Eric Adams joins other black mayors to denounce “Protect the Police” for how the White House is handling the border

Big Apple Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday joined several other black Democratic leaders from major cities in condemning the Protect the Police movement and the White House’s response to the country’s border crisis.

Adams joined his fellow mayors from Los Angeles and Houston in an appearance on ABC’s This Week, where he repeated his mantra that public safety is “a sine qua non of prosperity.

“When people hear about public safety, they think of the police,” Hizzoner said. “We say that public safety is about intervention and prevention. We need to stop feeding criminal behavior.”

“If you go to the average community of color, or any other community, they will tell you, ‘No, we need our police, but we want them to work honestly,’” Adams said.

He appeared with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. Bass’s recent inauguration marked the first time in history that black mayors simultaneously lead four of the country’s largest cities, including Chicago.

Bass and Turner cited public safety and homelessness as their biggest concerns, insuring their criticism of the Defund movement with calls for more funding for social services.

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

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“What I believe is that, over time, the federal government, state, and cities have moved away from funding social services,” Bass said. “We need to give money back to our communities – to create a social safety net so that people do not fall into a criminal environment.”

Turner told host Jonathan Karl, “It’s not about stopping funding for the police, it’s about investing in communities.”

The three mayors also took turns calling on the federal government to take action to deal with the influx of migrants arriving in their cities.

“This is a national issue,” Adams said. “Our national government — Congress and the White House — must have a long-term immigration policy, but the White House must deal with the urgent emergency that we have now.”

Adams and his administration held a city hall rally Sunday to urge federal and state officials to help New York deal with the continued influx of migrants from the southern border.

The mayor refrained from direct criticism of President Biden, a fellow Democrat.

“We met with a member of the White House in a closed-door meeting with other mayors … and we spoke with them,” he said.

“I believe that they understand the whole reality that we are facing and this will require coordination from the federal government. There needs to be someone in the White House who is solely responsible for coordinating all cities that are directly involved, and even those cities that are not directly involved, so that we have a decompression strategy. And we are going to continue these negotiations with them.”

One of the mayor’s rally attendees, Yesenia Mata, executive director of La Colmena, an immigrant advocacy center in Staten Island, said her organization has a waiting list of 400 people for recruitment courses.

The organization needs more “support” to be able to expand its services to deal with the influx of immigrants, Mata said.

“We are trying to create these additional areas, but that is why federal and state support is needed, because we need to be able to get more areas. We need to be able to recruit more employees to support us in this capacity,” she explained. “Everyone is in a waiting period.”