New York City Mayor Eric Adams will limit shelter stays for migrant families with children to 60 days as the city continues to be overwhelmed with a surge of asylum seekers.
The Democrat already placed a 30-day limit on adult migrant shelter in July as he scrambled to handle the more than 120,000 new migrants in the city.
Adams is expected to make the announcement later Friday, as reported by The New York Daily News.
Like migrant adults, migrant families unable to find housing on their own will be able to return to the arrivals center at The Roosevelt Hotel and reapply for shelter placement, a source told the Daily News.
The historic Manhattan hotel – dubbed ‘the new Ellis Island’ by one city official – has become the registration point for the migrants and currently houses 3,000 asylum seekers.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams will limit shelter stays for migrant families to 60 days
Like migrant adults, migrant families unable to find housing on their own will be able to return to the Arrivals Center at The Roosevelt Hotel and reapply for shelter placement
The city has a Right to Asylum law that Adams is desperately trying to amend as more than 62,000 migrants remain in shelters — a year after he said he was proud to live in a Right to Asylum state.
The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless called the move “a stain on our city’s longstanding reputation as a welcoming home for all.”
Adams announced the shelter requirement at the start of the crisis as a show of the city’s empathy toward asylum seekers. In the months since, his rhetoric has hardened as the city has spent more than a billion dollars renting space in hotels, setting up large emergency shelters and providing government services to migrants arriving without housing or jobs.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams said last month.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who also welcomed asylum seekers for the first time last year, supports the city’s effort to suspend a unique legal agreement that requires it to provide emergency housing to homeless people.
The shelter requirement has been in place in New York City for more than four decades, following a legal agreement that required the city to provide temporary housing for every homeless person. No other major city in America has such a requirement.
Hochul endorsed New York City’s challenge to the requirement in a court filing this week, telling reporters Thursday that the mandate was never intended to apply to an international humanitarian crisis.
The Roosevelt Hotel (pictured), Paul Hotel and Paramount Hotel are among those designated to house migrants in Manhattan
“I don’t know how the right to shelter – dedicated to helping those people, in which I believe, helping families – can or should be interpreted as an open invitation to 8 billion people living on this planet, that if you show in the streets of New York, that the city of New York has an obligation to provide you with a hotel room or shelter,” said Hochul, a Democrat.
Many of the migrants arrived without housing or work, forcing the city to set up emergency shelters and provide various government services, at an estimated cost of $12 billion over the next few years.
Last month Adams asked a court to allow him to suspend the mandate when there is an emergency where the shelter population of single adults is rapidly increasing. New York state filed a court document Wednesday in support of the city’s request, calling it reasonable.
Adams made a series of urgent pleas for a shift in federal immigration policy and for funding to help the city manage the influx of migrants, which he said could cost the city $12 billion over three years as it takes up space at hotels rent, erect new emergencies. shelters and provide various government services for asylum seekers.
Last year he did went to the Port Authority to welcome a bus full of asylum seekers sent by Republican Governor Gregg Abbot of Texas. Abbot argued at the time that progressive cities must also shoulder the costs of the influx of asylum seekers crossing the southern border.
Adams said: ‘As the mayor of New York, I have to provide services to families that are here, and that’s what we’re going to do – our responsibility as a city, and I’m proud that it’s a right to shelter- state is , and we continue to do so.’
But by May of this year, Adams made sweeping changes to the 40-year-old Right to Shelter law that guarantees a bed to anyone in the city who needs one, as his government asked for federal and state help to cope. the surge of migrants he now says could destroy New York as we know it.
Governor Hochul has also made a U-turn on asylum seekers, after first welcoming them with ‘open arms’ as she promised to house them just three years before telling migrants to ‘go elsewhere ‘ because the city is at its limit.
“We have to get the word out that when you come to New York, you’re not going to have any more hotel rooms, we don’t have capacity,” Hochul said on CNN. “So we also have to give a proper message that we are at a limit – if you are going to leave your country, go somewhere else.”
New York’s migrant crisis is expected to cost the city $4.7 billion this year. Above is a list of some of the landmarks that have been turned into emergency shelters as officials struggle to house nearly 60,000 migrants in the city’s care