EL PASO — More than 2,000 miles from New York City, Mayor Eric Adams stood outside a church in Texas on Sunday and told a group of migrants that he would fight for them to be able to work and to “experience the American dream.”
As the mayor’s words were translated into Spanish, the crowd began to clap and cheer.
But the mayor’s positive message contrasted with his difficult mission on his trip to the southern border — he is trying to increase pressure on President Biden to provide federal help to New York City, which is dealing with an influx of migrants. He is showing compassion for people whose lives have been upended while also insisting that they stop coming to his city.
The migrant crisis has become one of Mr. Adams’s greatest challenges as mayor. More than 40,000 people have arrived unexpectedly in New York City over the past year, straining the city’s budget as well as its system for sheltering homeless people.
After weeks of calling for more help from the federal government, Mr. Adams decided to visit the border. His trip came one week after Mr. Biden visited El Paso after announcing a new crackdown on border crossings.
The number of migrants apprehended while trying to illegally cross the border has hit record highs. The Border Patrol encountered 1.7 million migrants trying to cross illegally in the 12 months leading up to October 2021, the most since 1960.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat entering his second year in office, kept a busy schedule on his 24-hour trip to El Paso and sought to keep most of it out of the public eye. Only one event was open to reporters: a news conference on Sunday during which Mr. Adams called for help from federal officials for the places that are welcoming migrants.
“Our cities are being undermined — we don’t deserve this,” he said, before adding: “We expect more from our national leaders to address this in a real way.”
Mr. Adams said he would travel to Washington this week to continue his campaign, and he called on Mr. Biden to appoint a leader at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate a national response to the crisis.
On Friday, Mr. Adams said that services for migrants could cost the city as much as $2 billion — significantly higher than previous estimates. Asked on Sunday how much he wanted the federal government to cover, Mr. Adams said the “entire cost.”
The city comptroller, Brad Lander, said on Sunday that the mayor’s trip did little to deliver money for New York and “instead, it risks reinforcing a harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are a problem.”
“Far from ‘undermining’ our city, immigrants have been the driving force for New York City’s success for centuries,” Mr. Lander, a Democrat, said.
On Saturday, Mr. Adams met with Oscar Leeser, the mayor of El Paso, who took him to visit an area where migrants often cross the border and a site where people were sleeping outside in camping tents.
The next day, Mr. Adams met again with Mr. Leeser, a Democrat, and visited Sacred Heart Church, a shelter for migrants, according to Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams who traveled with him.
“The reality of the situation is that these migrants are being promised things before they cross the border that are just not available,” Mr. Levy posted on Twitter.
Mr. Adams also visited a memorial at a Walmart where 23 people were killed in a mass shooting in 2019 and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center.
Mr. Adams has struggled to respond to the flood of migrants arriving on buses in New York City, constantly shifting his strategy and his rhetoric. The city has provided shelter, food, clothing and schooling to thousands of migrants and their children, and Mr. Adams has argued that migrants should be able to work legally in the city more quickly.
But the mayor has also struck a harsh tone at times, calling on Mr. Biden to slow the flow of migrants at the border and saying shortly after Christmas that there was “no more room at the inn” in New York for additional migrants. As the city faces growing budget challenges, Mr. Adams has said that the migrant crisis may require cuts to basic city services.
On Sunday, he reiterated his position that the city could not welcome more migrants and said that nearly 800 had arrived on a recent day.
“New York cannot take more,” he said. “We can’t.”
In the spring, Republican leaders in Florida and Texas began sending a surge of people who had crossed the southern border seeking asylum to cities with Democratic elected leaders — New York, Washington and Chicago — saying they were giving a taste of the border crisis to left-leaning localities with so-called sanctuary city policies.
Mr. Adams said in an interview on “PBS NewsHour” on Friday that the Biden administration was placing a burden on cities like New York.
Saying that 36,000 people had appeared “on our doorsteps,” he said that “we did what any New Yorker would do — we provided for them not only housing, a place for them to sleep, with food, health care; we educated a substantial number of children, and we are also providing the necessary mental health support that is needed.”
“But we need help,” he added.
Mr. Adams traveled to El Paso with a small group of advisers that included Camille Joseph Varlack, his new chief of staff; Zachary Iscol, his commissioner for emergency management; and Manuel Castro, his commissioner of immigrant affairs. Mr. Iscol helped oversee the creation of a huge housing center for migrants on Randalls Island that has since closed; Mr. Castro has welcomed arriving migrants at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
At Sacred Heart Church in El Paso on Sunday, a crowd of about 40 migrants gathered outside when they heard that the mayor was visiting. One woman held a swaddled baby, and another woman fed a child rice and beans as they waited to see him. One person asked aloud if he was there to hand out papers to allow migrants to travel to New York.
Mr. Adams stopped to talk with the group and asked one man how he had learned about New York City.
“Only in movies and television,” the man said in Spanish, and the mayor laughed.