Migrants line up outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
Migrants camping in New York City bring a crisis into focus
Photographs by Yunghi Kim/Contact Press Images
Story by Kyle Almond, CNN
Updated August 19, 2023
Migrants line up outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
The line wrapped around two city blocks. Dozens of desperate asylum seekers, outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, waiting to be processed.
The Roosevelt, the city’s intake center in Manhattan, was overwhelmed by an influx of migrants. People would spend all day in the sweltering sun and then sleep on the sidewalk at night, clutching onto their few belongings.
“For me, it was striking in that this is steps from Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue is a very posh address,” said freelance photographer Yunghi Kim, who documented the scene as it unfolded over several days this month. “This was playing out in the heart of New York City, not too far from Grand Central Station.”
It was perhaps the most visible example yet of New York City’s migrant crisis, one that has cost the city about $3.6 billion this fiscal year. More than 100,000 asylum seekers have come through the city since the spring of 2022.
New York City has over 57,300 asylum seekers in its care, and nearly 200 sites have been opened to shelter them, including hotels, office buildings and even a former police academy building. But city officials say they need more help from the state and federal levels.
“As the number of asylum seekers in our care continues to grow by hundreds every day, stretching our system to its breaking point and beyond, it has become more and more of a Herculean effort to find enough beds every night,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said last week.
There were 2,900 asylum seekers who came into New York City’s care between July 30 and August 6. The influx led to the line outside the Roosevelt.
It was the worst that Kim, a Brooklyn resident, has ever seen it in the city.
“It’s smaller in scale, but it reminded me a lot of the refugee crises that I have covered my career,” said Kim, who has been working in journalism for 40 years. “It’s just the way they were left out in the open.”
Most of the people outside were men, as the city prioritizes shelter space for families with children. Many of the men, she said, were from African countries such as Senegal and Mali. But there were also some from South America.
“One of the migrants said to me, ‘Am I going to get sent back?’ That’s what he was worried about,” Kim recalled. “And I said no, I didn’t think so, because New York is a sanctuary city.”
New York has long prided its history as a home for immigrants, where the right to shelter has been guaranteed by law for decades. But Adams asked a judge to suspend portions of the law in May, looking for flexibility as the city struggles with the influx of migrants.
The city recently posted flyers encouraging asylum seekers to go elsewhere, saying, “There is no guarantee we will be able to provide shelter and services to new arrivals.”
Meanwhile, it continues to look for new places to house migrants. Last month, officials announced a plan to put 1,000 migrants in the parking lot of a state psychiatric hospital in Queens. It has also revived plans for a tent city to hold as many as 2,000 on Randall’s Island.
The city was eventually able to find temporary shelter for the migrants who were lined up outside the Roosevelt Hotel. They were placed in the hotel’s ballrooms and lobbies, and some were sent to a church in Long Island City, CNN affiliate WCBS reported.
But it took several days, in the middle of a heat wave, to get a handle on the situation.
“As the days went on, it became more organized,” Kim said. “The (New York Police Department) put up the barricades. They gave out tickets where (the migrants) had numbers.”
The migrants initially wouldn’t leave the area, Kim said, because they were afraid they would lose their spot in line. The number system made it easier.
Kim said she saw the migrants receive sandwiches, bagels and oranges, but they were craving hot food. At one point, she went to a nearby pizza shop and bought them nine boxes of pizza.
“Listen, wherever you fit on the spectrum of this political issue on the migrants, it’s a complex issue. Certainly, nobody has answers for this: The city’s struggling. The mayor’s struggling. Advocates are struggling,” Kim said. “But if an individual or a group of individuals come up to you and tell you, ‘I’m hungry, I’m thirsty,’ and they look like they’ve been through hell and they look dehydrated, you can’t walk away. You go to the nearest drugstore and you try to get some water. Or if there’s a pizza place, get some hot pizza.”
Kim wasn’t the only one to help. She later saw locals pass out groceries. One woman bought feminine hygiene products. Some people brought clothes, including sneakers, as a few of the migrants didn’t have proper shoes or their shoes were damaged.
The migrants were also desperate for electricity to charge their phones so that they could communicate with their families back home.
“New Yorkers are always very resilient about helping others in time of need,” Kim said.
City models project that with regards to asylum seekers, a “high rate of growth will continue in the future,” according to a news release last week. Officials anticipate the asylum seeker population will average nearly 33,860 households this fiscal year. That would increase costs to over $4.7 billion, according to the mayor.
“If things do not change, our new estimates have us spending nearly $5 billion on this crisis in the current fiscal year,” Adams said.
That nearly equals the budgets of the city’s sanitation department, the parks department and the fire department combined, according to Adams.
Kim herself is an immigrant who came to New York from South Korea in 1972. It took her nearly a decade to secure a visa to come to the United States, she said.
She’s glad the migrants she photographed have found shelter, but she said it’s just “temporary relief” and she worries about what’s to come.
“You have to wonder,” she said, “how long before this happens again?”
CNN’s Polo Sandoval, Catherine E. Shoichet and Celina Tebor contributed to this report.
