Migrants Are Leaving New York City for These States

Tens of thousands of migrants have left New York City to pursue opportunities in other states, and more than 3,000 have returned to places like Texas and Florida.

New York City Hall data provided to Newsweek shows that the top destination for migrants leaving New York City is Illinois, for which 2,369 plane tickets have been issued. The second-most popular destination is elsewhere in New York state.

Texas, notably, ranks third. More than 1,800 migrants have sought tickets to Texas, suggesting that many are returning to the state that likely sent them up north to begin with. There are also nearly 1,200 migrants who have left New York City for Florida.

While more than 19,000 migrants have taken New York City Mayor Eric Adams up on his offer, those figures represent roughly 13 percent of the migrants in the city.

Adams' administration has spent more than $4.6 million between March 2022 and November 2023 booking one-way plane tickets to relocate the more than 150,100 migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022.

City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak told Newsweek that 19,366 tickets have been issued across the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the New York City Emergency Management and the Department of Homeland Security.

Caught in the crosshairs of a wider national debate about immigration, New York City has become embattled by a migrant crisis that the mayor has warned will "destroy" the city. In response to the unprecedented influx of asylum seekers who began arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in spring of 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star. In an effort to ramp up pressure on the Biden administration, Abbott began busing migrants to Democratic-led cities, like New York, Chicago, Denver and Washington, D.C.

Since August 2022, Texas has bused more than 33,600 migrants to New York City. The city has experienced an uptick in arrivals again over the last month, recording more than 14,700 new arrivals. It also experienced its "highest recorded number in a single night" after Texas sent 14 chartered "rogue" buses overnight, Adams said last week.

Abbott has defended Operation Lone Star, arguing that busing migrants elsewhere "provides vital relief to our overwhelmed border communities." Speaking at a September breakfast event hosted by conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, Abbott said: "The lead importer of migrants to New York is not Texas, it's Joe Biden."

As a result of Operation Lone Star, New York City has struggled to accommodate the migrants. Adams has stressed that the city's shelters are at capacity and estimated that the influx will cost about $12 billion over the next three years. The mayor's office has already begun limiting adult migrants to 30 days in city shelters and 60 days for migrant families with children—a dubious legal move given the city's "right to shelter" requirement—and just last week, Adams issued a new order limiting arrival times for buses carrying migrants.

The mayor has also offered migrants voluntary travel out of the city in hopes of alleviating the strain on city resources. Figuring it would be cheaper to issue plane fares for anywhere in the world than to house migrants for months on end, Adams steered migrants vacated from city shelters to a "reticketing center" at the end of October.

"Here, the city will redouble efforts to purchase tickets for migrants to help them take the next steps in their journeys, and it helps us triage operations at The Roosevelt for new arrivals," Mamalek told local outlet THE CITY at the time.

On Tuesday, Mamalek declined Newsweek's request for information pertaining to international flights, noting that the city was providing only the top 10 destinations at this time.

Here are the top 10 destinations where migrants in New York City have been reticketed:

1. Illinois — 2,369
2. New York — 2,261
3. Texas — 1,847
4. Florida — 1,189
5. Minnesota — 1,177
6. Colorado — 1,147
7. Georgia — 925
8. California — 823
9. Virginia — 664
10. Ohio — 615

Despite the city's efforts to curb the number of migrant arrivals, asylum seekers continue to show up in the nation's largest city. Hundreds of migrants bypassed Adams' latest order by showing up at transit points in New Jersey

"Perhaps the requirements Mayor Adams put in place are too stringent and are resulting in unexpected consequences as it seems the bus operators have figured out a loophole in the system in order to ensure the migrants reach their final destination, which is New York City. Based on reports from the State Police this is now happening at train stations throughout the state," Secaucus Mayor Michael Gonnelli said in a Sunday press release.