Mayor Adams touts ‘substantial’ drop in NYC migrant wave — as new tent camp stands largely empty

Mayor Adams took a victory lap Thursday over what he described as a “substantial” slowdown in Latin American asylum seekers arriving in the city this week — as his administration’s newly-opened migrant tent camp on Randalls Island stands largely uninhabited.

For weeks, upward of 10 busloads of migrants have arrived in the city every day from southern border states, putting intense strain on the local homeless shelter system, whose population is at an all-time high.

But only two buses arrived Wednesday, followed by another two Thursday, Adams told reporters at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“A substantial decrease,” Adams said. “And so it’s clear that we’ve navigated through this storm. We don’t believe we’re there yet, but we need to really look at how this administration dealt with a real crisis.“

Adams tied the migrant wave drop to President Biden’s recent adoption of a new southern border policy under which Venezuelans, who make up most of the recent arrivals, are returned to Mexico unless they have a “sponsor” in the U.S. who can vouch for them financially while they go through the asylum process.

“After we communicated with the White House, they responded, they put in place a decompression strategy,” Adams said. “If we would have continued getting 10 buses a day, nine buses a day, that would’ve had a major impact on the future of our economy.”

“We stopped the first phase — first phase was slow down the flow, and now we’re in negotations to get the dollars,” Adams added, referring to his administration’s so far unanswered demand for emergency federal funding.

Camille Mackler, executive director of the New York-based Immigrant Advocates Responsive Collaborative, cautioned against reading too much into this week’s decrease in arrivals.

She noted that a spate of bad weather on the U.S.-Mexico border has likely driven down border crossings overall in recent days.

“This week, it seems to have been slowing down a bit, but that (could change quickly),” she said.

Meantime, the Adams administration’s controversial tent facility on Randalls Island — which opened Wednesday and has cost city taxpayers more than $600,000 just to build — gapes largely empty.

After opening its doors, only two migrants were spotted going through intake Wednesday at the sprawling tent facility, which has a maximum capacity of 1,000. On Thursday, activity at the site was equally slow, with the Daily News seeing less than a half dozen migrants being admitted throughout the day.

[ Cold, hungry, isolated. Migrants facing troubling conditions in Hell’s Kitchen hotel ]

Adams spokesman Fabien Levy claimed the actual tally of migrants on Randalls is “higher” than The News’ count, but declined to provide another estimate.

The Randalls tent city is only supposed to house single adult males. Migrant families and single women arriving in the city are directed to homeless shelters or hotel rooms rented by the city.

Levy said most migrants who have arrived this week are families and declined to comment if the administration has miscalculated the need for housing single adult men.

As of Wednesday, more than 21,000 South and Central American migrants have flooded into the city since this spring, according to City Hall data. Nearly 16,000 of them remain in city shelters or other forms of housing.

The desperate traveled are fleeing economic desperation and violence in their country, and some have been sent to New York on buses by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has refused to coordinate the transports with Adams’ administration.

With Barry Williams