In the midst of the holiday season, buses from Mexico’s southern border carrying hundreds of immigrants continue to arrive at the Port Authority terminal in downtown Manhattan. Just this week 15 new buses arrived.
Of course, the expectation of the right to unlimited refuge is the great wall that both single people and families with children will encounter, who continue to disembark to a frozen city that now imposes new rules, after more than 16 months of dealing with a completely collapsed shelter system.
After 40 years, New York City’s “right to shelter,” which guaranteed a bed to anyone who sought one on the same day, is at least functionally over, awaiting court rulings.
Two months ago the municipal Administration put in place a rule that until this week has been the center of high protests and criticism. Although also applause.
In summary, single immigrants who arrive in the Big Apple requesting shelter can only stay in these spaces for 30 days, and families with children, only 60 days. This does not mean that they are thrown out on the streets, but they do have to restart the application process for other shelters that are not necessarily in the same county where they were initially housed.
The first families will reach their 60-day limit just a few days after Christmas, but it was clarified that they will receive extensions until early January. So far, notices have been issued to about 3,500 families.
“It will disturb the children”
This measure has been described as “cruel” by elected leaders, community leaders and immigrant support organizations, who this week announce new mobilizations to demand that on these cold and festive days, the municipal team change these regulations.
“The 60-day rule is a monumental failure in shelter management for asylum seekers. This policy jeopardizes the well-being of families who deserve stability, while they rebuild their new lives as New Yorkers,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander has asserted in several settings in recent days.
In line with this complaint, Liza Schwartzwald, Director of Economic Justice at the New York Immigration Coalition (NYCI), reasons that this measure will disrupt children’s education while their families struggle to navigate the city’s complex system, calling it “inhuman.”
In this same vein, Christine C. Quinn. , President of Win, the largest provider of family shelters in the city, lamented that families are being “expelled” from their shelters.
“This will only create more trauma for those who have already endured too much. As all signs point to the City forcing families into dangerous congregate settings,” Quinn fears.
Radical response: “There are no spaces”
Faced with the onslaught of some community groups and Democratic leaders of the more progressive wing, Mayor Eric Adams in recent hours has not softened his speech. On the contrary, he has radicalized his position.
“We have communicated to the courts time and time again to make clear that the right to housing should not apply to a humanitarian crisis. “New York should not be responsible for someone who comes from anywhere in the world to request accommodation for as long as they want, with taxpayer resources,” the president said verbatim to the Fox network.
The mayor recalled that more than 150,000 people have been received by New York City since the spring of 2022, and to date 57% have been able to leave the shelters to start their new life independently.
The rate of immigrants that continue to arrive until this week is 4,000 per week. Everything indicates that a large part of the people concentrated in the caravans on the border until this Friday will largely end up in New York, Denver and Chicago.
Adams argues that the changes to the shelter rules have been an adaptation to reality: “There are no spaces. We continue to receive a wave that does not stop arriving. “Those who criticize us unfairly, without recognizing everything we have contributed as a City to a national crisis, do not offer a solution, only criticism that is far from the facts.”
The mayor’s formula to resolve this crisis, which has already begun to cut essential services for New Yorkers, includes, in his words, a national decompression strategy, federal funds, further securing the borders and expediting work permits for asylum seekers.
Governor Kathy Hochul is aligned in this same vein.
The immediate path announced by the municipal authority is meetings with clergy leaders and New York congressmen.
“I have the obligation to resolve this as mayor. I need all New Yorkers to know that I cannot stop buses from arriving by law. And I am obliged by law to provide them with food, accommodation and all services. The law has tied me down,” he highlighted in an interview with the Fox network.
Migrants: “It is very little time”
With just a few days left until 2023 ends, the “stability” dynamic of some groups of immigrants who have even stayed in hotels since last year, tends to change.
For example, Venezuelan Javier Conde, 28, claims that he received an emergency eviction order from an hotel in Long Island City, Queens, and is currently in a desperate limbo. The adjustment process to another shelter is not so quick.
Like Javier, hundreds of single migrants have been waiting days to get a bed, and many spend their nights in increasingly crowded waiting rooms.
“I think it’s fair to give us more time and give priority to those who arrive first,” reasoned the man from Caracas who has been living in an emergency hotel for 10 months.
This immigrant assures that “his family is on the way” and that it is very clear that they will not receive the same benefits as the first wave that arrived in the spring of 2022.