New York Begins a New Wave of Evictions From Migrant Shelters

New York City will begin a new push to evict migrants from its shelter system on Wednesday as the city enters a more aggressive phase in its effort to ease the strain that the migrant crisis has placed on the city’s budget and shelters.

The first wave of evictions will affect adult migrants who were given 30-day notices a month ago as part of the city’s push to enforce stricter time limits on shelter stays. Adult migrants who wish to stay longer can receive an extension if the city determines they meet one of several exceptions.

The new policy, which goes into effect on a rolling basis, will initially apply to about 250 migrants this week, though it remains unclear how many of those people will be kicked out and how many will be granted extensions. As the rules are phased in, they will eventually cover all 15,000 adult migrants that the city is paying to house in an array of hotels, tent dormitories and other buildings.

The administration of Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is betting that the threat of evictions will incentivize migrants to find other housing arrangements and help reduce the overall shelter population of 65,000, most of whom are families with children. Officials are also seeking to make space for the hundreds of migrants still arriving from the southern border each week.

“I don’t know when the crisis is going to be over,” Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor leading the city’s migrant response, said on Tuesday. “We are trying to exit people out of the system so that we can have some stability and then set up something that is more permanent.”

But the looming evictions have raised concerns among migrants, legal service providers and advocates for the homeless, who fear that the policy will simply force migrants into homelessness. They argue that one or two months is not enough time for recently arrived migrants — many of them impoverished and without a network of support in the United States — to secure steady income and find a more permanent place to stay, especially in an unaffordable city.