Migrants now living in cars outside NYC hotel amid space crunch with area dubbed ‘New Ellis Island’
NY Post
The dire shortage of shelter space during the Big Apple migrant crunch has forced some asylum seekers out onto the street and into cars parked in plain view outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan — which one official dubbed “a new Ellis Island,” a new report said.
At least four migrants who said they were booted from city shelters were spotted sleeping in cars in recent weeks just feet from the hotel that serves as the city’s main intake site for thousands of asylum seekers from the US border, Gothamist reported Wednesday.
“There’s no place in the hotel,” Venezuelan migrant Hugo Rafael Ramirez, 22, told the outlet. “It’s full.”
Another migrant, Yovani Nieves, said the white Mitsubishi Lancer he bought while working in Canada died when he pulled up to the hotel — and has been his home since the hotel turned him away.
“They’re just helping the people who have families, little kids,” said Nieves, 23, who is also from Venezuela. “If you’re a single man they kick you out, send you to the street.”
At least two of the cars — which were first spotted by Gothamist on Christmas Day — were still there on Wednesday, one of them with a flat tire as migrants came in and out of the vehicles.
