NYC Mayor Adams cancels trip to southern US border over 'safety concerns'

Published Mar 23, 2024 at 8:36 p.m. ET

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Published Mar 23, 2024 at 8:36 p.m. ET

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Mayor Eric Adams canceled his trip to the southern U.S. border on Saturday after the U.S. State Department raised safety concerns about a Mexican city he was scheduled to visit.

The executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande, Sister Norma Pimentel, invited Adams to visit her team at the Texas border, according to a City Hall spokesperson. While speaking on “The Reset Talk Show” on Friday, Adams said he planned to meet on Saturday with “national immigration leaders who all applaud what we have done.”

The planned visit would have been Adams’ second mayoral trip to the southern border, and its announcement came as the mayor has repeatedly implored the state and federal governments for additional aid in addressing the migrant influx. More than 184,000 migrants have moved through the city’s intake system since April 2022, and more than 64,000 are still in the city’s care. The ongoing situation has also tested the city’s unique right-to-shelter rules, with officials reaching an agreement last week to cap shelter stays for migrant adults to 30 or 60 days.

A City Hall spokesperson said in a statement on Saturday that Adams’ trip was canceled “due to safety concerns at one of the cities we were going to visit in Mexico.”

“We have decided to pause the visit at this time,” the statement read.

The spokesperson did not reply to questions about the mayor's itinerary, what prompted the last-minute safety warning, or which city was the subject of the safety concerns.

Adams’ first mayoral trip to the southern border took place last January, when he visited El Paso, Texas, to survey how the city was handling the ongoing migrant crisis. He later visited Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia — including the infamous Darién Gap — in October.

Other New York City agencies have also attempted to wade into immigration and border-related issues in recent months. The NYPD announced in January that it would establish two new outposts in Tucson, Arizona, and Bogota, Colombia, to “address the myriad of issues at the southern border,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner said at the time.

Weiner added that the Tucson official works from a “state-of-the-art” U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in part to address fentanyl smuggling to New York City.

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Bahar Ostadan covers the NYPD and public safety. Got a tip? Email bostadan@nypublicradio.org or message Bahar on Signal at 646-740-7335.

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