Men waiting outside the city’s central intake center for migrants in Midtown on Wednesday said they had slept outside overnight, and some for longer, waiting for placement in the city’s crowded shelter system.
In recent weeks, some fortunate enough to get inside the arrival center in the Roosevelt Hotel at 45 E. 45th St. have only been offered accommodations upstate, including as far away as Buffalo, according to immigrant advocates.
Miguel Alejandro Rojas Quero, 26, from Venezuela, was in a line of over 30 people that at midday snaked around the block outside the hotel. Quero said the process for accessing shelter was inhumane, but added he had suffered worse on his journey to the U.S. He was among 10 or so men who said they had been waiting overnight.
“They tell us they are going to take us out of the city, that if we get shelter, they’ll give it to us out of New York City,” Quero said of the staff outside the hotel. “And that at this moment, there aren’t rooms, there isn’t space.”
Such was the scene outside the arrival center as the city’s shelter system strains to accommodate newcomers, mostly asylum-seekers arriving from southern border states.
Mayor Eric Adams has said that the city has run out of shelter space and announced that single-adult migrants were being notified they would be limited to 60-day stays, with an opportunity to reapply.
Spokespeople for City Hall did not respond to requests for comment about what the men outside the Roosevelt Hotel were told, but in a briefing on Wednesday city officials emphasized the difficulty in accommodating the over 56,200 asylum-seekers staying in city shelters. The city also announced the opening of another emergency shelter in a former state psychiatric center in Queens — the latest addition to the over 200 sites officials have scrambled to set up so far.
“Everyday is a full-on sprint as we look to place hundreds of people and find places for them, every single day,” said Zach Iscol, the…
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