New York begins evicting migrant families who have reached a time limit for shelter

Since arriving from Venezuela four months ago, Joana Rivas has slowly found some semblance of stability in New York City, where she took on occasional cleaning jobs and enrolled her 9-year-old daughter in a Manhattan public school.

As she navigates her new city, a crucial anchor for Ms. Rivas has been the free housing she received at a hotel-turned-shelter near Times Square. However, her time at the shelter was up on Tuesday. Mrs. Rivas had to keep her daughter home from school and pack her belongings to apply for a new home.

“Tonight I don’t know where we’re going to go,” said Ms. Rivas, 39, outside a migrant shelter in Midtown Manhattan. “I just came here to see what they would tell me, hoping that my daughter could find somewhere to stay tonight.”

New York City has begun evicting dozens of migrant families who had reached the 60-day limit for staying in the homeless shelter system, the city’s latest effort to encourage more of them to leave and find permanent housing. Nearly 70,000 migrants live in a patchwork of hotels, homeless shelters and giant winterized tents set up around the city.

The first wave of evictions coincided with an unexpected and significant hurdle. City officials announced they would temporarily evacuate 1,900 migrants currently housed in a tent shelter in southeast Brooklyn due to a rainstorm moving toward the city Tuesday evening.

A City Hall spokeswoman said the relocation of migrant families living in the tent dormitories at Floyd Bennett Field, on the shores of Jamaica Bay, was made “to ensure the safety and well-being of the people who work and live downtown ‘. that is an area that was flooded during the last big storm. The families were scheduled to be bused to a Brooklyn high school Tuesday afternoon, city officials said.

The migrant families with children who were forced out of the city’s cramped shelter system as a result of the 60-day limit will be allowed to reapply for another place. But they will have to leave the shelters they have called home for weeks and sometimes months and take their suitcases to a reception center in the city to be assigned new beds, possibly in a different location.

The mid-winter realignment has been attacked by critics of Mayor Eric Adams as unnecessarily disruptive for migrants still finding base in a new city. Advocates have also raised concerns about migrant children potentially ending up in living situations further away from the public schools where they are enrolled.

Mayor Adams defended his decision to force migrant families to reapply for shelter. He argued at a news conference Monday that the city was being overrun by newcomers and that families living in hotels needed to find more stable places to live. He promised, as he has done before, that no family with children would be forced to sleep on the streets.

“We do it in a very humane way,” he said.

Since last spring, nearly 170,000 migrants have traveled from the southern border to New York City to ask for help. Many of them were drawn to the city’s unique legal mandate to provide free housing to anyone who asks for a bed.

The Adams administration has opened more than 200 emergency shelters to help house migrants, most of whom are no longer in the city’s care. But the city has also begun limiting the number of days migrants can stay in shelters to free up beds and draw people in shelters out of the city’s care.

About 4,400 families have been issued 60-day notices, which will take effect in the coming weeks, officials said. They said counselors met with the families to discuss possible living arrangements. The first migrants to fall under the 60-day limit on Tuesday were 40 migrant families staying at Row, the Times Square hotel where Ms. Rivas was staying.

The families were ordered to leave the shelter Tuesday morning, officials said. Those wanting to reapply for shelter had to go to the Roosevelt Hotel, a Midtown hotel about a 15-minute walk away that has been transformed into the city’s main migrant shelter.

Dr. Ted Long, a senior vice president at the city’s public hospital system who helps oversee the effort, said the city would prioritize helping immigrant families with young children find new housing near their schools and minimize disruption.

“We are going to move heaven and earth to place them in a new hotel as quickly as possible,” he said on Monday.

Despite the reassurances, Democratic officials to Mr. Adams’ political left quickly attacked the displacement of migrant families, using stern language to call on the mayor to suspend time limits on shelter stays. At a meeting in front of City Hall on Monday, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, described the family evictions as “one of the cruelest things the city has done in generations.”

“We will not throw people out of warm shelters during cold winters,” he said. “We will not allow this to become a city that drives children out of their public schools in the middle of the school year.”

A group of advocacy groups have also denounced the 60-day limit as harsh and destabilizing for migrants. The potential disruption to education could have disastrous consequences for children, some educators say, and advocates said the change in home addresses could disrupt migrants’ access to their mail, including important immigration court notices.

“Instead of focusing on school, work and building their lives here, newly arrived immigrants will have to overcome increasing bureaucratic obstacles to maintain housing and access immigration assistance,” the New York Legal Assistance Group said in a statement declaration.

Migrant families who said they had lived in the Row—at least one for fourteen months—began coming to the Roosevelt Hotel seeking new shelter assignments, some carrying suitcases. Some brought their children and decided not to send them to school on Tuesday without knowing where they would sleep at the end of the day.

Anthony Gomez and his wife, who is pregnant, said they woke up Monday to a pounding on their door telling them they had to leave the hotel the next day — their 60th day in New York after arriving from Venezuela.

“We didn’t realize it was time,” said Mr. Gomez, who is 29 and has worked as a delivery driver for Uber. “They knocked on our door like they were police. We don’t know what’s happening now, we have no idea.”

Other migrant families said they planned to leave the shelter system, and even New York City, for good.

Angel Gonzalez, 36, with luggage in tow, left the Row hotel for the last time Tuesday morning. He had lived there for eleven months with his family, including two children, ages 13 and 15, after emigrating from Venezuela. He said the free housing allowed him to save some money and “get everything in order” to move to Philadelphia, where he has a relative.

“I am grateful for New York, for this country and grateful for everything,” Mr. Gonzalez said on the way to the train. “This is a new opportunity.”

Singles were already subject to shorter 30-day deadlines late last year, leading to long lines outside an East Village school where dozens of migrants slept and stood in the freezing cold in December, hoping for a chance to get a new bed again to ask.

City officials have said that shelter-in-place time limits will remain in place, which are also in place in other cities struggling with an influx of migrants, including Chicago And Denverhelp migrants leave the reception system permanently.

The winter relocation of families comes as Mayor Adams continues to expand efforts to curb the flow of migrants into the city. The mayor, who traveled to Latin America last year to personally discourage migrants from coming to New York City, is offering migrants free bus and plane tickets from New York.

Last month, the mayor also escalated his feud with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, who has sent more than 30,000 migrants to New York City on Texas-paid charter buses since last year. On December 27, Mr. Adams imposed new rules and penalties on charter buses that transport migrants to New York City, limiting the hours and locations they can drop them off.

Last week, the Adams administration filed a lawsuit against 17 bus companies seeking about $700 million in damages, the amount the city says it spent to accommodate the migrants the companies bused into New York.

Emma Fitzsimmons And Liset Cruz reporting contributed.