NEW YORK (NewsNation) — For days, newly arrived asylum seekers have waited outside New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel. And for weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has said the city is out of room and sought to dissuade more migrants from arriving.
Yet, with more than 56,000 migrants in New York City’s care in close to 200 emergency shelters, Manhattan’s Central Park could be next on the list for a sprawling tent city.
“Everything is on the table,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday at a press conference. The sites are among 3,000 locations the city is reviewing, she said.
She added: “People, on the one hand, cannot accuse us of not having enough space, of telling us not to go to certain places and then, on the other hand, tell us you can’t go here, you can’t go there.”
The Roosevelt Hotel, on Manhattan’s eastside, serves as both an intake center and emergency shelter for migrant families with children. Outside the hotel, dozens of migrants, mostly men from South America and African countries, have been sleeping on cardboard on the sidewalk in hopes of a bed in the city’s shelter system.
“I’m saying we are managing this the best that we can,” Williams-Isom said. “I’m saying there’s not a lot of good options on the table and we will look at all the options that we have.”
City officials say the number of migrants arriving in New York since the spring of 2022 is approaching 100,000, overwhelming a shelter system designed to hold tens of thousands fewer people.
New York City has a unique court-ordered obligation to provide emergency shelter to anyone who asks for it, but officials have said in recent weeks that the influx of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. had made it increasingly difficult to fulfill that duty.
While the number of migrants crossing the border has fallen in recent months, busloads still arrive nearly every day. City officials said that some 2,300 more migrants came to the city seeking shelter last week alone.
“Every week I come here and I talk about the system at its breaking point,” Williams-Isom said.
City leaders continue to seek money from the Biden administration to supplement the billion-dollar cost of providing shelter and support services.
“We need some support,” Williams-Isom said. “I see the little kids in the Roosevelt and I wonder why nobody cares, I don’t understand why nobody cares.”
Instead, immigrant advocates claim it’s the Adams administration that doesn’t care.
“The Adams administration has kept the city in emergency response mentality — doubling and tripling down on strategies that are not working. he is no longer welcoming of asylum-seekers and is scapegoating them for his choices,” said Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.
Some critics accuse New York City officials of exploiting the lines outside the Roosevelt as part of a campaign to pressure state and federal officials to come up with more money to tackle the crisis and discourage more migrants from entering the U.S. from Mexico.
“Mayor Adams should not be using asylum seekers as props to get the attention of the Biden administration or discourage asylum seekers from coming to New York,” Awawdeh said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.