In October 2022, a top aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams emailed a pair of White House officials to sound the alarm.
“Wanted to flag that we intercepted 4 buses headed to [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s] office this morning from McAllen Texas and directed them to the Port Authority,” wrote mayoral aide Tiffany Raspberry. “We haven’t received any buses from McAllen, Texas before today.”
At the time, New York City was on the receiving end of a half dozen or more buses filled with migrants from the southern border. Many of the buses were chartered by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and other red-state officials as an act of political protest.
A month before, Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from the Bronx, suggested that “far-right politicians” were committing “crimes against humanity on refugees.” It stood to reason that buses heading to her office could mark a Republican escalation.
Except buses weren’t actually heading for Ocasio-Cortez’s office. When Gothamist asked the city’s Emergency Management agency about the buses it had supposedly intercepted, the agency said it did receive a tip suggesting as much but after further investigation “eventually found it unfounded.”
The email was among 88 pages of messages between New York City and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials that Gothamist obtained through a federal open records request. They stretch from the late summer of 2022 through the spring of 2023, marking the early days of an influx of migrant arrivals that continues to tax the city’s resources and push its shelter system to the brink, with many migrants forced to live in cramped conditions and move from shelter to shelter with little warning.
The documents offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the chaos that emerged when government officials from other states — including those in the Democrat-led city of El Paso — began sending migrants by the busload to New York City, leading city, state and federal officials scrambling to secure enough shelter space for tens of thousands of new arrivals. And the records suggest that Gov. Abbott’s strategy, which sought to embarrass blue-state leaders by making them contend with large, sudden arrivals of people, was working.
In an email with the subject line of “Migrant Crisis,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom told FEMA Regional Administrator David Warrington, “We are now receiving 6-8 buses per day — hundreds of individuals — with most ending up in our shelter system.”
That was in September 2022, just a few months after Abbott began sending buses to the city.
Williams-Isom, who leads the city’s migrant response, raised concerns about the “lack of coordination” when it came to buses arriving in New York City. The city, she said, didn’t know when the buses were coming and some weren’t heading to the Port Authority Bus Terminal as required.
“We need this coordination for all bus arrivals, and we need your help in diverting people as NYC seems not be [sic] many people’s final destination,” she wrote.
More than a year later, the city would sue a series of bus companies that allegedly transported migrants to New York City under Abbott’s program. The lawsuit is ongoing.
Raspberry’s email to the White House about buses to Ocasio-Cortez’s office came a month after Williams-Isom pleaded with FEMA. Federal officials passed it around before FEMA eventually reached out to Christina Farrell, first deputy commissioner at NYC Emergency Management, to “ground truth” to the claim, as one FEMA official wrote.
In response, Farrell told the FEMA official to call her. Farrell referred Gothamist to agency spokesperson Aries Dela Cruz, who said NYCEM did receive “a voicemail on our incoming line” about the buses that Raspberry had referred to in her email. But upon further investigation, the agency “didn’t have anything responsive or founded in the end,” he said.
Alerting the federal government to potential migrant buses headed for New York City was standard procedure in the early days of the migrant surge, according to City Hall. In the end, no migrants were transported to Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, migrant arrivals have slowed in the city since President Joe Biden cracked down on asylum seekers at the southern border last month. But the issue remains highly controversial across the country and New York, where a handful of suburban congressional districts this November could help determine whether Democrats or Republicans win control of the House of Representatives.
About 900 migrants were processed through the city’s shelter system in the first week of July, according to the Adams administration. That’s down from the roughly 1,100 to 1,500 migrants who had been arriving weekly since March and down from a peak of 4,000 earlier in the year, according to the New York Post.
With the number of new arrivals slowing, Williams-Isom said the city will further bolster its efforts to move people out of its shelters.
“Now we’ve really got to expedite the amount of people [who] exit so that we can see the census going down because that really is what we need to do in order to really save funds and to move people along,” she told reporters on Tuesday.
When a reporter asked Adams last week about the migrant surge being politically weaponized, the mayor quoted legendary local sportscaster Warner Wolf: “Let’s go to the videotapes.” Adams touted his early warnings of the strain that the massive increase in new arrivals would have on cities across the country, including New York City.
“We saw this coming like we saw the crime issue,” he said. “When you spend enough time on the streets, you can hear the voices of the people on the streets. We knew that this was an issue and we knew that it could have been managed better if the resources were given to the cities.”