A notorious hotel that was once at the epicenter of New York City’s illegal immigration crisis will begin shutting down its migrant arrival center, signaling how much has changed since migrants first began arriving en masse to the Big Apple under the Biden administration.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday his administration is closing the Roosevelt Hotel’s Asylum Arrival Center and Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center. The decision follows a monumental drop in the number of asylum seekers arriving weekly in the city, a change the mayor attributed to sound policies that managed the crisis.
“Thanks to the successful strategies we implemented in our city and policies we advocated for nationally, we’ll be closing this site that served new arrivals since the height of this crisis in 2023,” Adams announced on social media.
“Our city was receiving 4,000 migrants each week during the height of the crisis, and now we’re down to approximately 350 new arrivals each week,” Adams continued.
While the immigration crisis affected every major city and state during the Biden administration, New York City — the largest sanctuary city in the United States — quickly became the destination of choice for hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving at the southern border. In total, over 230,000 migrants have flocked to the Big Apple since the spring of 2022, costing the city around $7 billion in expenses.
In response to the crisis, New York City officials in 2023 reopened and repurposed the Roosevelt Hotel — which had closed down during the COVID-19 pandemic — into a migrant shelter. More than 75% of the asylum seekers who ended up in the city’s care were processed at the Roosevelt Hotel, Adams said.
The Roosevelt Hotel, which soon became a symbol of the city’s migrant dilemma, also served as a nexus of illegal migrant crime. Dozens of migrants were arrested at the once-swanky hotel in just the first few months it re-opened as a migrant shelter and groups of migrants beat down two New York Police Department officers in May.
The hotel was also the temporary home of Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal migrant who lived at the location in 2023 on the taxpayer dime before taking a “humanitarian” flight provided by city officials to Georgia. Ibarra was later found guilty of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in what authorities described as an attempted rape that became deadly as the 22-year-old was out for a run.
The Roosevelt Hotel is one of many migrant shelters in New York City that will be closing down in the coming months, Adams said Monday. By June, city officials will have shut down a total of 53 emergency migrant shelters.
“The fact that, within a span of year, we are closing 53 sites and shuttering all of our tent-based facilities shows both our continued progress and our ability, when faced with unprecedented challenges, to do what no other city can,” the mayor said in a public statement.
Amid the ongoing migrant crisis in the city, Adams has grown increasingly hawkish on illegal immigration — at least in rhetoric. He’s met with Trump administration border czar Tom Homan on two separate occasions and has voiced support for rolling back sanctuary city policies that restrict cooperation between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Following his second meeting with Homan earlier in February, the mayor declared that he was preparing an executive order that would allow ICE agents onto Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail. However, no executive order has yet to materialize since that announcement.
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