NYC migrant crisis: Long Island City shelter to house 1,000 asylum seekers
NEW YORK CITY - Another bus full of asylum seekers pulled up Wednesday night to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and as more families arrive in New York City – single adult migrants were shuffled around to new locations.
One woman, who only went by her first name, "Rosa," told FOX 5 NY she had been staying at the Stratford Arms Hotel on the Upper West Side for the past two months.
This week, a bus arrived to take her to Randall's Island to make more room for parents and children. Rosa decided to rent a room in the Bronx, instead.
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Gonzalo Arsila, of Colombia, faced the same fate, but chose to leave New York.
New shelter to house 1,000 migrants
The city is opening another makeshift shelter in Long Island City, with the capacity to house 330 single adult men, and eventually 1,000 migrants.
The formerly vacant office building on Austell Place will provide migrants with three meals a day, case management, reconnection with family members and referrals to other services.
It will contain five floors. The top four floors will be used for sleeping areas, and the first floor will have a cafeteria, a lounge, a medical station, a case management station and a mail room.
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"We’ve opened 200-plus sites in support to more than 100,000 new arrivals who have come to the city since April of 2022," said Anne Williams-Isom, deputy mayor of Health and Human services.
Nearly 60,000 migrants are currently in the city’s care under a "right to shelter" policy.
‘We want to be properly funded’
Mayor Eric Adams said it's putting the city in an impossible situation, and has doubled down on his request for more help from the federal government.
"We want a decompression strategy at the border, we want an emergency status to our state, we want to be properly funded, we want access to federal land," Adams argued.