She added that "we have to figure out what tools [to use] and continue to be innovative in order to move people out of shelter.”

“We really have to focus on resettlement in order to see that population going down,” Williams-Isom said.

Families with children account for 78% of migrants in city shelters, according to monthly data provided to the City Council.

This article was updated with additional data from the Adams administration. It subsequently was updated with new information about a court case involving bus companies transporting migrants to the city.