Hundreds more asylum seekers arrived in New York City Thursday morning, bussed in by the state of Texas in an ongoing political fight over immigration.
Last month Mayor Eric Adams accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of flooding the city with migrants, a claim Abbott denied. But as a war of words between the two men escalated, Abbott reversed course and said Texas would in fact start sending regular caravans to the city.
In just the last two days, more than 400 people arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, with the city alleging that many of them were forced to come here against their wishes. Another five buses filled with migrants arrived Thursday, were greeted by city agencies and social services groups offering them food, clothing and information on how to seek shelter.
Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox.> Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter.
NYC has right-to-shelter laws, and the mayor has said the asylees would be welcomed with "open arms." But he's also accused Abbott of wanton cruelty toward those migrants, forcing them onto buses and dumping them thousands of miles away.
"They are treating people as less than human — as cattle!" said Manuel Castro, the commissioner for the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. He objected to bracelets with barcodes that are being placed on many of the passengers, a practice Texas maintains they've used for months.
"Bracelets and barcodes are a way to intimidate people to stay on the bus," Castro said. "Asylum seekers believe they’re being tracked."
However, Texas officials said that the practice is routine and for everyone's benefit. NBC News received video of asylum seekers arriving in Washington D.C. in April, also wearing the bar code bracelets.
"Similar to plane tickets, the bracelets hold each migrants’ information and the voluntary consent waivers they sign upon boarding that they agree on the destination," Abbott's press secretary said.
Abbott, for his part, says the Biden Administration is allowing a crisis at the border and that Democrat mayors like Adams need to push the federal government to act. He also said Thursday that his decision to send thousands of asylum seekers to NYC has paid dividends in terms of awareness.
"Most of America hasn't understood the magnitude of the border until we started sending buses to New York," the governor said.
Once they get here, there is a separate controversy brewing over how the city actually handles them. As News 4 has reported, the city's Department of Social Services has been denying asylees' eligibility for shelter because they can't produce paperwork that, for many of them, simply doesn't exist.
The city's Department of Investigation is also probing allegations of a cover-up inside DSS, after the department violated legal mandates on multiple days for multiple families by failing to place them in shelter by a daily deadline.
Meanwhile, New York City Controller Brad Lander, who was among those greeting migrants today, wrote a new letter to the mayor's office after the News 4 I-Team revealed at least five families had to sleep on the floor of intake facilities, in violation of city law. Lander asserted that city employees improperly asked asylum seekers to prove they had no place else to go.
"We wrote this new letter after we saw the NBC report that everybody has to get training, and we are waiting for that response," he said. "People have been found not eligible for shelter — obviously they’re homeless or they wouldn’t be arriving on buses."
In response to Lander's letter, a DSS official said the department is working to make changes to eligibility determinations to accommodate those migrants who are arriving without the paperwork that was previously required. The families will get to remain in their conditional shelter placements until a final decision regarding eligibility is reached, the official said.
