Every time I take the F train into the city I come across at least one asylum seeker selling candy. You know they’re asylum seekers because even the little kids don’t have a word of English. My friend Julie Neusner, a human rights lawyer, confirmed—she speaks Spanish and asked a very young woman with a baby. She’d just come from Venezuela.
Julie and I were on our way to report on the scene at the Roosevelt hotel in midtown, the intake center for refugees. Here’s an excerpt. Read the whole story here:
Roughly 95,000 asylum seekers have made their way to New York City since the spring of 2022, most after crossing the treacherous southwest border. They’ve come from all over the world, from Guinea, Senegal, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Russia. Some came to New York because they have friends and family here; others say they ended up in the city because they don’t know where else to go. When people cross to seek asylum without a sponsor or destination, border guards often tell them, “They’ll take care of you in New York,” says Joshua Goldfein, an attorney with Legal Aid.
These border guards, Goldfein believes, often share the politics of Texas Governor Greg Abbott and presidential nominee Ron DeSantis, both of whom have made political shows of bussing migrants to liberal enclaves like New York and Martha’s Vineyard. As their numbers swelled this spring, Mayor Eric Adams began to backtrack on earlier promises to care for the migrants. By last month, the reversal was complete. “There is no more room,” he said on July 20. “From this moment on, it’s downhill.”
In early August, the city’s strained capacity was on display outside the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center. The line outside the stately building resembled an encampment, with hundreds of new arrivals sleeping on the street behind barricades. Families milled around the sidewalk outside the hotel, smoking cigarettes, eating fast food lunches, bouncing babies and talking to family back home in a medley of languages: French, Arabic, Spanish. Little kids zipped around on scooters, some of them wearing “I heart New York” t-shirts.
On Aug. 3, single men who’d been sleeping outside the hotel were bussed off to undisclosed shelters. Goldfein, who says there were empty shelter beds on the nights the city forced the asylum seekers to sleep on the sidewalk, says the encampment may have served as a message. “The mayor wanted to see people sleeping on the sidewalk… he wanted to send a message to the state government and the president [that] they need to solve this.”
Goldfein says the scene outside of the Roosevelt reflects governmental failures at every level. “The federal government lets asylum seekers in, but doesn’t let them work — which is all they want to do,” he tells us. “That makes no sense at all. The federal government should either pay for their support or allow them to work.” While the federal government has allocated $124 million to New York, city leaders claim it’s not enough to fulfill the guarantee, enshrined in the state constitution, of shelter to any person who needs it. This guarantee, cemented in the landmark 1981 ruling Callahan v. Casey, is the primary reason New York hasn’t seen an explosion of tent cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland. “You need to treat this like an emergency,” Judge Erika Edwards told the state’s lawyers at a closed court hearing on Aug. 4, Goldfein recalls.
At the city level, Goldfein says that understaffing at city agencies and bureaucratic delays prevent people from leaving New York City’s overwhelmed shelter system, which was supporting at least 83,000 people as of May 2023, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
“A family will secure a voucher, find an apartment, get the landlord to agree to rent [to] them and then the city doesn’t process payments for months and months,” Goldfien says. “The landlord gets frustrated and rents to someone else.” He points out that it’s not only cheaper for the city to expand subsidized rental vouchers, doing so would open up shelter beds to incoming asylum seekers.
You see kids as young as seven be met with stony silence as they make their way from car to car. People they probably had to go through the fucking Darién Gap. Buy a Snickers! Their parents aren’t legally allowed to work or open bank accounts (thanks federal government). So take out cash and give it to them.
It’s gross enough when you see everyone ignoring panhandlers or visibly homeless people. These are kids that have been whisked away to a different planet. Imagine going through that and then having adults in your new country pretend you’re invisible? Imagine your kids going through that?
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Illegal immigration has been a disaster in our country for the last 50 years but it has only gotten worse since Biden became president. Every politician today blames someone else. Adams blames Abbot who blames Biden who blames Trump. Hopefully before I die we’ll come up with a coherent immigration policy that makes sense and we’ll enforce it.