About 60 migrants and their advocates held a “sleep-in” protest on Wednesday outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of Mayor Eric Adams, in the latest public rebuke of his administration’s 30- and 60-day limits on shelter stays for migrants in the city’s care.
Protesters lay atop sleeping bags, erected tents and strung a tarp in nearby Carl Schurz Park — a symbolic warning of a predicted rise in street homelessness they say the limits will bring.
The participants also condemned the mayor’s efforts in the courts to chip away at long-standing right-to-shelter rules requiring the city to provide lodging to homeless people, subject to certain minimum standards and restrictions. Advocates for homeless people have long claimed that any diminution in the rules will result in more street homelessness.
Amaha Kassa, director of African Communities Together, one of the groups behind the protest, pointed to Gracie Mansion and noted that Adams has multiple homes.
“The mayor has several houses, so he doesn’t need to sleep here,” Kassa said.
“If we don’t get leadership from Mayor Adams on the migrant crisis and on housing and protecting the right to shelter, we are going to see sleeping bags and tents all over New York City,” he later added.
Adams announced the shelter limits in July, after images of hundreds of people sleeping outside the city’s main arrival center for migrants in Midtown made worldwide news. The move is necessary, Adams and his representatives have repeatedly said, to make space in the strained shelter system for still more new arrivals.
The city is currently sheltering some 65,600 migrants, part of an influx that began in spring 2022.
According to City Hall figures, as of the end of October, about 8,480 migrants had received notices that their shelter stays would end. Migrants unable to find alternative housing can reapply for shelter.
“We have used every possible corner of New York City and are, quite simply, out of good options to…
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