A City Council oversight hearing on Wednesday on facilities housing asylum seekers grew visibly tense when an official in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration revealed that some sites lack even showers, requiring migrants to travel offsite for their bathing needs.
Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who helped lead the hearing along with Councilmember Diana Ayala and is also pushing legislation that would preserve access to city shelters for asylum-seekers, said she was stunned by the revelation.
“I understand the scale of how many people the city is serving,” she said during a heated exchange with Zachary Iscol, the head of NYC Emergency Management, which oversees the so-called respite centers.
“But for folks needing to step out of a facility to go to another facility [to shower], I do have to ask, how far is this park site? Or how far are people going, particularly if these are folks with families, to take a shower?”
Her question brought a sarcastic response from Iscol.
“With all due respect, I wish there was a piece of legislation that could be waved like a magic wand to magically create the capacity in the city for us to open up respite centers, shelters, HERRCs [Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers] or otherwise, with everything that is needed at that moment,” said Iscol. “That is not where we are today.”
“The alternative is people sleeping on the streets,” he said. “That’s the alternative.”
Hanif and Iscol frequently spoke over each other during the exchange, which pointed up the growing chasm between councilmembers and Adams staffers regarding how to handle the migrant crisis. The divide has worsened since May, when the mayor suspended the city’s obligations under the decades-old right to shelter law, which he argued was a necessary response to the swelling population of asylum-seekers.
In the last year, some 74,000 asylum-seekers have flowed into New York City, with many of the migrants dispatched to the city by elected officials…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply