The Democratic Party is following a standard strategy as President Biden seeks re-election: Do not publicly criticize him under any circumstances, unless he helps Donald J. Trump or one of his acolytes win back the White House for the Republicans.
The only Democrat who seems to have missed the mark is Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.
Mr. Adams has taken almost every opportunity in recent weeks to publicly blame Mr. Biden or his administration for the influx of migrants into New York from border states, many of them on buses sent by Republican governors.
His eagerness to point the finger at the White House has infuriated top Biden aides, who note the overall complexity of the problem. At the same time, the mayor is using his platform to amplify concerns that many Democrats share, but won’t articulate publicly because they don’t want to hurt the president.
The recent schism comes as Republicans are making Mr. Biden’s immigration policy central to their efforts to unseat him in 2024. After many Democratic candidates last year successfully used abortion rights against his Republican opponents, Mr. Biden’s nascent campaign would prefer his allies stay on message. – Something that Mr. Adams has shown little willingness to do so, although he once told himselfthe biden of brooklyn.”
Officials in New York and Washington insist the ideologically aligned president and mayor have no personal animosity between them. But as Mr. Adams has struggled to manage the waves of migrants being sent to New York, he has been more vocal than other mayors in the same situation and more willing to blame Mr. Biden.
Mr. Adams said Wednesday that it was “puzzling” that officials in Washington “do not understand what this is doing in New York City.” He expressed similar sentiments last month, saying, “The president and the White House have failed New York City on this issue.”
Adams and his allies say the White House has ignored many of their pleas, including their request that the federal government give more asylum seekers access to work permits and develop a plan to more widely distribute migrants throughout the country.
“We’ve reached out to the White House on a number of occasions and made it very clear what we need,” Mr. Adams Wednesday. “Allowing people to work, which I think is one of the number 1 things we can do. Allow people to work. And make a decompression strategy at the border. We have 108,000 cities and towns and villages. Why aren’t we rolling this out across the country?”
Since becoming mayor 17 months ago on a platform of taming disorder on the city’s streets, Mr. Adams has repeatedly broken ranks with the Democratic Party. Last year, his language on crime echoed attacks from New York Republicans as they helped flip the House and mount a strong challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Now, some Democrats fear that Mr. Adams on migrants again undercut Mr. Biden, putting the president at odds with a high-profile ally and appearing to bolster arguments by Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida that he is weak on border security.
“Abbott and DeSantis and whoever is getting what they want — they’re screwing everybody,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime Adams ally who has tried to serve as an intermediary between the mayor and the White House . “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 12 in frustration, and sometimes in frustration it can be more adversarial than you’d like.”
Mr. Biden’s aides and allies in Washington, a half-dozen of whom spoke about their private discussions on condition of anonymity, are clearly irritated with the mayor. According to his opinion, Mr. Adams is a great opportunist, aiming to win headlines without considering the broader policy implications for the president and his reelection.
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that “Mayor Adams has and will always put the interests of New Yorkers first, and that’s why we’ve been asking for support for a year.” He added, “We desperately need federal and state support more than ever to quickly manage this crisis.”
Last year, some White House officials were upset when Mr. Adams published a public letter calling for more monkeypox vaccines and calling the White House’s approach “bit by bit” after he had already told Mr. Adams privately that he would receive the vaccine shipments he had ordered.
When Mr. Abbott began ferrying migrants to New York from Texas border towns, Mr. Adams and his team asked the White House for federal support to house the migrants, expedite their work permits and move some of them to cruise ships in the city’s port. The administration often responded that many of the mayor’s requests required congressional action, which was unlikely given the attack on the Capitol.
On several occasions, White House officials told the mayor’s staff they hoped to continue discussing the issues privately and emphasized the need to move forward as a partnership. Instead, Mr. Adams continued to criticize the administration in public.
“You should look at Republicans who are purposefully causing chaos for their political gain and refusing to take any action to fix the problem,” said Pili Tobar, a former deputy communications director in the Biden administration who served of immigration.
Mr. Biden introduced legislation that would overhaul the immigration system, increase funding for border security and provide citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants. But Republicans have uniformly opposed the proposals and they’ve gone nowhere.
The mayor has his own calculations to make. While New York City has long prided itself on being a haven for migrants, more than 67,000 people have traveled there in the past year. The city is also unique among major American cities in its legal requirement to house homeless people. Already facing record homelessness, the city is now home to around 42,400 migrants. He has run out of space in his shelters and has started looking for alternative places.
New York has sent migrants to the US state while continuing to pay for housing and utilities, has temporarily housed migrants in public school gymnasiums and floated ideas like pitching tents in Central Park. The Adams administration even asked an owner of the mostly vacant Flatiron Building if there was room. (He said no.)
Homeland Security officials in the Biden administration also privately expressed concerns last year about how the cities would handle the influx of migrants from Texas and Florida.
Last summer, those officials acknowledged that New York City and Washington were already struggling, even with additional volunteers, to process hundreds of migrants transported to their cities, according to internal emails reviewed by The New York Times.
The Department of Homeland Security was considering a plan in which the federal government would coordinate with local officials to bring migrants into cities, rather than releasing them along the border, and let Mr. Abbott continued to orchestrate surprise relegations.
Supporters of these government-funded flights believed they would ease congestion at the border and allow federal officials to finish processing migrants once they land. But some felt there weren’t enough federal resources to complete the plan.
Instead, the administration moved forward with an “Inner City Awareness Campaign,” in which the government would educate city leaders about migrant rights and immigration processing, but leave it to municipalities to handle of the abandonment of migrants. The Biden administration has made $350 million in federal grants available to local governments struggling with the influx of migrants; New York received $30 million.
The Adams administration says that beyond organizational difficulties, the arrival of migrants will blow a $4.3 billion hole in the city’s budget, which was already threatened by the downturn in the commercial real estate market.
Frank Carone, the former chief of staff to Mr. Adams, who is expected to lead the mayor’s re-election campaign, said it was “entirely appropriate that his colleagues” disagreed on how to handle immigration.
“I would contrast that with what happens in an oligarchic state, like Russia, China or North Korea, where I highly doubt you’ll see dissent from Putin’s allies,” Carone said. “The president and his team realize that they are in a humanitarian crisis. And he’s doing the best he can. Unfortunately, it’s falling squarely on the shoulders of New York City.”
What makes Mr. Adams’s approach so politically salient — and attractive to Republicans — is that while he’s not the only Democrat to argue that Mr. Biden isn’t handling immigration right, he’s the rare one who he does it repeatedly in front of the television. cameras
The repeated criticisms of Mr. Adams in the White House have raised his national profile — no small concern for a man whose three predecessors ran for president. His comments appear regularly on Fox News and other conservative outlets, with a clear message: Even the liberal mayor of New York City has had it with Mr. Biden.
The mayor’s candor has earned him the enmity of White House officials. Last week he was conspicuously absent from the Biden campaign’s list of surrogates, which included the mayors of Cincinnati; Richmond, Va.; and Madison, Wis.
What political benefit Mr. Adams can gain by attacking Mr. Biden is another question.
Representative Ritchie Torres, D-Bronx, said the mayor’s “sentiment is understandable and his grievance against the federal government seems legitimate to me.”
He added: “I wish he was more careful in his choice of words? Sure.”
