- Migrants in NYC are refusing to move to a warehouse shelter they say doesn’t have sufficient heat.
- Some of the migrants have been camping outside the luxury hotel where they’d been staying.
- Other migrants — and NYC Mayor Eric Adams — say conditions at the new shelter are good.
Dozens of migrants have been protesting for days outside of a New York City luxury hotel where they’d been sheltering because they refuse to move to a barracks-style warehouse facility in Brooklyn that some say does not have sufficient heat or enough bathrooms or showers, according to multiple reports.
The migrants — all of them single men and mostly asylum seekers from Latin America — have been staying in private rooms at the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen for weeks and in some cases, months, the New York Daily News reported. But over the weekend, the city began kicking them out to make room for migrant families, the Daily News reported.
The city has instead offered the migrants shelter at a facility near the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. But, unlike the Watson Hotel, the Brooklyn shelter houses a thousand beds packed closely together in one massive room with no privacy, the Daily News reported.
After being given a tour of the Brooklyn facility on Tuesday, many migrants chose instead to sleep outside the Watson Hotel in protest, saying the warehouse is freezing and doesn’t offer enough bathrooms, the Daily News reported.
“We do not want to go to Brooklyn Terminal,” one migrant, Oscar Veliz, told ABC7. “I was there yesterday. There was no heat; it’s cold.”
Advocates from the Legal Aid Society, South Bronx Mutual Aid, and other organizations have posted up outside the Watson Hotel in support of the migrants, the Daily News reported.
Temperatures in New York reached as low as 31 degrees Fahrenheit this week as the migrants and advocates camped outside, according to data from the National Weather Service. The National Weather Service predicted that it could get as low as 26 degrees on Wednesday.
Some migrants currently staying at the Brooklyn shelter told CBS2 that, although it’s not as nice as the Watson Hotel, the shelter’s conditions are “very good.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams also said that conditions at the facility are sufficient.
“I just had to come here when I started hearing all the rumors about it was too cold,” Adams said in a video shared on Instagram from the Brooklyn warehouse. “It’s warm inside. About the food not being there, you know healthy food is present.”
