Mayor Eric Adams is trying through various means to cut the “jugular” to the immigration crisis, which in the specific case of New York City, continues to drain municipal coffers. First, a court was formally asked for a judicial review of the rule requiring the City to provide temporary shelter to anyone who needs it. Later, the length of stay of single people in shelters was reduced.
Now, with the Big Apple overflowing with more and more people arriving every week, the president does not rule out that he could send families with children to congregate spaces for homeless people.
This last letter up his sleeve, which was revealed to local media, has already caused the reaction of at least 30 members of the State Legislature, who, through a letter to which the publication Politico refers, “urged Governor Kathy Hochul to block any new shelter regulations.”
“History has shown that placing children in congregate settings puts them at high risk of suffering sexual abuse and emotional, academic and developmental setbacks,” the legislators wrote in a letter commented on by this New York media.
It is added in the text that “in New York, advocates and officials have fought over the years to ban this practice and establish humane and safe standards for our shelters.”
Likewise, organizations that defend the right to housing continue to reject the possibility of changing any letter of this norm.
The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless in a joint statement described this possibility as “lack of compassion.”
“Expelling new arrivals from the shelters, who have nowhere else to go, will increase the number of people sleeping on the streets,” they calculate.
“Go to NY with full payment”
This new warning from Democratic legislators to fight any change to this municipal rule on several fronts comes when it is certain that new waves of immigrants will continue crossing the southern border in the coming weeks.
This controversy between the mayor and the Democratic caucus in the Assembly appears when the City has very well outlined that transnational human trafficking organizations continue to offer a “digital route” in their “packages” not only to “pass” people, but also from other continents. But to give them the route to follow so that they are offered “unlimited accommodation and food” in ‘sanctuary cities’. As even the recently arrived immigrants themselves have confirmed.
But, mainly, this debate is ignited when the municipal Administration has announced that it will have to resort to cuts to the City’s budget, to continue addressing this crisis, after months demanding national emergency action and more extraordinary funds. Funds that, after 15 months of emergency, have not arrived until now.
Mayor Adams has been specific: “We are saying that you can come from anywhere in the world, come to New York City and we will give you food, shelter and clothing for as long as you want, forever. That’s not realistic. It is not sustainable. And that’s what we’re seeing now. “That needs to be re-examined.”
Municipal spokespersons confirmed to El Diario that if some local shelter regulations are not reviewed, the average rate of 10,000 people per month arriving in the Big Apple could be multiplied by three. That is to say, after a few weeks the city will be completely overwhelmed without having the capacity to respond.
“Unfortunately, one of the handles that opens the door to the crisis are thousands of people who are fleeing dangers, attracted by a municipal shelter rule, which was created in very different circumstances. For no city in the world, this would be sustainable,” the source indicated.
Some reports maintain that a large part of the thousands of people who were waiting until this Wednesday, to be processed at the southern border with Mexico, are destined to come to New York to request refuge.
“No other city in the country has addressed this crisis in such a compassionate and humanitarian way. Resources are not unlimited. And if we send a different message from here, we are not closing the doors to migrants. We are simply being honest with them, before they make a decision: There is no space! “, reasoned the municipal official.
In the same direction, it is certain that the mere reassignment of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans, who are estimated to occupy 40% of the spaces in the shelters, will not alleviate the collapse of the city, facing a new avalanche of immigrants expected to cross the border.
The effect for single men
The recent rules that reduced the length of stay in emergency shelters for single people from 60 days to 30 days have already generated eviction orders for thousands of men, who are given the option to apply to reintegrate into the system. of ‘shelters’.
“What we observed is that many of them even had relatives in other cities. They came to New York because someone told them that they could live indefinitely under the care of the City. In some cases, many have already reunited with their families in other regions. Others, knowing that they have a deadline, are motivated to look for alternatives more quickly,” they indicated.
Such is the case of “Gerardo”, a 24-year-old Venezuelan, who lived for 10 months in a shelter and received the eviction order a couple of weeks ago. Although he dreamed of staying in New York, the force of events motivated him to contact relatives in Detroit, where they are even waiting for him with a job.
In the last few hours, while waiting for the time of his trip, he was waiting at Vander’s Bar, right on the corner of the Roosevelt Hotel, where several men in the same situation had to sleep in chairs while they found a location, lodging or the mobilization to other states.
“I will thank New York all my life for the treatment, but what you work here is not enough to become independent. I will return one day on vacation,” she commented.
“From here to my house”
Another Venezuelan, Esther López, 28, is pregnant. And as she herself specifies, she arrived in the City 45 days ago. In summary, she assures that her “guides” (coyotes) guaranteed her that “here with a child in her womb, she would be guaranteed lodging and stable housing for life.”
“I know that from here, I am leaving for my own worthy home,” he said at the doors of the Roosevelt Hotel in the face of the winds of change in shelter regulations.
There is already a judicial precedent
Specifically, the Mayor’s Legal Department asked the courts in May to change the “language” of the rule approved in the 1980s, to allow it to waive its obligation to offer emergency shelters if it lacks “the resources and the ability to establish and maintain sufficient shelter sites, personnel and security to provide safe and appropriate shelter,” according to court records.
By housing thousands and thousands of immigrants, who lack basic resources, the city argues that it “faces an unprecedented demand on its accommodation capacity” and that these challenges could never have been “contemplated, foreseen or even remotely imagined,” when A decree was approved in 1981.
This Tuesday, Staten Island Judge Wayne Ozzi issued a preliminary injunction preventing the city from filling the former St. John Villa Academy with asylum seekers.
The jurist had a few words about the city’s “right to shelter” mandate.
Ozzi described in his ruling that the current regulations are “anachronistic relics of the past, because they aim to address a problem as different as day and night.”
He added that “no one can argue that at that time there was a situation of the magnitude that exists today: An avalanche of immigrants whose number would fill two Yankee Stadiums and be equivalent to one-fifth of the population of Staten Island.”
Additionally, the judge wrote that this decree agreed to house those who were homeless “due to physical, mental or social dysfunction,” reinforcing that the majority of immigrants do not fit that description.
Texas Governor in NYC
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who during the last year acknowledged that he transported thousands of people by bus, from his state to New York City, assured during a visit to Manhattan this Wednesday that the management he observes in the face of the influx of immigrants is “calm and organized,” The New York Times reported.
The Republican assured that what was happening in Texas was much worse, “because we have crimes that occur in ways that are not seen in New York,” after acknowledging having sent 15,800 immigrants to New York, around 10 percent of the almost 120,000 who have arrived in the city since spring 2022.
The Texan president, who has been considered the architect of the immigration crisis in the Big Apple and described as “inhumane” for using vulnerable people for a “political game,” concluded by saying that whoever “has sent people who cross to New York the border, it’s not Abbott, it’s Biden.”
The data:
- 116,100 immigrants have passed through NYC’s shelter intake system since spring 2022, and more than 61,000 immigrants are currently in the city’s care.