Mayor Eric Adams has announced the city’s plan to close both the Asylum Seeker Arrival Center and Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center located at The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan by June 2025. More than 173,000 of the 232,000 migrant arrivals since May 2023 have been processed through the hotel, where the city officials connected migrants with services including work authorization and asylum case management.
“While we’re not done caring for those who come into our care,” Adams said in a statement, “today marks another milestone in demonstrating the immense progress we have achieved in turning the corner on an unprecedented international humanitarian effort.” There are around 45,000 migrants in the city’s care as of January 2025, down from 69,000 the previous year, staying in 182 migrant shelters across the city, down from a peak of 219.
The announcement is part of a broader push from the Adams administration to close 53 other migrant shelters by June as well. The roughly 2,000-bed tent camp for migrants at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn was dismantled by city workers in January, while another on Randall’s Island with 3,000 beds will be removed by the end of the month. While many sites are closing, new ones are also to take in those moved from other facilities. A 2,200-bed shelter being built in the South Bronx is meant to take in single men from the Randall’s Island tent shelter after it closes, much to the chagrin of local officials. “You’re just dumping everything that’s bad into the South Bronx, and it is wrong,” City Councilmember Rafael Salamanca Jr. told Gothamist last month concerning the plan, as his district is already home to 60 shelters serving non-migrant homeless people.
The news of the closures also comes at a particularly contentious time for the Adams administration regarding immigration policy. The mayor is broadly believed to have arranged a quid pro quo with the Trump administration, whereby he has allegedly agreed to go along with the president’s mass deportation policy in exchange for the federal corruption charges against him being dropped. Seven federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, D.C. have resigned over the move, and four of the Adams’ deputy mayors – key officials in any mayoral administration – have announced their desire to leave City Hall as well over the alleged deal, expecting to leave by the end of March as Adams finds replacements.
A joint statement from the deputy mayors stated that they were stepping down “to stay faithful to the oaths [they] swore to New Yorkers and [their] families.” One of the officials is Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom, who has led the city’s response in addressing the migrant crisis. While Williams-Isom had previously stated the city’s goal was to eventually house migrants through the Department of Homeless Services without using resources from other city agencies, the tens of thousands of migrants in the city’s care are well beyond the roughly 1,000 beds at DHS’s disposal.
