'The only option': Migrants say NYC remains best choice amid Adams' discouragement
The New York City mayor is in Latin America to dissuade migrants from coming to New York. Migrants say he’s disconnected from reality.
A day before Mayor Eric Adams set off through Latin America on a mission to slow the flow of migrants to his city, Mariana and Abel Gomez arrived in New York following a harrowing weekslong trip from Venezuela.
The couple and their toddler had stepped over dead bodies in the treacherous Darién Gap in Colombia, where Adams was set to visit Saturday, and slipped past crocodiles as they traversed the jungle. They traveled under the cover of darkness, heeding the stern directions of smugglers who demanded their silence.
And at no point — not even as they crossed the border at El Paso, Texas, and took a bus north to New York — did they hear that the Democratic mayor of the nation’s largest city had been encouraging migrants not to come.
If they had, they wouldn’t have cared. And they doubt any others would have, either.
“You think the mayor will go there and say, ‘Don’t come in,’ and they won’t come? They’re not going to listen to that,” Abel Gomez said Wednesday, speaking in Spanish as he sat on a curb with his family outside a McDonald’s in Queens.
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