The city evicted the migrants camped out in front of the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen on Wednesday night, the mayor’s office said.
On Wednesday night, city workers played over loudspeakers a message in Spanish encouraging immigrants to leave, according to a video provided to NY1 by Ariadna Phillips, founder of the South Bronx Mutual Aid Fund, which has been helping migrants. camped in front of the hotel this week.
“This is the Department of Health. You must leave the area and take your belongings,” the recording said in Spanish.
This comes days after some migrants rejected the city’s plan to move from a Manhattan hotel to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, which immigrant advocates likened to a “detention center.”
“Tonight, a joint multi-agency city effort began cleaning up the block and encouraging the few dozen asylum seekers to come in as temperatures continued to drop. Immediately, most asylum seekers decided to get on our buses. and go to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal,” Fabien Levy, the mayor’s press secretary, said in a statement.
Levy said six other asylum seekers left to join friends and family in other cities, while an unidentified number “chose to go their own way as agitators outside Watson continued to encourage them to put their lives at risk in these temperatures.” below zero no longer accept refuge”.
Mayor Eric Adams and his administration have repeatedly referred to the activists working alongside the migrants who remained outside the hotel as “rioters.”
There were no arrests, Levy said.
