A Growing Number of Homeless Migrants Are Sleeping on New York Streets

NEW YORK — As New York City grapples with the formidable challenge of housing nearly 65,000 asylum-seekers from the southern border, a related problem has emerged: A noticeable and growing number of them are sleeping outside.

An encampment springs to life every evening in a corner of Randall’s Island, home to one of the city’s largest migrant shelters, until dozens of tents dot the riverbank. The sun sets behind the Manhattan skyline as migrants cook over small fires, shower with buckets and wind down to sleep under the stars.

Ten miles south, men from West Africa and Latin America have been huddling for the night on filthy cobblestone beneath a highway overpass near a Brooklyn migrant shelter. A handful of migrants flatten cardboard boxes and lay out bedsheets at a nearby playground. Others ride subway cars or sleep on sidewalks until the sun rises again.

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The emerging clusters of unsheltered migrants may be an indicator that two of the city’s most vexing challenges — a two-year influx of migrants and the long-standing issue of street homelessness — are becoming intertwined.

The New York Times interviewed more than a dozen migrants this week who said they have been sleeping outside for up to two months, and spotted many more in early-morning visits to areas around existing migrant shelters.

Some migrants said they were kicked out of the shelter system after the city began imposing stricter time limits on stays in late May. Others have chosen to brave the elements voluntarily.

Some said they prefer to sleep outside because they were assigned to far-flung shelters — like a warehouse at Kennedy International Airport — that are miles away from the jobs they have found. Many others abandoned the giant congregate facilities, where the city is housing thousands of people in rows of folding cots, because of conditions some migrants described as unsafe, unruly and unsanitary.

For them, the calculation was simple: They feel safer outside.

“Here we all take care of each other,” said Estefanía Cevallos, 31, who has spent a month sleeping in an orange tent on Randall’s Island with views of Harlem, along with five other Latin American migrants. “It’s not what we expected, but it’s part of the process.”

The migrant crisis has persisted as a political conundrum for Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, turning New York City into a humanitarian refuge for more than 200,000 displaced migrants who have passed through the city’s shelter system since early 2022. The influx has burdened the city budget and escalated quality-of-life concerns among some New Yorkers.

Overwhelmed by the migrant influx, New York City officials are confronting the delicate balancing act of cajoling migrants out of a strained shelter system without increasing street homelessness — a prospect that could give fresh fuel to Republican attacks before the presidential election and fan anti-immigrant sentiment in a city where residents’ views on immigration continue to be tested.

The city recently altered its unique legal obligation to provide a bed to any homeless person, known as the right to shelter. It implemented new restrictions this year to limit the time adult migrants can stay in the shelter system to 30 or 60 days.

The modifications have not led to a large wave of evictions, as some advocates for homeless people originally feared, because many people are being granted extensions. Many have remained in the system because the city recently determined that, by law, it cannot deny shelter to migrants who have applied for asylum or temporary protective status. Those migrants’ immigration statuses entitle them to certain public benefits, such as shelter.

In practice, that means that migrants who show they have submitted asylum applications can stay in the shelter system indefinitely while their cases wind through the courts, which can take years.

But it has become clear that a number of migrants — neither the city nor homeless advocacy groups know how many — are becoming unsheltered after being evicted. They are joining the 4,000-or-so people who sleep on the street and in subways in New York City.

“It’s a question on everybody’s mind,” said Dave Giffen, the executive director of Coalition for the Homeless. “There’s unquestionably more people sleeping in public spaces now.”

The fuller picture of the city’s migrant crisis seems less dire. The number of asylum-seekers in the shelter system declined to 64,300 as of last week, down from a peak of 69,000 in January, in part because of President Joe Biden’s recent border crackdown that caused the number of people crossing the Mexican border to plunge to a three-year low.

The effect is being felt in New York: Roughly 800 migrants entered the city’s shelter system last week, down from 1,200 migrants the week before the Biden policy went into effect, and significantly lower than the city’s one-week peak of 4,300 in May 2023.

Even so, stemming the trickle of migrants sleeping on the street and in parks has become the latest challenge for Adams’ administration.

Despite the city’s sporadic efforts to tear them down, small tent encampments of dozens of migrants have popped up nightly outside the perimeter of a giant migrant shelter on the southwest corner of Randall’s Island, where the city is sheltering more than 3,000 migrants.

The shelter on Randall’s Island — an isolated strip of mostly recreational land in the northern part of the East River, between Queens and Manhattan — is an assortment of tents the size of football fields, where migrants sleep on cots and shower in trailers. The shelter is crowded and has become problematic: Fights and petty thefts are common, and three migrants have been killed this year in a stabbing and a shooting.

The Randall’s Island Park Alliance, a nonprofit that helps maintain the park, has threatened to sue the city over the migrant shelter, erected in August 2023. The shelter occupies 10 acres of public parkland, including four athletic fields once heavily used by children.

Though far removed from residential neighborhoods, the Randall’s Island shelter has become a flashpoint. Police raided the shelter last week to search for contraband after a string of violent incidents, but the search turned up nothing and led to no arrests.

Unease over the violence has led some migrants to seek safety outside the shelter system. Migrants sleep on blankets, under tarps that they stretch over tree branches, or crammed into a colorful mosaic of camping tents some have ordered off Amazon. They pool their money to buy eggs, bread and meat to cook breakfast and stews that they sell or share among themselves.

When park security patrols the area in the morning, they scurry to take the tents down before erecting them again in the evening.

Mamadou Alpha Kaba, 30, from Guinea, said he has been sleeping outside for a month after being evicted because he had not applied for asylum after his immigration papers were stolen in the Randall’s Island shelter. He has made friends with five other African men who were also evicted because they had not filed asylum claims.

His friends sleep in tents and on makeshift mattresses. Kaba sleeps on the ground.

“Like this,” he said in French, pointing to patches of grass and dirt around where he was sitting. “No tent. I can’t afford it.”

The encampment has drawn detractors, including city officials.

“That’s not OK,” Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor leading the city’s migrant response, said Tuesday. “We’re not trying to be heavy-handed, but if you’ve had your time, you’ve had your case management, and you have to leave, you have to really move on.”

A spokesperson for City Hall said that a majority of the migrants who have stayed in the shelter system have eventually moved on, noting the city’s efforts to help thousands apply for asylum and work permits to help them become self-sufficient.

The situation at Randall’s Island is also a visceral reminder of the billions of dollars the city and state are spending to shelter migrants, rankling some residents who see it as wasteful spending of taxpayer money. Barry Bliss, 59, a Bronx resident, thinks about it on his 50-minute walk through Randall’s Island to his job as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“This is what I work for?” he said, pointing at the shelter. “My tax money goes to that? I make $18.50 an hour, but after taxes it’s like $12. So, where does that go? Well, the library I used to go to closed. And then how should I feel about that?”

For some migrants, the city’s streets have become an unanticipated obstacle in their flight from violence and poverty in their home countries.

A group of about 10 men from Mauritania in West Africa have been sleeping under a tree on Steuben Playground in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where three migrants were fatally shot last month near two shelters housing more than 4,000 migrants.

The men wash their clothes in a plastic cement bucket and dry them on a fence. They make heavily sweetened Mauritanian coffee on a camping burner. And they sleep on unfolded cardboard boxes. When it rains, they move their collection of bags and belongings to a spot beneath an overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and sleep there amid the hum of passing cars.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Carlos Hurtado, a Queens resident who parks his car under the expressway every morning and sometimes brings the men bread.

As a light rain fell on Wednesday morning, Ibrahiima, a 46-year-old man from Mauritania, took off his clothes and rinsed himself using a water fountain in Steuben Playground after spending the night under the overpass.

Ibrahiima, who declined to give his last name, said he had felt stunted by life inside the Clinton Hill shelter, growing tired of the sometimes rude staff, dismal food and concerns that he would get sick.

A self-proclaimed artist, musician and poet, he has tried to remain optimistic, despite living on the street for two months.

“Man is called to live the difficult in order to know an easy tomorrow,” he said. “It can’t always be good; you have to be practical. You have to understand that it’s the cost of living because, at the moment, if you’ve chosen to come to the United States, it’s to get back on your feet.”

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