Colombian Asylum Seekers in New York Face Eviction After 60 Days: Families Struggle to Find Housing and Stability

Sally, 12, is in tears: she can no longer access the New York hotel where she was staying with her family, Colombian asylum seekers. Her mother Karol and her partner, Sebastian, targeted like thousands of others by a more restrictive reception policy in the city, must take new steps to find a home.

Tested, the young girl is inconsolable. She will miss her meeting with her group of “Girl Scouts”, one of her landmarks since she arrived in the American megalopolis a year ago.

“We had to leave the hotel at 11 a.m., the class is at 6 p.m. and she can no longer enter” in the hotel where the youth movement is meeting, explains Wednesday her mother, Karol Hernandez, in the middle of their suitcases and with her another child of a year and a half.

“Everything is transitional, it’s difficult. We had a professional career (in financial management), and here we have nothing, we have to start all over again,” laments his companion Sebastian Arango, 24, in front of “Row Nyc “.

– 60 days –

The trendy hotel very close to the famous Times Square, currently closed to tourists, is one of some 200 sites opened by the Democratic mayor of New York to urgently accommodate the some 160,000 asylum seekers who have landed since spring 2022 in the megacity of 8.5 million inhabitants. Some 68,000 are still housed by the city.

With thousands of migrants arriving every day at the Mexican border to flee poverty, political instability or the violence shaking Latin American countries like Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, the subject is politically hot in the UNITED STATES. The Republicans, Donald Trump in the lead, but also Democratic mayors like that of New York, Eric Adams, have targeted President Joe Biden, with different arguments.

For his part, the Republican governor of Texas, bordering Mexico, Greg Abbott, has chartered hundreds of buses since 2022 to send thousands of migrants to Democratic cities like New York.

To discourage arrivals and relieve the accommodation system, New York City Hall has restricted the duration of accommodation: after 60 days, families must leave their hotel to go elsewhere or start from scratch and request a new place. .

– Winter –

Suitcases and strollers in hand, the first families have had to leave camp since Tuesday. Direction, for those who have no other solutions, the “Roosevelt Hotel”, an emblematic establishment with 1,000 rooms, close to Grand Central station, but which closed in 2020 and which the city has reassigned as a point of arrival for administrative procedures.

In the middle of winter, the new measures are controversial.

“The expulsion of migrant families is one of the cruelest things the city has done in generations,” denounced New York’s financial controller, Brad Lander, a left-wing elected official.

Mayor Eric Adams, also attacked on his right for his supposed laxity in the management of migrants, guaranteed that no one would find themselves on the street and that everything would be done to not disrupt the education of migrant children despite the moves. The city often has to deal with the most urgent: Tuesday evening, nearly 2,000 migrants housed in a gigantic encampment in Brooklyn which risked being flooded due to bad weather, were evacuated and found refuge in a high school, whose students had to do video lessons on Wednesday.

In front of the “Roosevelt”, Angelo Chirino, a 22-year-old Venezuelan, accompanied by his wife, 23, and their one-year-old baby, took the lead. The 60 days at the “Gatsby Hotel” ends “on the 13th”, Saturday. The family arrived in November by bus from Texas after a risky and harrowing three-month journey from Venezuela, through eight countries and the dangerous Darien jungle, where they risk being kidnapped by criminals.

“60 days,” he says, “is very short for a person arriving in the city, because the procedures take much longer, whether it is a work permit or obtaining “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) of the United States, explains Angelo.

He only asks one thing: to work. “If I have to clean, I will clean, if I have to wash cars, I will wash cars.” But immediately, “they told me to come back on the 13th” for new accommodation.

2024-01-11 11:08:56
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