NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A group of about 50 men who the city attempted to move from the Watson Hotel in Midtown to a refugee camp at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook are sleeping outside the hotel due to poor conditions at the Brooklyn site.
The city evicted about 1,000 single men who had been housed at the hotel in order to replace them with families of asylum seekers.
Some of the men who the city bussed to Red Hook on Sunday found the refugee camp to be too cold, with no hot water, uncomfortable cots packed in too close to each other, no privacy, no personal storage space and a lack of easily accessible transportation.
Unsatisfied with the conditions at the terminal, men started returning to the hotel, but they were denied entry. Word spread among residents at the hotel slated for eviction, and others started to refuse to board the buses.
The city claims the refugee camp is heated, that there are personal storage lockers and that transit is accessible.
Volunteer news outlet Pro_NYC reported two men at the hotel said they were cold with only thin blankets at the camp.
Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro said he visited the site, and that accommodations were appropriate.
“We’re battling misinformation,” Castro said in an impromptu press conference outside the hotel. “For me it’s important that [the migrants] understand that we’re doing this for them to be in a safe environment where they can access resources.”
The men sleeping outside the hotel have been joined by mutual aid groups who are providing food, supplies and camping gear for shelter.
Activists at the site have issued a list of demands to the city:
-Use newly contracted hotels for refugee families instead of placing them in camps.
-Waive the 90-day wait for shelter residents to access city-funded housing.
-Accelerate work permit access for asylum seekers.
-Clear the shelter backlog using vacant apartments held by landlords.
Adams argued in an interview with CBS that the city can’t house homeless people without building new housing, which would take too much time to be helpful in this instance. He did not acknowledge the part of the demand that proposes using existing empty housing.
The Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants estimated there were almost 80,000 vacant rental units in 2017 and documents obtained by the New York Times in November revealed almost 26,000 vacant supportive housing apartments.
The mayor denied that migrants are refusing to go to the refugee camp at the cruise terminal and blamed activists for “[aggravating] the situation.”
“They [the asylum seekers] didn’t hold out,” he told CBS. “You had a group of advocates and organizations that went to the location and tried to aggravate the situation.”
In a Tweet on Tuesday, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs said “most” single men from the hotel had been moved into the cruise terminal.
“As of tonight, most of the asylum seekers from the Watson Hotel have moved to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal HERRC [Humanitarian Emergency Response Relief Center],” the agency wrote. “They expressed their gratitude to all New Yorkers for their continued support.”
City Council Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif called on Adams to allow the men at the terminal to return to the hotel.
“These are people, not pawns, and I condemn the administration’s actions,” said Hanif in a statement to Gothamist. “We know that the needs of asylum seekers cannot be met in this setting. I call on the administration to abandon this model and prioritize keeping people in proper brick-and-mortar facilities.”
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