New York is slowly getting rid of its immigrants

At the main entrance of The Row Hotel, a 10-year-old girl slowly descends from a yellow school bus. She’s received by her mother, who’s been waiting for a while near Eighth Avenue, on the western side of downtown Manhattan, where there’s the usual and tremendous hustle and bustle of people coming and going.

This area of New York seems divided between those who belong to the hotel and those who continue on their way. The Row, a 1,300-room behemoth with a terracotta brick facade, stands like a kind of fortress that protects its tenants from the outside world. From the hotel’s entrance, you can spot a group of screaming teenagers queuing up at a souvenir shop, a couple — in athleisure — leaving with several bottles of wine from a Times Square liquor store, or parents pushing strollers past an advertisement for the Michael Jackson musical.

Inside the hotel, there’s a father who asks for work and cannot find a job. Kids exchange cigarettes for loose dollar bills near the lobby. A middle-aged woman speaks to her parents on a video call in Spanish.

The four-star hotel was the first of more than 200 that New York City has taken off the tourist circuit. They’ve been turned into shelters for the migrants who have arrived in recent years. But none of the tenants — neither the mother waiting for her daughter, nor the boys who smuggle small goods, nor the woman on a video call — are willing to admit that they live in the hotel. They don’t want to talk to the press, say anything that could harm them, or have their faces appear on television or in a magazine. Some finish a cigarette or a conversation on the sidewalk, show their ID cards to the hotel guards and go up to their rooms. Others will grab the bikes that they’ve parked out front, to begin their work as food delivery people. Some will simply wait until nightfall.

On its website, The Row, which promotes itself as being “more New York than New York,” announces that it’s “closed until further notice” (at least, for tourists). When the governor of Texas began expelling migrants arriving in the country in 2022 during the border crisis, some 4,000 people were arriving in New York each week. By law, the city was required to offer at least a bed per person.

The Row negotiated an initial agreement of $40 million with the city to host the families, who arrived through the airports, or by bus at the Port Authority terminal. Dozens of other Manhattan hotels — normally intended to receive the millions of tourists passing through — found themselves between a rock and a hard place due to the economic impact of the pandemic. Many were converted into shelters. Until the end of last year, the figures showed that the majority of families or people living in shelters were of Latin American origin, mainly Venezuelans (35%), followed by Ecuadorians (18%) and Colombians (9%).

Now, after almost three years, New York City officials are announcing the end of an era. Mayor Eric Adams said that no official could have predicted a time when the system reached “its breaking point.” The lack of hotels and shelters has made politicians think about housing migrants on cruise ships, in churches, and even in city gyms. To date, the local government has registered 232,000 people in its shelter system. Still, New York City now seems to be far from those days when migrants arrived in unexpected numbers. Today, the city has a total of 45,000 people under its care, or some 24,000 fewer than the previous month. The latest promise from the Adams administration is to close 53 shelters by June of 2025.

It’s not a decision that the residents of The Row seem to be aware of, but it’s on people’s lips a few blocks to the northwest, at The Watson. A year ago, the 600-room hotel was a hubbub of children in the lobby: parents were coming and going, while people were asking for work around the neighborhood. Now, it’s a much more subdued place.

Luz Marina arrived with a large suitcase, to collect the belongings that remained in her old room. She lived there for six months with her husband and two children, after they arrived from Venezuela. Her seven-year-old son was immensely sad after they had to leave the hotel on February 24.

“I have my children studying nearby. Now, they’ve sent me to a shelter in Queens,” says Luz Marina, 21, who travels more than an hour every day to get to the school. “It’s very complicated for me, because they don’t want to move.”

Although she feels “sad” to have to leave a neighborhood she already knows, in her new shelter, she’s allowed to cook… something she couldn’t do at The Watson. And there’s also a small room where she can receive visitors. But what Luz Marina really wants is to work and have documents, so that she can earn money. She was a beneficiary of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that, as a Venezuelan, she received in 2023. However, she’s now one of the 300,000 people who have seen their protection withdrawn by the Trump administration. “With this suspension, we’re all left in the air,” she sighs, while dragging her suitcase to finally leave The Watson.

A crusade before Trump

Turning left from The Watson, a few blocks down, you hit Tenth Avenue. There, The Skyline Hotel is almost desolate. A man arrives with an order from Domino’s Pizza and a woman comes out to meet him: it’s a sign that there are still people living inside. There aren’t many more tenants to be seen outside the austere place with gray walls. It’s not as imposing as The Row or The Watson. It became a shelter during the migrant crisis in the city… something that neighbors and business owners in Hell’s Kitchen have complained about many times. If, a few months ago, there were always people congregating around The Skyline, now, everything is much quieter. Some say that migrant families are careful not to be out and about, for fear that the authorities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could conduct one of the raids that have been widely promoted by Trump. Mayor Adams has been particularly cooperative in these operations.

Just a few blocks from The Skyline is Hotel Merit. Upon being queried by EL PAÍS, representatives of the small hotel refused to accept that, not long ago, it was a shelter for dozens of migrants. Apparently, it’s not convenient for tourists to imagine sleeping in the same rooms where families, recently arrived in New York, once lived. Last November, local media outlet W42ST reported that the city government had terminated the contract with this hotel. But today, just four months later, the receptionist at the hotel claims that they were never a shelter. However, when pressed, she calmly responds: “Yes, probably yes.”

The New York City government’s crusade against shelters and migrant reception centers didn’t begin with Trump’s return to power. Before mid-January, Mayor Adams had already announced the closure of 25 centers, including the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRC) at Randall’s Island and Floyd Bennett Field. Although it’s a fact that the terror spread by the new administration — along with the end of programs such as Humanitarian Parole or CBP One — has reduced the arrival of migrants to the country, the flow had already been reduced last year, following the measures taken at the border by the Democratic administration. Even so, Adams has claimed the local authorities have achieved “an important milestone” regarding the decrease in the number of arrivals of immigrants to New York. He credits the policies that the municipal government has implemented to face the crisis, such as limiting the stays of immigrants in shelters to a maximum of between 30 and 60 days.

What is a reality — and what’s proven by the city’s Migrant Shelter Census — is that the number of people registered in shelters has been decreasing for more than seven months. Migrant arrivals are no longer in the thousands, but are at around 350 people per week. And, according to the local government, 80% of migrants in shelters have already taken “the next steps in their journeys.” The Migrant Shelter Census notes that the administration doesn’t record these “next steps,” nor does it know “if [migrants] have obtained their own housing.”

Leaving Hell’s Kitchen behind and crossing Times Square stands the majestic Roosevelt Hotel, a building with Italian Renaissance-style facades that takes up the entire block located between 45th and 46th Street and Madison Avenue and Vanderbilt Avenue. The century-old 1,025-room hotel — which opened its doors to the border crisis in 2023 — has received some 173,000 migrants and asylum seekers. Now, as dusk falls, a man stands at the front door, slowly smoking a cigarette.

The gentleman arrived from Colombia two years ago, but has been living at the Roosevelt for 20 days. He heard that the hotel had been in the news and that it’s one of the migrant shelters scheduled to close before June. He’s not worried about the decision. Rather, he says that he’s grateful for the help that the city has given him so far. “You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he smiles, while letting out a puff of smoke. He adds that what he really wants to be offered is a job: nobody wants to live in a shelter in the long-run. What he really needs, he explains, is a room to rent and a way to earn money.

Paola, her husband Gilbert, and their two small children also live in one of the rooms at the Roosevelt. Soon, they’ll be joined by the baby that Paola gave birth to prematurely just a month ago, at the Bellevue Hospital Center. He remains hospitalized until he’s discharged. The Roosevelt will become the baby’s first home. A year ago, they arrived in Houston, Texas… a place they left behind two months ago “due to lack of work.” They got a van and drove for several days until they reached New York. “I imagined that there were more possibilities here, but we’ve only been suffering from the cold. There’s no work,” Gilbert laments. The 22-year-old affirms that — beyond accommodation — he hasn’t received any kind of help or guidance from the city.

The couple has just learned that the Roosevelt Hotel plans to close its doors in June. No one had informed them. Nor is it a place they would like to stay much longer. Elon Musk claims that it’s a “luxury hotel,” but they explain that the hallways stink, there’s a lot of noise, the food isn’t good and people sometimes give them dirty looks. Still, they’re grateful to have a roof over their heads. They find it incredible that no one has come to tell them that, in a few months, they’ll have to leave. They’ve noticed fewer and fewer people coming in and out of the hotel. And their mail no longer arrives at the Roosevelt: it gets sent to a center in the Bronx.

Even though the lines of migrants camping outside the hotel are no longer visible — and even though the processing center where help was offered to undocumented immigrants is no longer functioning — Liz Garcia, the spokeswoman for City Hall, assures EL PAÍS that there are still about 2,852 people staying at the hotel. According to the dates planned by the city, they’ll have to leave in the next few months. Other spaces will also close by June: a 2,400-bed shelter in Clinton Hill is expected to close that month, as is a 1,300-bed migrant camp on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, in Queens.

In a statement sent to El PAÍS, the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless expressed their dismay at the announcement of the closure of the Roosevelt Hotel and the city’s handling of the shelter crisis. “We’re very concerned that the city cannot meet its moral and legal obligations to provide safe and appropriate shelter for all those in need, especially at a time when an increasing number of New Yorkers are homeless,” they said. “The city must ensure that no one is left out in the open due to a lack of beds.”

Recently, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ordered the suspension of more than $80 million destined to cover housing and other services for immigrants in New York, after Musk called the conversion of some high-end hotels into shelters “illegal.” And, although many shelters have now closed — especially those located in Manhattan — the city still has to take care of some 45,000 migrants or asylum seekers. Yet, officials are already seeing an end to the crisis that began in 2022, while the Adams administration is claiming a victory, stating that the closures have saved them some $5.2 billion.

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