New York City Mayor Eric Adams has warned that there’s no room in the city as hundreds of migrants sleep on the street outside Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel for a second day in a row. Asylum seekers from a number of South American and African countries have been lining the streets and sleeping on carbdboard boxes rough because the migrant hotel has reached its capacity.
The number of migrants continues to rise as buses from southern states arrive in the city, a result of policies that have caused thousands of asylum seekers to overrun the US-Mexico border.
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The Mail Online reports: New York City currently housing more than 56,000 migrants across around 200 makeshift sites – while thousands more are in the city’s shelter system. But buses keep arriving week-on-week transporting people from the border.
The Roosevelt Hotel, which was shuttered three years ago, is one of several hotels that have been transformed into emergency centers as the city struggles with an influx of migrants.
New York is bound by a decades-old consent decree in a class-action lawsuit to provide shelter for those without homes.
As a result, the Roosevelt Hotel and others have become hubs for refugees – within walking distance from Times Square, the World Trade Center memorial site and the Empire State Building.
Over the weekend, the migrants were handed small red tickets with digits on them – and once in a while hotel workers would come out and call numbers to let people inside the air-conditioned lobby.
Others, desperately pushing closer to the front to get inside, were left to wait outside in the New York City heat.
The desperate people looking to get inside the hotel early on Tuesday morning were speaking a number of languages, including Spanish, French and Arabic.
Mahmouth, a migrant from Diungame in Senegal, has been waiting on the streets of New York City for five days, desperate for a spot to rest his head.
He told DailyMail.com: ‘We’re night and day here. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.’
Sahi Khalil, from Mauritania, arrived in New York two months ago, before being transferred to Ohio and moving back to the Big Apple. He was living in the Magma Hotel in Queens before being thrown out.
He told DailyMail.com from the line on Tuesday: ‘They moved all of us out – they said they wanted to move a family in.’
Khalil was then put into one of the city’s shelters but has tried his shot at getting into the Roosevelt Hotel.
He added: ‘My friends said they’ve been here 3 days. They slept here on the street for three days. I want a better life. I wish them a better life. We are suffering in our country.’
When asked why he wants to migrate to the US, he said the country is a ‘place of freedom and dignity.’
Eric Adams said in a statement on Monday: ‘Children and families continue to be prioritized and are found a bed every night.
‘While we at least offered all adults a temporary place to wait off the sidewalks last night, some may have chosen to sleep outside.
‘And, in all honesty, New Yorkers may continue to see that more and more as hundreds of asylum seekers continue to arrive each day.’
Many have now spent two nights sleeping on the streets of New York, after being dropped off on buses from the southern border in Texas. Unless they are inside the hotel, many have been refused entry to use the restroom inside.
One migrant, named Mary who traveled from Venezuela, told The City that she was in floods of tears after hotel workers refused her use the restroom at 2am. She wandered the streets looking for somewhere else to use the toilet.
A group of men, from Chad in Africa, huddled around a gutter to wash their feet before praying in the line on Saturday amid their long wait to get inside.
The long line of migrants hail from many different countries – including Venezuela, Ecuador, Sudan, Mauritania, and Senegal.
