(NewsNation) — As winter storms and cold weather threaten the country, migrants bussed to sanctuary cities from the southern border remain unhoused and freezing.
The winter season was among politicians’ top worries back in the fall, with many of them attempting to find a solution as to where migrants would seek refuge when the cold front moved in.
The pressure mounted in cities like New York City and Chicago as shelters for asylum-seekers remained questionable for the winter months.
More than 25,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago and 116,000 in New York City since Aug. 21, 2022, and plans to house the asylum seekers have hit logistic and financial setbacks.
It’s not limited to the two cities. In Denver, migrants fear they’ll have to live in tents after shelters closed.
But as January is in full swing, and with another weather system creeping up on sanctuary cities, migrants still have nowhere to go nor the proper supplies to survive the elements.
Over the weekend, fights broke out among 300 migrants waiting in the cold in New York City for shelter, Daily Mail reported. Migrants were eager to secure warm shelter quarters before the first major winter storm hit.
When one man tried to sneak into the large line outside a re-take center in East Village, he was confronted by others and the disagreement escalated into a physical fight, according to the report.
“People were punching each other and fighting — a lot of people,” Samantha Hernandez, 27, from Mexico told the Daily Mail.
The lines for shelter snaked around buildings and some migrants even revealed they had been waiting for a month for a bed, the report said.
But even inside the shelters, conditions are dire.
“Inside the shelter there are fights, people steal phones, people have knives and there is not enough food,” a man from Mauritania told the Daily Mail.
The winter weather has exposed the lack of adequate shelters in both cities, spurring humanitarian and safety concerns.
“We’ve seen it happen in the past where people have ended up dying from the cold and we’ve already had two or three code blues in the city of New York, which means that there’s a very aggressive push to get people into shelter and off the streets,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.
In New York City, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly asked the federal government for assistance and recently announced across-the-board budget cuts.
The New York Immigration Coalition said the short-term fixes weren’t working and that permanent housing for migrants should be prioritized, according to WABC-TV.
New York City has taken several measures to ease the pressure on shelters including a “reticketing center” in Manhattan, where asylum-seekers can obtain tickets to another destination after they’ve been discharged from the city’s shelter program.
Adams also announced in October he would limit shelter stays for asylum seekers with children to 60 days. He made a similar call in September when he limited adult migrants’ shelter stays to 30 days.
In Chicago, Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson pledged to move forward with a plan to move as many as 2,000 asylum seekers into “winterized base camps.”
However, fellow Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker’s office halted plans for a migrant base camp in Chicago’s Brighton Park, citing an environmental agency’s concerns about elevated levels of mercury, lead and arsenic.
Migrants in Chicago have spent their nights on police station floors and at a makeshift shelter at O’Hare International Airport.
A CVS is being transformed into a shelter in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood where it will house 200 migrants at a time, according to CBS News Chicago. It is set to open sometime this month and will be open for six months, sheltering families with children.
It’s a part of Pritzker’s $160 million effort to support Chicago amid the growing migrant crisis.
NewsNation’s Katie Smith contributed to this report.