New York struggles to shelter, process asylum-seekers amid heat

Knees to their chests, dozens of men from countries such as Venezuela, Mali, and Senegal sat on a dirty New York City sidewalk outside a Manhattan hotel Tuesday, awaiting asylum processing.

Some had been there for days, in a line that wrapped around the block and that underlined the challenge facing thousands of migrants in New York.

During a press conference on Monday, Mayor Eric Adams said the city's resources were stretched.

"There is no more room," Adams said.

The mayor's office announced that since 2022 the city has opened over 190 emergency shelters, with 12 large-scale relief centres. Two more are planned to be set up in the coming weeks.

At the Roosevelt Hotel, which replaced the Port Authority Bus Terminal as the processing hub for migrants new to the city, asylum-seekers are supposed to be given food, water, and for the single men, transportation to a shelter.

Only families are sheltered at the hotel. Hamid, a 20-year-old Mauritanian who gave only one name, had slept on the sidewalk for the past few days and was exhausted, hungry and thirsty.

Hamid came to the United States "to work and for a home," he said, adding that he can't go back because "we are threatened with death." A recent US State Department travel advisory for Mauritania warned of violent crime in the North African country and said its police lack resources.

New York state is bound by a decades-old consent decree from a class-action lawsuit to provide shelter for those without homes. As more migrants have arrived, a range of approaches to housing them, from tents to relocation to other parts of the state, has been tried.

Murad Awadeh, executive director of the New York Immigrant Coalition, said that this week was the anniversary of asylum seekers being bused to New York City from Texas. He added that the city should have better planning and shouldn't be operating from an emergency response.

"We need to actually invest in making sure that the infrastructure we have in place can support people," he said. "The city needs to work to get vouchers in the hand of people who've been there the longest and get them out of the shelter system and give them the support of starting their lives in their new homes."

Dino Redzic, the owner of Uncle Paul's Pizza and Cafe next door to the Roosevelt, gives pizza daily to the men outside. Adams' policies aren't doing enough, he said.

"Thirty one years ago, I was in their shoes," said Redzic, a Yugoslav refugee.

"To help makes me feel good, but to watch this here, I just don't understand why this was so organised in the beginning but is now a broken system."