Hochul backed New York City officials’ challenge to the requirement in a court filing this week and told reporters Thursday that the mandate was never intended to apply to an international humanitarian crisis.
“I don’t know how the right to housing – dedicated to helping those people I believe in, to helping families – can or should be interpreted as an open invitation to the 8 billion people who live on this planet, who if present on the streets of New York, New York City would be obligated to provide them with a hotel room or shelter,” the Democratic governor said.
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The city government has been trying for months to reverse the so-called ‘right to housing’ rule following the arrival of more than 120,000 immigrants since last year.
Many of the migrants have arrived without housing or jobs, forcing the city to build emergency shelters and provide various government services, at an estimated cost of $12 billion over the next few years.
What the Callahan Decree says
In force for more than 40 years, the Callahan Decree initially spoke of “men” when stating that the city had the obligation to provide shelter and food to anyone who requested it as long as they met certain standards established by the state and needed temporary shelter for physical, mental or social dysfunction reasons.
The right to shelter was officially expanded to families in 2008 following an agreement between the city and state after city officials refused to accept that families could benefit from the Callahan Act.
The decree indicates that the city or attached cities will provide shelter in facilities operated in accordance with established standards as soon as possible.
“The circumstances of this emergency have worsened significantly since May,” the lawyers argue. And they warn that between May and July the city “provided an overview of the unprecedented and extraordinarily complex challenges posed by the historic and enormous influx of people into the City’s care over the past eighteen months.”
“This influx has increased the population in the City’s care from approximately 45,000 on April 1, 2022 to more than 116,700 on October 1, 2023, an increase of 159%,” it warns.
If it achieves its goal, the city would stop providing shelter to single male immigrants, but would continue to serve family units seeking an opportunity to obtain protection from the United States federal government through asylum.
The request occurs in the midst of an acute crisis unleashed by the arrival of immigrants in the last two years in search of asylum, processes that in most cases will take years to be resolved by the immigration courts that find themselves with a traffic jam that exceeds 2.5 million cases.
With information from AP and Jorge Cancino, Immigration editor of Univision Noticias.
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2023-10-13 09:04:00
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