An asylum-seeker from Senegal said he felt deeply embarrassed after a friend back home sent him a screenshot from a French TV broadcast about the migrants sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City. “If I had known I would’ve been sleeping outside, I wouldn’t even come,” said C.S., who asked his full name not be used because of fear it would harm his immigration case.
Another migrant, Savi Khalil, spent three days and nights on the same pavement in Midtown just weeks ago. He said a TikTok video of his ordeal found its way to his mother back home in Mauritania. He wondered how such a “powerful country” like the U.S. could have people sleeping on the street.
They were among the hundreds of new arrivals who recently slept overnight in the scorching summer heat — some for days on end — on the sidewalk outside the city’s asylum-seeker arrival center, the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street, amid what would become a national and international media storm.
And the newspapers were coming, recording us, showing us to the world without trying to help.
Photos and videos of the mostly Black men, who were splayed out on flattened cardboard boxes and using their backpacks as pillows while office workers, tourists and others hurried past, circulated on TV screens and in TikTok videos. The city’s yearlong influx of newcomers had remained largely invisible to most New Yorkers, perhaps even to the world, until the outstretched bodies were seen lining the sidewalk.
Onlookers gawked and described the scene as “chaos” and “a disgrace.” Several, and even some of the migrants themselves, wondered why, in the wealthiest city in the world, were hundreds of people sleeping on the street? Had New York, which had accommodated more than 100,000 asylum-seekers since spring 2022, abandoned even the pretense of being welcoming?
But the attention touched a chord. City Hall, which professed to be out of shelter space for new migrants, quickly found…
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