New York City is grappling with a new surge of thousands of migrants a week as human smugglers flood a remote Arizona town with asylum-seekers and border patrol is stretched dangerously thin.
“We’re in a surge,” City Hall rep Kayla Mamelak told The Post on Sunday. “Any time there are a lot of border crossings, there is a surge in New York City.
“We expect to see the same high numbers,” Mamelak said, referring to previous waves of migrants deluging the Big Apple.
City officials said about 3,600 migrants were processed in Gotham the week after Thanksgiving, up 40% from the 2,600 the week before — and that the weekly numbers are only expected to continue to boom.
The troubling development comes as Mayor Eric Adams said last week that despite his desperate pleas for assistance from the Biden administration, “Help is not on the way.”
More than 150,000 asylum-seekers streaming across the border have already gone through New York City since the spring of 2022, with at least 66,000 still in the city’s care — at an expected price tag of $12 billion.
New York City officials say they are grappling with another surge in migrants as smugglers flood a remote border town in Arizona with thousands of asylum-seekers — many of them streaming into the Big Apple. James Keivom
The normally sleepy US border town of Lukeville, Ariz., has become the busiest migrant crossing from Mexico. Getty ImagesLast week, more than 12,000 migrants crossed the border in a single day — the most ever.
The latest culprit feeding the Big Apple surge is the remote, typically sleepy border outpost of Lukeville, Ariz., which has now become the country’s busiest crossing along the US border with Mexico, federal statistics show.
According to US Customs and Border Protection, the agency’s Tucson station reported 55,224 crossings since the start of the 2024 federal fiscal year Oct. 1, a huge leap over the 22,938 people who came over the same period in the 2023 fiscal year.
That number topped the usually busier Texas sectors of El Paso, Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio, which have now lagged behind Tucson since Oct. 1 with 22,107, 32,107, and 38,211 crossings, respectively, the data shows.
US border agents have been so overwhelmed with the flood of migrants in Lukeville that they are diverting federal officers from other agencies to help and chartering flights to move migrants to better staffed Texas sites. Getty Images“This is a humanitarian crisis that is happening in our own back yard,” said Dora Rodriguez, who chairs Humane Borders, a Tucson nonprofit, to The Associated Press. “There are hundreds of people, including infants and children, who are stranded [by smugglers] in remote areas of the desert for days.”
Flooding the Lukeville crossing is part of a strategy by the Sinaloa cartel and other Mexican gangs to target sleepy border towns to overwhelm border patrol agents, making entry into the US easier.
Other border towns such as Antelope Wells, NM, and Jacumba Hot Springs in California have also been overwhelmed with migrants in recent years.
The surge has forced CBP to shut down a legal international crossing between Lukeville and Sonoyta, Mexico — the latest in a series of official crossings closed by the overwhelmed agency in recent months.
More than 150,000 migrants from the US border have ended up in New York City — with 66,000 still in city care today. Getty Images
US Customs and Broder Protection has shut down the legal international crossing at Lukeville as migrants flood in. APThe crush of migrants has the short-handed agency diverting other federal agents — including from Federal Protective Services — to the newly bustling crossing in Arizona. The feds have also booked charter flights to ship migrants to better-staffed CBP stations in Texas.
Chris Clem, an ex-Arizona sector chief, said Lukeville’s remote location puts “enormous strain” on agents.
The town, which listed a population of just 35 residents in the 2020 Census, is largely abandoned, with a local trailer park and the only service station now closed down.
With Post wires
