Each weekday morning, commuters stream from Grand Central Terminal to begin another day at the center of the biggest and richest city in America.
Those exiting the east side pass by the Yale Club across the street and continue on to buildings housing billion-dollar hedge funds and big-shot law firms.
But in the past few days, those who head uptown have suddenly encountered a scene that disgraces every level of government, from the mayor to the governor to the president. As many as 200 migrants are camped on scraps of cardboard outside the Roosevelt Hotel, the bright sunshine making them look all the more worn and weary from the long and often harrowing journeys that should have brought them to at least a bed and a shower.
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“WELCOME TO THE ARRIVAL CENTER,” reads a smudged message on a whiteboard propped outside the hotel’s main entrance.
More than 90,000 migrants have arrived in the city since the spring of 2020. A good number of them—as many as eight busloads a day—were sent north from the southern border by Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, whose idea of leadership is to seek political points by turning a big blue city’s decency against itself.
For decades, New York has been under a legal obligation—arising from a 1979 lawsuit by an advocate for the homeless—to provide shelter to those in need. Its immediate ability to cope with such an influx has maxed out and neither the feds nor the state are coming to the rescue even though the city pays both far more in taxes than it receives in services and benefits.
Last Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams met with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose idea of assistance was to offer to send a single staff member to New York. That paltry gesture seemed all the more insulting as Adams inspected the scene outside the Roosevelt Hotel on Saturday and again on Sunday.
But, rather than seize the situation as a challenge in the way of a great leader, Adams simply quit.
“It’s not going to get any better,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “From this moment on, it’s downhill. There is no more room.”
He also told reporters: “Eventually this is going to come to a neighborhood near you, and it is—91,000 people.”
Adams offered a strategy that is essentially a surrender at a time when he should be just beginning to fight. That is what a great mayor does when things get tough. He instead sounded like he could have been just anyone in City Hall.
“We need to localize this madness,” Adams said as if that statement were not in itself nuts.
On Wednesday, the prime locale of the madness continued to be the sidewalks around the Roosevelt Hotel, a 1,200-room facility owned by Pakistan International Airlines that is being leased by the city at $200 per room per night.
The facility is being run in conjunction with DocGo, which was hired by the city for COVID testing and vaccination services during the pandemic. The New York Times has reported that the company now has a $432 million contract to process migrants and bus them elsewhere, much as Abbott did, though within the state and without partisan political intent. The sidewalk was nonetheless crowded with people who had slept there for another night.
“We are currently at capacity,” read the smudged whiteboard outside.
The board further advised, “Now serving ticket #’s 24552366 -2452304, 2452366c- 2452363, 2452365-2452302 Your tickets saves your place in line. We will provide briefings at 2 pm, 6 pm, 9 pm.”
But for all the city’s resources and all the millions paid to DocGo, a 31-year-old migrant from Mauritania named Savi Khalil said that he and the others around him had not received tickets. He further reported that there had been no briefings in the two days he had been there.
“Nobody has numbers,” he lamented. “Nobody tells us anything.”
The government is doing little to help the migrants camped out behind barricades in Midtown Manhattan.
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesHe said he arrived in New York in May, after a 14-day journey, first by plane to Nicaragua, then by car, bus, and boat to Mexico. He proceeded by bus and foot to the Arizona border, where he sought asylum. He was asked where he wanted to go and he said New York and stayed for a time at a hotel near Kennedy Airport. He went to Ohio a month ago in search of a living wage but did not have a work permit and returned to New York on Tuesday only to learn that the hotel near Kennedy Airport was full. He was sent to the Roosevelt Hotel and told to wait his turn in line outside. It proved to be just a mass of fellow migrants from which a few were periodically picked, seemingly at random.
“There is no line,” he said.
He managed to call home, and told them he was doing well—a lie meant to reassure his loved ones.
“I’m trying to hide this, the way that I’m living right now,” he said. “I’m telling them I’m OK, I’m in a shelter, there is no problem. I don’t want to make them worried about me.”
He was wearing a knit hat with an “NY” logo that a friend had given him and he said he still preferred the surrounding metropolis with its multicultural bustle to where he had been in Ohio.
“New York is still better I think,” he said. “The only thing it misses is a place to sleep. Because we cannot sleep on the street, as it’s tough.”
The sidewalk on West 45th Street was the only place for him to sleep on Tuesday night and promised to still be the only place in the nights to come.
As of 9:30 Wednesday morning, no level of government had arrived to assist him and the fellow migrants who sat hemmed in by police barricades. They looked dispirited and exhausted at the start of a day that had people across the city cheerily remarking on the fine weather after a stultifying heat wave.
The cops and security cops on hand were only there to maintain order—their idea of which was to keep away reporters who wanted to report on what was essentially a humanitarian crisis unfolding on a sidewalk just off Madison Avenue.
The very least that the government should have done, but did not, was performed by a dozen private citizens wearing T-shirts stenciled with “NO ONE GOES HUNGRY IN OUR WORLD.” They were from the nonprofit Migrant Kitchen Initiative and they began distributing just under 300 hot meals freshly prepared at the group’s kitchen in Long Island City.
“It’s restaurant chefs,” Jaclinn Tanney said of the cooks who made the food.
One of her crew of actual do-gooders handed Khalil a covered container labeled “Refried beans, tomato sauce, turmeric rice, and mixed vegetables. Allergies: None.” He opened it and even from three feet away, the aroma turned that patch of sidewalk momentarily sublime. He ate a plastic fork full.
“Good,” he reported.
The day briefly turned as nice for Khalil and the other migrants as it was for the rest of the city. Tanney and her crew departed having set an example for our do-too-little leaders to follow.
“We’ll be back for sure,” she said.
The shame of the situation—and the shame of Adams and his elected colleagues—is that Khalil and the other migrants will probably still be there.
