City reaches new phase of migrant crisis
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Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said on Wednesday that the city had reached a “new phase” of the asylum seeker crisis. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kaye
Top City Hall officials said Wednesday that the migrant crisis, and the city’s response to it, has reached a new and dire chapter.
“We are certainly in a new phase,” said Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom. “We are seeing 2,300 people a week still coming into New York City seeking shelter – that is unsustainable.”
Williams-Isom made the comments during a press briefing on the crisis that has grappled the administration for the past year. However, in the past week, the crisis has reached new heights.
With the city’s shelter system at capacity and the city unable to keep up with the flow of newly arrived migrants, some have taken to sleeping in the streets awaiting shelter – a reality Mayor Eric Adams has said he wants to avoid more than anything else.
“Things are not looking good,” Williams-Isom said. “We need some support, and now New Yorkers are seeing what that means and what that looks like.”
In recent days, dozens of migrants, most of whom are adult men, began camping out in front of the Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The hotel, which serves as an intake center for the newly arrived asylum seekers, ran out of beds over the weekend, as did the city’s 194 shelters it has opened up in the past year to deal with the influx in residents, according to the mayor’s office.
Citing the situation at the hotel, Adams said that the crisis in the city was going “downhill.”
Commenting on the crowds of people outside of the Roosevelt Hotel on Wednesday, Williams-Isom called the situation “heartbreaking.”
“No one's happy about that,” she said. “We need support and it doesn't have to be that way.”
The deputy mayor denied that the influx of men sleeping outside the Roosevelt Hotel had anything to do with the city’s recently-enacted 60-day rule. The rule, which was rolled out last month, requires that adult men and women migrants be evicted from the city’s shelter after a 60-day stay. Through Wednesday, over 800 migrants had been given eviction notices, according to the deputy mayor.
“I can definitely see how people are connecting that,” Williams-Isom said. “[But] what we're seeing is the ongoing struggle of a system that is buckling with 500 people a day. And so that is the struggle that we're having right now and what we're seeing that's happening at the Roosevelt.”
Williams-Isom pleaded with President Joe Biden and other federal officials to take action to address the crisis in New York and at the border, a call that has been drummed by Adams and several other elected officials for months.
“This is a global crisis and New York City is in the middle of this,” Williams-Isom said. “[The federal government] is asking us to do it on our own and I don't understand why.”
“In the absence of a national strategy, our administration has stepped up,” the deputy mayor added.
The administration has called on the federal government to expedite work authorizations for migrants, a move they say will lessen dependence on the city’s shelter system and other public assistance programs.
They have also demanded Biden officially designate the migrant influx a state of emergency, a move that would allow for additional funds to flow into the management of the crisis. Additionally, the Adams administration has called on the federal government to create a “decompression strategy” at the border, or a plan to divert migrants to cities throughout the U.S., and not just New York City.
In the past year, over 95,000 migrants have arrived in the five boroughs. Currently, around 56,200 of them are being housed in the city’s shelter system, which reached a new high of 107,900 people this week.
To house the migrants, the city has created nearly 200 shelters and over a dozen Humanitarian Emergency Referral and Response Center, otherwise known as HERRCs.
Last month, the administration announced that it would be building a 1,000-bed HERRC in a parking lot at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center campus in Eastern Queens, a plan that received widespread pushback from local elected officials on both sides of the isle.
Williams-Isom said on Wednesday that she expects the Creedmoor HERRC to open “probably in the next two weeks or so.”
The deputy mayor also did not rule out bringing similar tent shelters to Central Park or Prospect Park.
When asked by reporters about a recent report in Gothamist that detailed plans to bring migrant shelters to the two green spaces, Williams-Isom did not confirm that the sites would be used for shelter, but also didn’t rule them out as a possibility in the future.
“I think this plan was leaked almost nine months ago, where there were all kinds of sites that we have to look at,” she said. “Similar to what we went through the COVID emergency, when we were like, ‘Where do we need to be and what is possible?’”
“Right now, everything is on the table,” she added.
Wednesday marked one year since the first bus sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott carrying migrants from the southern border arrived in New York City.
