Their asylum case seems strong. But instead of hope, they feel despair.

On the last day of 2023, Thierno Sadou Barry walked from his homeless shelter near Times Square to Harlem, looking for cheap suitcases he could fill with all his belongings.

Mr Barry and his wife, Oumou Barry, had fled political persecution in Guinea. Now the couple and their infant daughter had to leave the homeless shelter where they had lived since arriving in New York City nine months earlier, under recent city rules that limit shelter stays and have forced thousands of families to move.

As he walked, Mr. Barry cursed himself for leaving Guinea and coming to this cold, unforgiving place.

At home he risked death – and what good would a dead man have done for his family, he wondered? And so he had abandoned his elderly parents, his toddler daughter and his young sons. But now he lost hope that he would ever be able to send for them. He couldn't even send money home to support them.

“I can't even tell you how anxious, stressed and desperate I am right now,” he said in French. He had heard that some families were sent to tent shelters after being evicted. “Can you imagine, with an 8-month-old baby?”

The Barrys are among tens of thousands of migrants who have filled homeless shelters across the city over the past year and a half. But in recent weeks, many have received letters telling them it's time to move.

The expulsions are part of an effort by the Adams administration to reduce rising costs for migrant shelters and free up space for new immigrants who continue to come from the border.

The Barrys have applied for asylum and are awaiting a work permit. Their claim to political persecution seems strong. But the process is long and uncertain. So, like the tens of thousands of other migrants in the city, they're stuck waiting in a bureaucratic purgatory, increasingly concerned that the place they've traveled so far to doesn't want them.

“The problem with all this waiting is: wait until when?” Mr Barry said, adding: 'Because you were kicked out of the place where you thought you would at least be safe. It's like being told that my future is much more uncertain than I could have imagined.”

The Barrys arrived in New York City by plane on March 26, via Brazil, Nicaragua and California. They had to leave three of their children with relatives and friends, but two days after arriving in California after crossing the southern border, Mrs. Barry gave birth to a new daughter, Adama.

A taxi driver at the New York airport where they arrived asked where they wanted to go, but they had no idea. The driver dropped them off at Row NYC in Midtown Manhattan.

The Row was a four-star hotel converted into a homeless shelter. Nobody spoke French. But they found help from volunteers working at the nearby bus station. Mr. Barry got a MetroCard and signed up for food stamps. They contacted Andrew Heinrich, a lawyer and executive director of the nonprofit Project Rousseau, who provided them with pro bono legal assistance in managing the asylum application process.

They felt happy, but also isolated and haunted by guilt.

“Leaving your children, it's really not easy to live with,” Ms Barry said. “I want to talk to my kids, but it's so hard. So I look at pictures of them. I'll settle for that.”

On the day Mr Barry applied for asylum in August, he told his lawyer it felt like another birthday. The day he would receive his papers would be like a baptism.

But first there would be months of waiting for an uncertain outcome. About half of asylum applications were rejected last year.

Many migrants work off the books while waiting for legal approval. The Barrys didn't, terrified of jeopardizing their business. “I'm not going against the law,” Mr. Barry said.

Instead, the Barrys signed up for English classes so they would have more options once they got a work permit. They expected the permits to arrive in March, 180 days after they submitted their asylum applications.

One day in English class, Mr. Barry said his teacher was explaining the stages of culture shock that people can experience when they arrive in new places. First comes the honeymoon. “It's the excitement phase. When you see the big buildings, you're really overexcited,” Mr. Barry recalled one day in October, as he walked down a noisy stretch of Eighth Avenue next to Port Authority as Times Square glowed nearby.

The second phase was frustration, Mr. Barry said, which he felt acutely toward the end of the fall.

His lawyer, Mr. Heinrich, encouraged him to focus on gathering evidence for his asylum case. So in December, Mr. Barry told his story while Mr. Heinrich typed.

Coming to New York City had never been his plan. Mr Barry studied for four years at university in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, before opening a shop selling imported textiles from China.

But in January 2023, he and his wife knew they had to leave as soon as possible. A coup had taken place in September 2021 and a military junta that promised reforms had instead stepped up political persecution of opposition groups. Mr Barry had taken part in protests and members of the military came to his house looking for him.

Mr and Mrs Barry's relatives had also pressured them to have their four-year-old daughter's genitals cut. “The parents say it's tradition, that we should do it too,” Mrs. Barry said. “It still bothers me to this day. I don't want my daughters to experience what I did.”

Mr. Heinrich asked if Mr. Barry could think of any evidence of political persecution that he could present to a judge.

“I think it can be done with articles,” Mr. Barry replied, referring to news reports, adding: “A lot of markets were set on fire. Everyone knows that, you can Google it.”

Mr. Barry searched his phone for photos. Sometimes he would stand and stare into space, his hands folded in his lap. When they started talking about his four-year-old daughter and the female genital mutilation, Mr. Barry began to cry. He brought his right hand to his temple and covered his face and eyes.

“Every time I talk to her she asks me, 'Why did you abandon me, why did you abandon me?'” he said softly.

On Jan. 30, just after 8 a.m., the Barrys left the Row hotel with most of their belongings — three backpacks, a crib, a car seat, a stroller, a large suitcase and a shoulder bag with baby supplies — and loaded up in an Uber.

Mr. Barry had heard a rumor at the shelter that if they showed up at the Department of Homeless Services family intake center in the Bronx, they could avoid another eviction notice and get permanent placement in a shelter.

There was something to that rumor. The city now has two systems for homeless families, one for migrants and one for everyone else. In January, there were 15,000 families in the new migrant system. The migrants are subject to rolling deportation orders, while this is not the case for families in the regular system.

The Barrys waited in the Bronx center for five hours until a worker led them out the door. “They told us to wait, so we waited, and now they're telling us to go,” Mr. Barry said.

No one told them why they had to leave, but after gathering their belongings, they were sent to a van with another migrant family. The van dropped them off on 45th Street in Manhattan, outside the Roosevelt Hotel, the city's main migrant shelter.

New arrivals go there to be placed in shelters, but in recent weeks it has become a holding area for families who have been kicked out and hope to reapply for shelter. When the Barrys entered the hotel, they found hundreds of families in front of them. Hours passed.

Just before 2 a.m., a worker told Mr. Barry that the family would be assigned a room at the Americana Inn, eight blocks from where they were staying at the Row hotel.

The room was small, with room for a single bed, right against the walls, and a sink. There was no room for the crib. Mr Barry slept on the floor so his wife and baby could share the bed.

In the morning, Mr. Barry begged the hotel staff for a bigger room. They assigned him a room where they could cram in the crib. “We'll deal with it while we wait,” he said.

He had numbered the days. By the time the next 60 days were up, his work permit would be on its way.