Migrants forced to sleep on floor at NYC’s Roosevelt Hotel shelter as city hits deadline for stay limit
Scores of migrants have been sleeping on the floor of an old bar at the Big Apple’s Roosevelt Hotel shelter “for days” — as the first wave of asylum seekers were being booted from city sites under its stay-limit rule.
Sobering Post photos show the asylum seekers sprawled out side by side in the middle of the once-iconic hotel’s former Vander Bar in Midtown Manhattan early Monday.
Nearly a dozen other migrants also could be seen sleeping upright in chairs or hunched over their few belongings as they tried to doze.
“It depends on their situation — they could be there for hours — but most times they could be there for days,” a shelter worker, who didn’t want to be named, told The Post on Monday.
“That’s where the singles are processed, so it just depends on their situation,” they said.
The harrowing scene came as the city’s eviction-notice deadline passed over the weekend for the first of 13,000 single adult migrants who have been staying in one of its shelter sites for the past 60 days.
It wasn’t immediately known how many migrants may have been booted from shelters over the weekend. A City hall rep said “a few dozen” asylum seekers could have been affected.
Under the rule, single adult migrants who reach their two-month limit have to head back to the city’s main intake center at the Roosevelt Hotel to reapply for a new shelter bed.
They are still guaranteed housing under the city’s “Right to Shelter” law.
But even after reapplying and getting another bed, that arrangement will now only last them 30 days before they have to reapply again if needed. Mayor Eric Adams revealed Friday the city was slashing the 60-day stay limit to just 30 days to try to discourage migrants from using the overwhelmed system too long.
It wasn’t clear whether the majority of asylum seekers spotted sleeping on the floor of the former Roosevelt bar early Monday were there after being evicted from another shelter over the weekend or they are newly arrived migrants waiting to be processed for the first time.
Martin Cordero, a 30-year-old asylum seeker who just arrived in the Big Apple from Venezuela, said he was among those to sleep overnight inside the bar area.
“I don’t know what the next step from here is,” he admitted to The Post.
“They asked me if I had anyone that can pick me up, but I don’t know anyone here.
“They told me this is just temporary,” he added.
Another Venezuelan migrant, only identified as Daniel, said he, too, slept in a chair after arriving at the hotel mega shelter Sunday.
“They were supposedly going to move us to another place, but we don’t really know how long we will be staying here,” the 26-year-old said. “We have to wait for space if we don’t have anyone to contact to come get us. They have not said how long that will be.”
By midmorning, another dozen adult migrants had been led into the already crammed area to await processing.
“After a long and arduous journey, often on cramped buses, people at the Arrival Center are made comfortable and able to safely doze off, while waiting a few hours for placement,” said City Hall rep Amaris Cockfield when asked about sleeping migrants. “But, to be clear: We have no overnight stays in the lobby.”
In July, dozens of migrants were forced to sleep on cardboard boxes on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt after the makeshift processing center hit capacity.
Currently, the city has nearly 60,000 asylum seekers in its care spread out at more than 200 shelter sites across the five boroughs.
Migrants — as with anyone in need in the Big Apple — are guaranteed a bed in the city’s shelter system under New York’s decades-old “Right to Shelter” mandate.
But the Adams administration is challenging the “Right to Shelter” rule in state Supreme Court, arguing it needs to start turning some people away because the city’s resources have already buckled with the arrival of more than 113,000 asylum seekers since spring 2022.
Separately, a busload of about 40 migrants with kids pulled up to the hotel shelter Monday morning after being driven in from Texas.
The migrant families were quickly whisked into the shelter to be processed, The Post observed.
The mayor of the border town of El Paso, Texas, said Saturday that his city has reached “a breaking point” as it grapples with 2,000 migrants a day — and that his administration chartered five buses that day to ship some of them to New York City, Chicago and Denver.
