NYC officials, advocates demand end to Mayor Eric Adams’ migrant shelter limits

NEW YORK — Dozens of City Council members and advocates called on Mayor Eric Adams Monday to halt shelter stay limits for migrant families, with Speaker Adrienne Adams slamming the policy as “counterproductive and cruel.”

“The negative effects will ripple throughout our communities and schools,” she said at a rally outside a Midtown church.

At least 4,800 families have received eviction notices so far. The 60-day notices started going out late last year, with the first families getting the boot on Jan. 9. As the policy gains momentum, around 100 families are expected to be required to leave their shelters every day.

Venezuela asylum seeker Reina Alvarez and her four children, including three-year-old son Mathias, recently had to move from Queens to Manhattan under the policy.

“My experience of the shelters is changing one day after the next, and it’s putting our children’s education in jeopardy,” she said in Spanish.

“All we want is a better life.”

Mayor Adams has maintained that the policy is necessary move to free up space in the city’s strained shelter system and encourage migrants to move out on their own.

But the policy has received intense backlash. Monday’s rally was just the latest in a string of calls for the mayor to reverse it; the policy is currently under investigation by City Comptroller Brad Lander.

Council Member Diana Ayala had strong words for the policy: “Our mayor is a slumlord,” she said.

Advocates and elected officials have raised concerns from the moment the first notices went out about families’ well-being, education and ability to build a new life in New York as they’re subjected to frequent moves.

Single adults are also subject to a similar policy limiting their stays to 30 days in a shelter. When their stays are up, they must reapply for shelter at an East Village site where, for weeks, lines have stretched around the block as migrants wait as long as a week to get a new bed.

“This action actively hurts people, uprooting youth and families with children, forcing them to navigate an unnecessarily burdensome and bureaucratic process to receive a new shelter placement,” Speaker Adams said at the rally.

Alvarez, 36, a single mother, arrived in New York five months ago. Her kids are scattered across three schools, and it’s a full- time job just taking care of them and navigating the city’s complicated bureaucracy as she gathers her paperwork for asylum and work permits.

“It bothers me and stresses me out that I have to worry that every 60 days I have to change to another shelter, which means that I have to change my children’s school, which affects them drastically,” she said.

Mayor Adams has repeatedly said the influx of thousands of migrants from the southern border is the worst crisis the city is currently facing — and recently credited a much rosier budget prediction in part on cost savings from the shelter limits.

During a previous budget announcement in November — also when the first family shelter stay notices started going out — Adams announced that he wanted to slash migrant spending by 20%. Citing the migrant crisis, the mayor announced a requirement for every city agency to cut budgets by 5%, on top of other cuts.

“It’s cruel and inhumane to remove children out of schools that are providing them with the basic services and with the community that they need, now more than ever,” Ayala said.

Ayala acknowledged a new policy from Adams administration that gives pregnant migrants in their third trimester and women with newborn babies a break from shelter evictions until their babies are six months old, as first reported by The City.

But that’s not enough, Ayala said. Moving from shelter to shelter in a still-unfamiliar city with children with young children and all their belongings in tow is an enormous burden for these families, she said.

“What is the goal here other than to break down the moral character of these folks?” she asked.

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