Eric Adams' fight with Biden campaign manager ruined mayor's relationship with president

According to The Post's sources, New York City Mayor Eric Adams publicly criticized President Joe Biden for his handling of the border problem after an angry confrontation with Biden's now-campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

Insiders have recounted the confrontation from last year that started the rift as Biden hurries to issue new executive orders that are supposed to limit the admission of asylum applicants, according to The Post.

This comes as poll after poll shows that the crisis is a major liability for the White House in the run-up to the November 5 election.

From The Mayor

“The mayor said, ‘Let’s have a family conversation, we are drowning [and] we need help,'” recalled a participant in the dramatic January 2023 discussion between Adams and Chavez Rodriguez, then the White House director of intergovernmental affairs.

Now 46, Chavez Rodriguez was clearly irate as Adams urged action during a small-group private conversation during a national conference of the mayors.

“You could tell she was not happy at all and she came back at him in a really tough way,” the witness told The Post.

“She immediately sniped back. There was a notable tone, a very direct exchange, and it went back and forth.”

“It was a very unfortunate exchange and things just went south after that,” the source went on. “Up until that point, she had been the main person dealing with [Adams] on those topics. It just became very difficult after that.

“I think they [the Biden administration] were just not reading the tea leaves properly here. This is an issue and people are not happy.”

A Second Source

According to another source, "that moment made it seem personal on the Biden administration's side as opposed to policy and that meant City Hall felt it didn't just not have an ally, but it did have an enemy, and that meant there was going to be a different public footing when the migrant crisis worsened."

“She has a dug deeper and deeper hole,” they said.

It's unclear why Chavez Rodriquez, who left the White House about four months after the incident to become Biden's campaign manager, chose to reprimand Adams rather than try to appease her — though multiple additional sources told The Post that she is also known to be brusque and even mean to fellow campaign staff, especially when they don't meet her standards.

Pleas to Biden

Throughout 2022, Adams was "basically pleading with the White House to do something about this," according to the second insider, including lobbying for limits on the number of paroled asylum applicants at the border and increasing government help to towns to deal with the flood.

The number of migrants illegally crossing the border increased during 2023, as did Adams' public condemnation, as the majority of new entrants were assigned court dates and bused to liberal cities such as New York.

“The political argument [from Adams] was basically: look, black and Latino Democrats — who, by the way, you’re losing as a party — are much more likely than white Democrats to oppose unrestricted immigration,” the second source said.

“They are much more likely to lose work to people coming into the country and they are likely to be first or second-generation Americans who had to go through a vigorous policy to get here. Also, the social services are coming out of the same pie.”