No room at the inn? As holidays approach, migrants face eviction from New York City shelters
NEW YORK — It could be a cold, grim New Year for thousands of migrant families living in New York City's emergency shelter system. With winter approaching, they are told to leave, with no guarantee that they will get a bed elsewhere.
Homeless migrants and their children were limited to 60 days in city housing under an order issued in October by Mayor Eric Adams, a move the Democrat says is necessary to relieve a shelter system overwhelmed by asylum seekers entering the South crossing the US border.
That clock is now ticking for people like Karina Obando, a 38-year-old mother from Ecuador who has been given until January 5 to leave the former hotel where she was staying with her two young children.
It is unclear where she will end up next. After that date, she can reapply for admission to the reception system. A placement may not happen immediately. Her family could end up being sent to one of the city's large tent shelters, far from where her 11-year-old son goes to school.
“I told my son, 'Take advantage of it. Enjoy the hotel because we now have a roof,” Obando said in Spanish outside Row NYC, a towering 1,300-room hotel that the city has converted into a migrant shelter in the heart of the theater district. “Because they send us away and we end up sleeping on the train or on the street.”
A handful of U.S. cities experiencing an influx of homeless migrants have imposed their own shelter-in-place restrictions, citing a variety of reasons including rising costs, a lack of space and a desire to put pressure on people to find housing in their own country, or leave the city entirely.
Chicago imposed a 60-day shelter-in-place limit last month and is poised to start evicting people in early January. In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, has limited the number of migrant families in emergency shelters to 7,500.
Denver had limited migrant families to 37 days, but paused the policy this month due to the onset of winter. Single adults are limited to 14 days.
In New York, the first families were expected to reach their 60-day limit just days after Christmas, but the mayor's office said these migrants will get extensions until early January. So far, about 3,500 families have received a warning.
Unlike most other major cities, New York has had a “right to shelter” law for decades, which requires the city to provide emergency housing to anyone who requests it.
But officials have warned migrants that there is no guarantee they will stay in the same hotel or in the same part of town.
Adult migrants without children already have a shorter limit for staying in a reception center: 30 days.
Those who are kicked out and still want help are told to go to the city's so-called “reticketing center,” which opened in late October in a former Catholic school in Manhattan's East Village.
Dozens of men and women, many with their luggage and other belongings in tow, line up every morning in frigid weather to apply for renewed residency.
They get a free one-way ticket to anywhere in the world. Most people refuse.
Some are able to secure new housing for 30 days, but many others say they leave empty-handed and have to queue again the next day to try their luck.
“I'm afraid of dying and sleeping on the streets,” said Barbara Coromoto Monzon Peña, a 22-year-old from Venezuela, as she waited in line for a second day on a recent weekday.
Obando said her oldest son, who is 19, has been unable to find a place to rent since he and his wife used up their 30 allotted days at the Row NYC hotel.
“As a mother, it hurts,” she said, breaking into tears. 'He sleeps on the train, on the street, in the cold. He's in a lot of pain, and now it's our turn. They told me this country was different, but for me it was hell.”
Adams has emphasized that the city is doing far more for immigrant families than anywhere else. New York is on track to spend billions of dollars opening shelters, paying for hotel rooms, buying meals and helping asylum seekers overcome bureaucratic hurdles.
The mayor has also repeatedly warned that the city's resources are stretched thin, with more than 67,200 migrants still in her care and many more arriving every week.
“We are committed to treating families as humanely as possible,” said Kayla Mamelak, Adams spokesperson. “We've used every possible corner of New York City and are simply running out of good options.”
She emphasized that the government intends to prevent families from sleeping on the streets and said there will be an orderly process for them to apply for another 60-day stay.
Immigrant advocates say the end result will still uproot vulnerable families during the coldest months of the year and disrupt education for new students just settling into the classroom.
“It might be the most Grinch move ever,” said Liza Schwartzwald, executive director of the New York Immigrant Coalition. “Sending families with children out in the middle of winter right after the holidays is just cruel.”
Adams has emphasized that migrant children do not have to change schools when they move. But some children could potentially face epic commutes if they are placed in new shelters far from their current schools.
Migrant parents say two months is simply not enough time to find a job, get their children into daycare or school and save enough for rent.
Obando, who arrived in the U.S. three months ago, said that aside from a few cleaning jobs, she has struggled to find consistent work because there is no one to care for her 3-year-old daughter while her husband remains at the border Is being detained. in Arizona.
“It's not that we Ecuadorians are coming to take away their jobs or that we are lazy,” she said. “We are good workers. More time, that's all we ask for.”
For Ana Vasquez, a 22-year-old woman from Venezuela who is eight months pregnant, the situation is more urgent.
Her baby is due in late December, but she has until January 8 to leave Row NYC, where she has been staying with her sister and two young nieces for the past four months.
“They're leaving me out in the cold,” Vasquez complained in Spanish on a cold morning outside the hotel this month. 'We have no escape plan. The situation is difficult, especially with the baby.”
___
Associated Press writer Liset Cruz contributed to this report.
___
Follow Philip Marcelo on twitter.com/philmarcelo.