“You are welcome here! NYC is a land of immigrants! The right to shelter is not touched!”, shouted a group of protesters this Monday in front of the New York Supreme Court headquarters, in Lower Manhattan. At the same time, another smaller but very loud group joined in, chanting: Close the border! Do not support human trafficking of children! They are destroying New York!
The backdrop to this “clash” of opinions is that asylum-seeking immigrants continue to arrive by the thousands in New York City, at a time when the temperature of a political struggle over the right to shelter for new arrivals.
On the one hand, Mayor Eric Adams persists in his position of shortening the time spent in municipal shelters. And on the other, a coalition of community organizations and elected leaders They are mobilizing for this new norm to be repealed.
This week, notifications and eviction orders for immigrant families continued to roll out, which in some cases, They have been living in emergency hotels-shelters for more than a year and whose first departures would begin to take place this Tuesday, January 8.
It is confirmed that 40 families will immediately leave emergency hotel locations like Hotel Rowafter a process of interviews and monitoring.
The new rule gives single people a period of 30 days to stay in shelters and a 60-day window for families with children. This group must again request reassignment to other emergency accommodation centers.
At the same time, hundreds of newly arrived people wait in long lines, in the cold, waiting for shelter.
The Mayor’s legal team is also waiting for a decision in court to change the substance of the municipal regulation, approved 42 years ago, which guarantees the “right to housing” for anyone who requests a bedunder the argument that it was not designed to respond to a global migration and humanitarian crisis.
“In the last twenty months, New York City has welcomed more than 100,000 asylum seekers, at a time when we did not know how we would recover from the loss of almost half a million residents during the pandemic. Instead of closing the doors to new New Yorkers, our city, our state and the federal government must work together to maintain the tradition of accepting immigration,” said Brad Lander, the city comptroller.
The official also states that the vast majority of asylum seekers who have arrived in New York City come from countries such as Venezuela, Mauritania and Haiti, where the State Department has identified horrific human rights abuses, including torture, false imprisonment and slavery.
The Brooklyn councilwoman. Alexa Avilés considers that Mayor Adams persists in a “racist” rule of 30 and 60 days. (Photo: Gerardo Romo – NYC City Council)
“They deserve a place to sleep”
In addition, Brooklyn Councilwoman Alexa Aviles described how countless families now face unnecessary trauma on city streets in the dead of winter only to be reassigned to other shelters, a practice he called as typical of “racist” rulers of the south.
How can forcing people out of their living situations, only to relocate them somewhere else, create stability or make financial sense? It is not like this. We need to stop human misery and this vicious cycle of displacement. “This is a moral imperative.”he claimed.
The position of Jose Lopezspokesperson for the organization Make The Road NY is shared by the Legal Aid Society, the Homeless Coalition and the NY Immigrant Coalition: “all New Yorkers, including the newest, They deserve a safe place to sleep and rest.”
They accuse the municipal leader of scapegoating asylum seekers in his attempt to suspend protections for the right to shelter that would leave families in the cold and They would uproot children from their schools.
“We call on Mayor Adams to stop these eviction notices for 30 and 60 days and finally focus on real long-term solutions“, they agreed.
Puerto Rican Alexa Cruz, a resident of a NYCHA complex, claims that funds are being unfairly taken away from the poorest to address this immigration crisis. (Photo: F. Martínez)
Nobody is against immigration!
While protesters tried to outline the arguments for keeping the “door open” to immigrants, A group of protesters who describe themselves as “spontaneous” shouted out that possibility.
Such is the case of the Puerto Rican, Alexa Cruz, resident of a Manhattan public housing complex (NYCHA), who approached with a megaphone to oppose the group of organizations and elected leaders who demand that the municipal government that does not touch a letter of the norm of the right to shelter.
“It is not possible that they are taking funds from the poor, who pay taxes and pay our income, to cover all the expenses of a wave that continues to arrive without any control. Nobody in New York is against immigration. We all come from somewhere here. But it had not been seen that thousands came asking to be paid in full.”Alexa asserted.
The islander assures that her voice is that of thousands of NYCHA residents, who have been waiting for years for repairs and improvements to the buildings, but receive a “slap” when they know that the needs accumulated for decades, They get bogged down to attend to other priorities, which are not those of New Yorkers who have a history of effort.
“This is not an act of meanness. Thousands of people arrive fleeing horrible things. They have the right to have a better life, as several generations have. What is not fair is that they cut off services to the poorest taxpayers, because when we arrived, no one gave us anything,” said the protester, who clarified to The newspaper that does not respond to the economic and political interests of any group.
Who has the priority?
More than 3,500 families who received notifications to leave the shelters must apply again to be reassigned to other centers that are not necessarily in the same county where they are staying. This poses a challenge for children already in public schools.
A single mother who preferred to reserve her identity, living with her son in an emergency hotel in Queens for 11 months, believes that the new rule is “inhumane,” because in her case It has been very difficult to get a job to be able to rent a room.
“It seems to me that in this case they should give priority to those who arrive first and we already have children in schools,” the immigrant reasoned.
In effect, the new municipal strategy seeks to mobilize those who have spent the most time in these accommodations, to be able to receive thousands of people who continue to arrive at an increasingly accelerated rate.
Municipal sources reacted by warning that no city in the country has served with “so much humanity,” in the midst of this global migration crisis, more than 170,000 people in the last two years.
“As we warned in due time, space was sold out. They continue to arrive and we must continue to comply with our legal commitment. “We have had to take tough, but rational measures,” said the municipal spokesperson.
Keys to the migratory labyrinth today:
- This chapter of the already indescribable migration crisis in the Big Apple could be explained like this: More than 70,000 immigrants, who in many cases arrived since the spring of 2022, who are still under municipal care, They will begin to receive eviction notices to open spaces for thousands who continue to arrive.
- This first group, which has already been in the shelters for months, demands not to be evicted because “they have priority”, because they arrived first.
- In this puzzle, spokespersons for community organizations and elected leaders consider that the City must have funds and help for everyone. In addition to not putting limits on the flow of thousands of people who aspire to make New York their new home.
- Mayor Adams remains firm in his position to limit the time of each asylum seeker in municipal shelters and his highest ambition is that the rule that obliges the City of New York to provide housing to whoever requests it be judicially terminatedas it was not conceived to address a global humanitarian crisis.
2024-01-09 11:00:00
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