So close … and yet so far away.
President Biden will ignore the Big Apple’s spiraling, $2 billion migrant crisis during a Tuesday afternoon visit to tout $292 million in federal spending on a new rail tunnel.
Biden is scheduled to tour the Manhattan side of the Hudson River Tunnel project in Chelsea, just a mile or so south of ongoing migrant protests outside the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen.
But his itinerary, which also includes attending a fundraising reception for the Democratic National Committee in Manhattan, doesn’t list a stop at the three-star hotel, where about 50 migrants were huddled under blankets on the sidewalk Tuesday morning.
Nor does Biden plan to visit any of the city’s emergency migrant intake centers or supportive housing.
The single males — spurred on by outside agitators — are refusing to be relocated to a mega-shelter set up by Mayor Eric Adams at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook.
City Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) blasted the fellow-Democrat president, calling it “absurd that he wouldn’t want to visit the migrants.”
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“That is really disgraceful, to say the least,” Holden said. “The president is pushing his agenda but he doesn’t want to fix the border mess he created. He’ll sweep it under the rug.”
Holden further likened Biden’s actions to then-President Gerald Ford’s 1975 refusal to provide the Big Apple with funding to spare it from bankruptcy.
“It’s almost like, ‘Biden to New York City: Drop dead,'” he said.
Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (D-Staten Island) said he was “glad the president is here to take a gander at a much-needed hole in the ground but his failure at the border is blowing a tunnel-sized gap in our city budget, with absolutely no offer to assist.”
“Perhaps one of the sandhogs he meets can assist with his buried head,” Borelli added.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is scheduled to join Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul on the tour, has been publicly pleading with the White House to provide $1 billion in emergency migrant aid.
As of Sunday, an estimated 43,200 migrants had flooded into Gotham since the spring, with 28,200 living in taxpayer-funding housing, according to City Hall.
It’s unclear if Adams, who recently bucked Biden by calling the situation at the southern US border a “disaster,” planned to discuss the city’s migrant crisis with the president.
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At the Watson Hotel, Jesús Aguais, founder of the Greenwich Village-based nonprofit AID for AIDS International, said he showed up after learning about the situation there.
Aguais, who immigrated to the US from Venezuela in 1989, said he hoped to convince the migrants to go to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
“They have to move forward,” he said. “We want them to be fine. We want them to get a job. The last thing we want is to fuel the anti-immigrant hate.”
Meanwhile, the activist group Open Hearts Initiative said it was planning a 1 p.m. rally to “stand in solidarity with migrant-led efforts to resist this move and…call on the city to provide safe, stable housing for all.”