After a two-year influx of asylum seekers, New York City leaders are cautiously optimistic that the migrant crisis has begun to subside, and that the city’s emergency response is entering a new phase.
Fewer migrants are arriving from the southern border. Even more are leaving the city’s strained shelter system each week. And on top of the slowdown, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats of mass deportations have injected a large dose of uncertainty into the situation.
The threat of an immigration crackdown may accelerate a nearly five-month trend: The number of migrants in city shelters has declined for 19 consecutive weeks, as crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to record lows. As of Nov. 17, the city was housing 57,400 migrants in 210 shelters, hotels and tent complexes — a drop of 17 percent from a peak of 69,000 in January.
If the past two years were defined by how Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, managed to accommodate more than 223,000 new migrants, the next four will surely be focused on how the city navigates Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts.
The situation could quickly turn fraught amid the specter of immigration authorities ramping up their presence in New York, a liberal bastion known for its status as a sanctuary city.
How might the Trump administration affect migrants?
Mr. Trump indicated last week that he intended to utilize the U.S. military to help carry out his plans for mass deportations, though such a large-scale operation would face numerous legal, logistical and financial hurdles.
The president-elect and his allies have suggested that dangerous criminals would be prioritized for deportation, but warned that all of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants could be subject to removal.
The specter of mass deportations has raised fears of family separations among New York City’s estimated 412,000 undocumented immigrants. Many have been here for years and have children or spouses who are U.S. citizens or have legal status.
Most recent migrants have applied for asylum and are already in so-called removal proceedings to determine whether they can remain in the country. That means they cannot be immediately deported while their cases are winding through the courts, according to immigration lawyers.
But migrants fear that deportations could target city shelters, even though, in practice, federal immigration authorities can only enter a shelter if they have difficult-to-obtain judicial warrants for specific people.
The city’s sanctuary policies also sharply limit the extent to which the Police Department can cooperate with federal officials to deport people. But the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is free to detain and make arrests in the city.
Mr. Adams has said that he opposes mass deportations, but he supports tweaking the city’s sanctuary laws to allow it to help the federal government detain noncitizens accused of crimes. Any changes to the sanctuary laws require City Council approval.
Why are fewer migrants arriving in New York City?
The number of people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border dropped this year to its lowest point since President Biden took office in 2021.
Illegal border crossings began to plummet this year as Mexico stepped up its crackdown of people trekking north to the American border. The falloff became more pronounced after Mr. Biden implemented stricter rules in June that significantly curtailed the ability of migrants to claim asylum after entering the United States illegally.
Border Patrol agents recorded about 54,000 apprehensions in September, down 78 percent from a record monthly high of 250,000 in December 2023. In New York City, only about 500 migrants were admitted into the shelter system in the second week of November — a steep drop from the 4,700 that arrived in a single week in summer 2023.
Last year, hundreds waiting to be processed at the Roosevelt Hotel, a migrant welcome center in Manhattan, were forced to sleep outside when the city briefly ran out of beds. Today, the hotel’s lobby is eerily quiet, its rows of once-crowded chairs now sparsely filled.
On Randall’s Island, city workers have begun dismantling the giant tent dormitories that once housed 3,000 migrants in cots, slowly restoring the athletic fields they were built on.
What about the existing migrant population in New York City?
While migrants are arriving in lesser numbers, even more are leaving the shelter system.
Earlier this month, on a week when 500 migrants entered shelters, more than 1,100 left, according to city officials. This pattern has held steady in recent months, chipping away at the total shelter population.
Overall, more than 150,000 of the 223,000 migrants the city has housed since early 2022 have left the shelter system. It is unclear how many remain in the city. There is also an unknown number of migrants who entered the city but not the shelter system, most likely because they had other resources to turn to, like family connections.
The city’s deliberate strategy to reduce its shelter population has also had an effect. It has spent more than $13 million on bus and plane tickets for more than 47,000 migrants who wanted to leave the city. The top destinations included Texas, Florida, Illinois and Colorado.
Some migrants have also moved to upstate New York in search of jobs. A number of them, some 555 families, have been resettled as part of a state-city relocation program, in Albany, Westchester, Suffolk and other counties.
The city also implemented new rules in May that limit single adults to shelter stays of 30 days. Most of those affected have been granted extensions after reaching the one-month limit, but thousands have been forced out.
Who are the migrants still in shelters?
About 80 percent of the 57,400 migrants in the shelter system are families with children.
They hail from across the globe, though most are from Venezuela, Colombia or Ecuador. The city is obligated to house them because of a decades-old right-to-shelter statute, which requires the city to provide a bed to anyone who is homeless.
Many are seeking asylum, a form of legal protection granted to people fleeing persecution. Fighting for asylum can take years because of backlogs in immigration courts.
Complaints about living conditions in some shelters, including safety and the quality of food, have been common. Most recently, the City Council has scrutinized the Adams administration’s rules limiting how long migrants can stay in shelters, a policy that has led some migrants to sleep outside.
Families with children at many shelters are allowed to stay for 60 days, but they can extend their stay, though not necessarily in the same shelter. As of Nov. 1, about 89 percent of families who reapplied for a shelter were placed in a different facility, according to data obtained by the city’s Independent Budget Office.
At a Council hearing on Tuesday, city lawmakers questioned the logic behind forcing families to shuffle between shelters every two months, and highlighted the potential damage to children who are being moved farther away from the public schools they attend.
Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, Democrat of Brooklyn, said forcing migrant children to switch schools could “affect a child’s mental well-being and their progress in school.”
In anticipation of the hearing, Mr. Adams announced a shift in policy. Families with children in prekindergarten through sixth grade would now be allowed to stay in the same shelter after reaching their second 60-day limit. He also said that the city would open a centralized mail center for migrants, following complaints that they were losing important government documents as a result of being shifted between shelters.
At the hearing, city officials defended their response, saying they had invested in case management that has helped migrants file 29,000 asylum applications, as well as 34,000 work permit applications.
“None of these policies were done easily,” said Molly Schaeffer, the director of the Office of Asylum Seeker Operations. “These were done to really make sure that we were protecting both our shelter system and people at their most vulnerable time.”
What does the shelter reduction mean for the city’s budget?
Mr. Adams, who has criticized the federal government for not providing sufficient funding, has spoken in dire terms about the burden that the migrant influx has placed on the city’s budget.
But the mayor’s past projections of migrant expenditures have been much higher than what the city has ended up spending. His administration has projected even higher costs down the road — $4.4 billion just in the 2025 fiscal year, even as the shelter population continues to drop.
The city and state have spent about $5.2 billion over the last two years, entering into hundreds of emergency no-bid contracts with hotels and other private contractors to shelter and provide services for migrants.
A continuing decline in the shelter population should, in theory, lead to a reduction in the billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to house and feed asylum seekers.
The city is already planning to close the giant tent shelter on Randall’s Island by February, as well as four other shelters in New York City and 10 hotels housing migrants in upstate New York.
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