Mayor Eric Adams keeps blaming Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as the culprit responsible for the city’s migrant crisis, which has hoovered up millions in taxpayer resources.
In the latest broadside, Adams dared Abbott to spend a night in a NYC migrant shelter, while the no-thanks Abbot fired back that Adams’s sanctuary city policies were “aiding and abetting” the border disaster.
Some 37,000 of New York’s estimated 150,000 migrants — or 25% — were bused from Texas.
But there’s another number, comparable to that, that Adams should blame on another politician: Joe Biden.
A new report from me and my organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, finds that the Department of Homeland Security secretly has okayed the flights of some 33,000 illegal immigrants directly to the New York region from foreign airports. That’s 22% of the city’s migrant influx.
One of Biden’s flying immigrants was a Haitian man, Pierre Lucard Emile, who was recently accused of raping a developmentally disabled teen girl. The administration reportedly authorized him to fly directly from Haiti into John F. Kennedy International Airport as part of the immigrant flights program.
Biden is, of course, far more responsible than Abbott for New York’s troubles because he’s doing nothing to enforce border laws in the first place, thus flooding Texas and other southern states with unsustainable numbers of illegal immigrants.
Yet Adams gives Biden a total a pass on the flights, which Biden could shut down with a phone call, preferring to continue pretending that the Republican Abbott is the cause of Gotham’s problems.
DHS reports that it has approved the flights of more than 386,000 immigrants directly from foreign airports into the U.S. since launching the program without Congressional authorization in January 2023.
The flights were intended mainly for Cuban, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans but since expanded to five other nationalities. It is alternatively referred to as the “CHNV Program” or the “Advanced Travel Authorization Program.” Under it, U.S.-based “sponsors” apply for air travel permission on behalf of aspiring illegal border crossers in other countries who provide information via an online program and mobile cell phone app called CBP-One.
Once Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection approves their applications, the aspiring illegal border crossers arrange for their own flights by commercial air into a government-approved U.S. international airport, and U.S. customs inspectors process them into the country.
A separate twin program has brought in some 420,000 more from 100 countries at eight land ports over the past year.
Both programs are predicated on a legally challenged mass use of an authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows a president to grant temporary “humanitarian parole” into the country of immigrants in emergency situations on a “case by case” basis.
But this administration has applied this highly restricted “case-by-case” parole authority to far greater numbers of foreigners than any other before, more than a combined 800,000 by both land and air ports paroles, to reduce the optics of thousands illlegally crossing the land border at once.
The administration has not coordinated this effort with Adams or other big-city mayors, nor with taxpayers who have to shoulder the costs of hundreds of thousands of people just showing up. Biden has hid where the illegal immigrants are being flown and in what numbers.
The administration was so determined to keep this information from the public that it denied a 2023 Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act request for it.
In fact, the administration is so bent on obfuscating the basic program details that its monthly border statistics report presents this section as a strange unidentified orphan, amorphously titling it as only “CHNV Program” and not once mentioning potentially interest-flagging immigrant “flights” or “air travel” or “airports.”
But using available public records for the April 1 report, I was able to narrow down the regions receiving these flights, showing that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida is by far the biggest initial landing zone in the country with 326,000 through February first showing up to that state’s many international airports – and the 33,000 flights into the New York area’s airports.
“It is secret because they’re not telling anybody. They don’t tell us anytime somebody comes in,” DeSantis said in an April 4 press conference. “They don’t give us any information on it. They are not coordinating with state government at all. If they throw six people on a commercial flight coming from a foreign country, there’s no acknowledgement at all to state or local authorities. That’s just a fact.”
DeSantis has a plausible theory about the huge volume of flights landing in Florida: that some perhaps significant percentage of those initially landing there are processed through U.S. Customs to domestic flights and continue onward to cities like New York.
If what the governor believes is true, that means the number reaching Gotham is much higher than 33,000.
How many is it really? Mayor Adams doesn’t want to know. If he did, he could put pressure on the administration to stop the flights. But he won’t. He’ll just keep trying to blame Republicans, when the danger is coming from inside his house.
Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
