When the first buses carrying migrants from the southern border arrived in Manhattan two years ago, it seemed little more than a political stunt. If New York truly wanted to be a sanctuary city, then the Republican governor of Texas was happy to oblige by sending busloads of migrants its way.
No one could have predicted what would follow.
Just over 225,000 migrants have entered New York City since 2022. More than $6 billion has been spent on a hodgepodge of shelters that morphed into the largest system of emergency housing for migrants in the country.
Hundreds of hotels and vacant office buildings hit hard by the pandemic found second lives as converted shelters. Ball fields and warehouses were turned into barrack-style dormitories to house migrants from places including Venezuela, Peru, Morocco and Sudan.
The changes went beyond the struggle to house people. Politics changed, too. New York became embroiled in the national anger over immigration that helped Donald J. Trump recapture the presidency.
The president-elect increased his vote count in a city previously hostile to him, with the influx prompting Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, to reconsider one of the city’s bedrock principles: that it must provide a bed to anyone in need of shelter.
Street protests became common at the opening of new shelters, with opponents citing violent episodes at some of them and frequent disarray on sidewalks outside.
But even with the migrant crisis so visibly burdening the city, much of it was still hidden from public view: the teeming existence inside the shelters.
Beginning in February, The New York Times was granted exclusive access into eight New York City migrant shelters to document life there, following the journeys of five families and four other asylum seekers from seven different countries. Their odysseys make up a unique chapter in New York’s history, heightening the tensions that typically emerge with each new wave of immigrants, even as they replenish and diversify the city.
A number of New Yorkers have been alienated by the migrants’ visible presence: mothers with children selling candy on subways; men with scooters loitering on already crowded sidewalks — all recipients of public resources that, critics say, could be spent elsewhere.
Yet many inside the shelters are filled with gratitude for a city that has given them shelter, a bedside table, a bare cot. And they are determined to get out, to become self-sufficient and to contribute to the country they escaped to.
What comes next, for them and the city, is uncertain.
Mr. Trump has pledged to aggressively secure the U.S.-Mexico border and begin mass deportations — measures that may have a profound effect on the city’s migrants and have many on edge.
The number of migrants entering New York, in fact, has been steadily declining for months, leading to the recent closure of some shelters.
But the largest city in the country is continuing to house some 55,000 migrants — the size of a small city. The story that began with the arrival of buses from Texas two years ago is still shaping New York, leading to disruption and anger and charity and grace.
And it continues to unfold each day, mostly out of sight, inside the lobby of a Midtown hotel.
The New Ellis Island
At first, there was chaos.
Those early buses were followed by many others, as migrants arrived by cars and planes and any way they could. What began as a publicity stunt quickly became a crisis.
City officials responded with stopgap measures: tents erected on Randall’s Island, hotels converted into shelters, a cruise terminal turned into housing.
In May 2023, they tried to impose more order. The city struck a multimillion-dollar deal with the then-shuttered Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal to convert it into an arrival center, the first stop for migrants disembarking buses from the border.
The century-old hotel quickly got a nickname: the new Ellis Island.
As the city struggled to find enough beds that summer, hundreds of migrants briefly slept outside the hotel — a widely shared image that illustrated the depth of the crisis.
Operations have been smoother since then. The long-faded lobby is filled with chatter in Spanish, French and Arabic as disoriented and often penniless migrants are interviewed by contracted workers and undergo health screenings before they are finally assigned to a shelter.
The city also set up a center to help migrants file applications for asylum and for temporary work permits.
Most have come from Latin America: Venezuelans make up 35 percent of those the city has sheltered since 2022; followed by Ecuadoreans, about 18 percent; and Colombians, about 9 percent. But migrants have also arrived from as far as Afghanistan, Angola, Eritrea, Iran and even Russia.
Many were dispatched to shelters elsewhere in the city. A few were sent upstate as part of the mayor’s decompression strategy. Some ended up staying at the Roosevelt in one of its 1,025 rooms.
On a recent evening, Anastasiia Antipkina, 37, balanced four boxes of cold lasagna from the makeshift cafeteria in the hotel’s former restaurant, which once served burgers and martinis.
She walked down the musty hallway on the 11th floor and into the room that her family of four has called home for nearly a year since leaving Russia.
Viktoriia, 15, was already doing her geometry homework on one of the two full-size beds the parents share with their two children. A damp smell still lingered from mildew that had been plastered over.
Ivan, 3, always energetic, chased down a remote-controlled toy in the tight quarters as the children’s father, Dimitrii Tsesarev, 39, tried to decompress after his shift as an electrician in Brooklyn.
The family is among more than 3,300 Russians who have passed through the city’s shelter system.
They, too, crossed the southern border, getting to Mexico via flights from Belarus, Georgia and Israel after clandestinely leaving their home in Kaliningrad, a small Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.
The family said they fled Russia when President Vladimir V. Putin began to crack down on dissent against the war in Ukraine. In search of proper medical care for Ms. Antipkina’s autoimmune disease, they ended up in New York in May 2023.
They are determined to lay down roots in the city and possibly find a place in Harlem, but have been unable to save enough money for rent because of the high costs of child care.
Even so, they are making inroads.
Viktoriia has won two Student of the Month awards and resumed her passion for rowing, joining a club that practices in the Harlem River. Her mother has been juggling three jobs, including a remote marketing job that requires her to begin working at 2 a.m., perched on the bathroom toilet while her family sleeps.
The First Hotels to Welcome Migrants
The first hotel to convert into a migrant shelter was the Row NYC, once a four-star hotel in Times Square that advertised itself as “more New York than New York.”
The hotel was repurposed in late 2022, when Mr. Adams declared that the population in traditional homeless shelters had hit a “breaking point” after absorbing more than 16,000 asylum seekers. And the city was obligated to house homeless people, including new migrants, under a longstanding legal mandate known as right to shelter.
Desperate for more space, the city negotiated an initial $40 million deal with the Row, still in financial straits from the pandemic. The hotel received $190 a night per room to house migrant families with children in its 1,331 rooms.
As the pace of migrant arrivals began to exceed 2,000 each week last year, more than 100 hotels were turned into shelters.
The contracts with the city — totaling up to $1.04 billion — became a boon for hotels recovering from sluggish tourism after the pandemic, filling a critical need for migrant beds even as they created a shortage of rooms for some travelers.
Nearly two dozen hotels in Midtown Manhattan were removed from the tourist pipeline, transforming them into unlikely refuges in plain sight. Some have drawn outsize attention for robberies in Times Square this year that the police have attributed to a small group of migrants who live in the hotels.
On a cold afternoon in March, a Colombian family brushed past fellow migrants smoking outside the Watson Hotel on West 57th Street. They entered its transformed lobby, flashing their shelter identifications to a guard behind a wooden counter where guests once asked about theater tickets.
They walked down a second-floor hallway where one hotel room was being used to stockpile free baby supplies, past fliers explaining how migrants could get MetroCards and enroll children in school.
It was the family’s second week in New York, but the parents were already diligently applying for work permits and jobs. Still, Ingrid Henao, the mother, could not shake a feeling of guilt that their stay in the hotel, tucked between the skyscrapers of Billionaire’s Row, was being funded by American taxpayers.
They were getting free laundry service, their clothes sometimes returned folded to their room, as well as housekeeping. Uncomfortable, Ms. Henao would sometimes deter maids from cleaning the room.
“We’re getting spoiled,” Ms. Henao said. “This was never my idea. I didn’t leave my country under the conditions we fled for this.”
The family abandoned Colombia following threats from a gang that, they said, demanded protection money shortly after the parents opened a small restaurant in the city of Pereira. The parents sold their home and traveled here with their two children and little else.
Over the past year, the parents have cycled through gigs at restaurants, with William, the father, baking empanadas and selling peanuts on the subway, until they landed steadier jobs as cleaners. The children, Luis, 11, and Antonella, 4, are enrolled in school, and the parents even married in City Hall after 15 years together — a popular move among unmarried couples looking to streamline their asylum cases.
From Vacant Office Space to Shelter
By June 2023, migrants had pushed the total number of homeless people in shelters past 100,000 for the first time in city history.
Hotels and traditional shelters could not keep pace with asylum seekers drawn to the promise of free lodging. The mayor, clamoring for federal help, considered housing migrants in cruise ships, school gyms and churches.
The city also turned to empty office buildings, issuing no-bid emergency contracts to real estate developers and other contractors, some of whom were politically connected to the mayor.
In an industrial stretch of Long Island City in Queens, developers had converted a warehouse into an office space with modern floor-to-ceiling windows in 2020, but the building struggled to find tenants after the pandemic.
In 2023, the city struck a deal to turn it into a shelter to house up to 1,000 migrant adults, or “guests,” as staff members prefer to call those in their care.
The ground floor was outfitted with booths offering legal and medical services. A lounge was set up with couches and televisions, not far from the cafeteria where migrants pick up free meals, like a breakfast of apples, bagels and milk.
Elimane Tambedou, 29, has been living on the fourth floor, sleeping on one of the hundreds of cots with thin top sheets where men rest just a few feet from each other, their belongings stuffed in suitcases by their beds.
But he is rarely inside, except when he goes in to pray, clutching his prayer beads over a small rug, the only belongings he brought from Senegal, a country that represents 5 percent of migrants in shelters.
He usually sits in the sidewalk outside, rereading an agriculture text book or an African book that promises the secrets to financial prosperity. Or he stares at pictures of all he left behind: the eggplant fields he farmed, the chickens and turkey he raised.
“Inside, if I’m alone, I’m thinking about other things, my thoughts, the problems I had with my stepmother, and why I can’t get along with my father,” he said in French. “My former life.”
Twice a week, he walks to LaGuardia Community College for English classes. And some evenings, he plays soccer with other migrants at a nearby field. Its use is now in question after a recent clash with a local charity league.
A Contentious Haven by the Brooklyn Waterfront
From Staten Island to the Bronx, tensions have flared at a broader scale wherever the city has opened a new shelter — among everyday New Yorkers, activists who denounced living conditions at congregate facilities and parents upset over the use of school gyms.
Such was the case in Brooklyn, where the city began paying at least $20 million a year to the owner of a remodeled office complex by the Brooklyn Navy Yard to house 3,000 migrants, one of the largest shelters in the city.
Quality-of-life complaints surged among neighbors near the shelter on Hall Street, with a string of violent incidents — including a shooting that police investigated as being gang-related — prompting demands to reduce its size.
Inside a bare space that was to become a co-working facility, thousands of men now sleep in cots. Wi-Fi was installed, as well as foot-washing stations for Muslim migrants and glow-in-the-dark light strips so they can find their way when lights go out at 10 p.m.
One night in March, Aldryn Zea began a meticulous ritual he had honed bouncing from shelter to shelter.
He sanitized his assigned mattress with a scented cleaner, bundling his toiletries inside a towel. The fuzzy Grinch slippers went beneath the cot, next to his boots and construction helmet. His immigration papers were stashed under the mattress.
Mr. Zea, 34, said he fled Venezuela more than a year earlier, after being beaten by a paramilitary group for participating in protests against the country’s government.
He was briefly able to afford a $600-a-month Bronx apartment after securing a construction job that paid him $22.50 an hour. But the work slowed during the winter, and he reluctantly returned to the system — a common path among migrants trying to make it in an unaffordable city.
“I want to aspire to more,” Mr. Zea said in Spanish. “I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”
He went to sleep thinking of the partner and baby he left behind. In a few months, he would be greeting them with balloons at Newark Airport.
Two floors up, Roger Miranda, a fellow Venezuelan, is among the oldest in the system at age 67; less than 1 percent of migrants are over 65.
He has no money or relatives here, but the shelter staff soon discovered that the diminutive, ever-polite man was also a consummate artist, single-mindedly focused on his craft.
A painter and art professor with two doctorate degrees, Mr. Miranda embarked on the treacherous hike through Latin America alone — “and with God,” he says — to cap his lifelong “investigation of universal art.”
“Reaching the United States was a matter of life or death,” Mr. Miranda said in October. “I was going to die in anonymity.”
The shelter allowed Mr. Miranda to set up a small studio by his cot. He spends his days painting canvases, using donated paints and brushes, as well as materials he buys with cash other migrants have given him.
For him, unlike others, leaving the shelter is not top of mind.
Tent City on an Airport Runway
By October 2023, as 600 migrants arrived each day, officials resorted to a less desirable option: giant tent dormitories, the types used during disaster relief missions, built on a former airfield in a remote corner of Brooklyn.
The city constructed the dormitories at Floyd Bennett Field despite protests and criticism that the location was unsuitable and isolated. It was in a flood zone by Jamaica Bay and 25 miles from Midtown Manhattan.
Nonetheless, a mini city sprouted from the old tarmac.
Four gargantuan tents were carved up into a maze of cubicles with cots, divided by seven-foot-high partitions meant to offer a measure of privacy for 500 families. Three other tents house a mail room, caseworkers and a cafeteria, where Venezuelan toddlers rub shoulders with Asian children over blaring salsa music.
Amid the cacophony of activity, a quiet family of three from Ecuador has languished there since March, inside a spartan cubicle. They share one cellphone and the Bible they carried to the United States.
The Bible, according to Alberto Guambiango, the father, was “the only thing that wasn’t stolen” during their journey.
Hailing from the Andean highlands, where they sold colorful textiles before fleeing violence and plummeting sales, the family has felt jarringly out of place in New York.
On his first day of work, Mr. Guambiango got lost for five hours in the subway, arriving at the shelter at sunrise, trembling and scared. He has since memorized his two-hour commute to the restaurant on Roosevelt Island where he works as a dishwasher, using his earnings to repay their $18,000 debt to family members who paid smugglers to get them across the border.
Ecuadoreans are the second largest nationality in shelters, but the family is also Indigenous, making them a minority within the city’s Hispanics. Their first language is not Spanish, but Kichwa, a Quechuan dialect — and the source of stinging marginalization.
After Mr. Trump’s election, the family began looking for an apartment to rent with other migrant families, amid rumors of looming immigration raids. Earlier this month, the city announced it would close the complex before Mr. Trump’s inauguration and relocate migrants to other facilities, following concerns that the president-elect would target the shelter, which is on federal land.
“We are not calm,” Nicolaza Criollo, the mother, said in November. “People are desperate to get out.”
Down the hallway, a Chinese family — one of only a handful in a shelter dominated by Spanish speakers — turned their compact quarters into a colorful home.
Its walls are plastered with heart-shaped cutouts and bright watercolors, the artistic creations of their 3-year-old, Huang. Her parents obtained a mattress to supplant the rigid military-style cots, and built a canopy from bedsheets. The room overflows with Chinatown-bought snacks.
Practicing Christians from the Fujian province, the family said they fled last October and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in January to escape religious persecution.
“In China, we often feel uncomfortable and anxious in our own community, but in the U.S. we have more freedom,” Huang Jiliang, 33, the father, said in Mandarin. “We can say whatever we want to say, and there is a sense of ease and comfort.”
Unlike the Ecuadoreans, the Chinese family managed to move out of the shelter in July after a six-month stay. They are renting a shared apartment in Flushing, Queens, where Mr. Jiliang secured a job installing air-conditioners, while his wife, Guo Yanxia, cares for Huang.
They also found a church to worship in.
Leaving the Shelter System
More than 170,000 of the 225,000 migrants the city has sheltered since early 2022 have left the system.
Some were able to find permanent housing, after staying in shelters for months or as long as a year. Thousands were evicted after the city began limiting stays to 30 or 60 days for single adults. Others abandoned New York, disillusioned by work prospects or lured away by better opportunities elsewhere.
About 80 percent of those who remain are families with children — about 42,000 in all — complicating efforts to close shelters without forcing them to the street. They are allowed to stay for up to 60 days before having to move out and reapply to extend their stay.
Some of the families are single mothers with children, who are particularly hamstrung by the lack of easy access to child care that would allow them to work.
The conundrum became an all-consuming stress for Jennifer Escalona, 36, a Venezuelan mother who arrived with her two children in May after escaping an abusive partner in Denver shortly after migrating from Venezuela last year.
She enrolled her children in school, but had no one to leave them with during summer break, limiting her search for a job. The family rarely strayed from their one-bed room at a Holiday Inn in Long Island City, where 900 migrants live. Eighteen other hotels nearby have also been converted to shelters.
With only a few dollars in her wallet, Ms. Escalona felt especially helpless when relatives in Venezuela reached out for money. She would hide in the bathroom to cry out of view from her children.
“I’m not a woman who goes out to the street to panhandle,” she said. “I didn’t come to live from the government for two years.”
Despite her gratitude for the free housing, she grew increasingly paranoid inside the shelter. She described a sense of constant surveillance, lamented restrictions on bringing food to her room and speculated that the stale shelter meals had made her sick. All are recurring gripes among shelter residents.
She also began to feel unwelcome in New York, where she said Venezuelans were being stereotyped because of crimes that a clutch of recent migrants committed.
“We’re not all the same,” she said. “We can’t all pay for the acts of one person.”
Eager for a change, she accepted the city’s standing offer for paid transportation back to Denver, an effort to decompress the crowded shelter system. More than 47,000 migrants have left on city-paid flights and buses.
City officials have sought to differentiate the one-way tickets from the Texas bus program that sparked the influx in New York, but the parallels are unmistakable.
A Refuge on Randall’s Island
Few shelters were perceived as negatively as one far from view of most New Yorkers: a tent dormitory built on Randall’s Island, a mostly recreational strip of land on the East River.
The football-field-sized tents have experienced what critics argue are all the adverse effects of the migrant crisis: a deadly shooting, a stabbing, a police raid and homeless encampments. The shelter’s presence also riled New Yorkers who used the athletic fields the tents were built on.
Past the metal detectors and phone bank for international calls, the mega-shelter houses adult migrants sleeping in endless rows of cots, as if they had just been displaced by a natural disaster.
But the tent complex, which at one point housed more than 3,000 people, is perhaps the starkest example of mass human displacement, where traces of humanity are displayed despite less-than-ideal conditions.
Few embodied that humanity more than Moussa Sall, a charismatic 33-year-old from Mauritania in West Africa, who became the shelter’s de facto mayor during his seven months living there.
His command of five languages — Arabic, English, French, Pulaar and Wolof — turned him into a sought-after translator among African migrants frantic to communicate with the staff about their legal, housing and work issues.
But it was his willingness to assist other migrants — despite his own struggles — that transformed him into one of the most well-known personalities at the shelter.
“I’m Muslim, and it’s not just for the pride,” he said after helping lead a Muslim prayer service for migrants in April. “Somebody helped me, too. When I’m helping, I’m happy.”
He said he left Mauritania last year at the behest of his mother after the police killed his brother, and spent $9,000 to reach the southern border by flying through the Ivory Coast, Turkey, Spain and Colombia.
He slept in the subway when he arrived in New York City before entering the shelter system and languishing on Randall’s Island for months, unable to find a job without a work permit. Often, he could not stomach the food at the shelter and would go days without eating until his family sent him money to buy chicken and rice at a deli across the river.
After months of stagnation, Mr. Sall had a brief breakthrough.
He got a job cooking at a halal restaurant in Brooklyn where he was paid $13 an hour, below the minimum wage, six days a week, earning enough to send some money to his mother.
He was moved to another Brooklyn shelter, began searching for an apartment and hired an immigration lawyer. But he recently quit his job after being treated unfairly, he said, and is languishing again.
In any case, Randall’s Island will soon have no need for a de facto mayor: With the number of migrant arrivals continuing to decline, the city announced that it will close the tent shelter by February.
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