Mayor Adams gives few specifics on NYC shelter plan as migrant arrivals climb to 700 per day

Mayor Eric Adams and his administration offered few details on Wednesday about how New York City plans to address the daily arrival of hundreds of migrants — a long-anticipated crisis that has the administration scrambling to find emergency shelter sites and pleading for help from federal and state officials.

“We're going to look at everything,” Adams said at an unrelated morning press conference in Harlem. “And as we roll out what we're doing, we will announce, but right now, everything.”

The lack of clarity comes amid an evolving and increasingly desperate response that has concerned some elected officials and advocates. Adams has reportedly been looking at a wide range of locations to use as makeshift shelters for newly arrived migrants, including municipal buildings, empty offices and even Rikers Island, the notorious city jail.

The mayor on Tuesday said the city was looking at a list of 20 public school gyms to use as emergency sites.

The number of migrants arriving daily has increased from around 200 to as many as 700, according to city officials. All told, there are 41,500 migrants currently under the city’s care.

The administration has so far set up 150 shelter sites, including in hotels, but is under pressure to find more locations. A plan to send migrants to hotels in suburban counties fell short after Rockland County obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the measure.

Principals at 10 schools were informed over the weekend that migrants may use their gyms as emergency shelter sites, according to the teachers’ union, which has pushed back on the use of schools.

But on Wednesday, roughly 75 migrants were unexpectedly moved from a Coney Island school. City Councilmember Justin Brannan said he was informed that the city no longer intended to use that specific gym.

During a City Hall briefing, two administration officials would not explain why the individuals were relocated and whether other school gyms were being reconsidered.

“I’m not going to speak to any specific locations right now,” said Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom.

The deputy mayor was joined at the news conference by Dr. Ted Long, a senior official in the city’s public hospital network who has been involved in the emergency response.

Long provided some details about an arrival center at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which will serve as the first point of access to information and services for migrants beginning on Friday.

Both declined to answer reporters’ questions about any of the locations that have been floated, saying only that everything was on the table.

Adams did not attend the briefing.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is also facing increasing pressure to address the crisis, traveled to Washington, D.C. on Wednesday for a series of meetings on migrant arrivals, including one with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and a handful of fellow New York Democrats.

Hochul also spoke with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, according to her office.

In a letter last week to President Joe Biden, Hochul asked him to open up a federally operated housing facility for migrants at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former military airfield now operated by the National Park Service.

She also requested that the president make use of military installations across the Northeast for the same purpose.

In an interview with Spectrum News in Washington, Hochul said she’s also looking at all state properties as a potential housing solution, including SUNY campuses.

But she acknowledged SUNY facilities come with their own challenges, since students would be returning for the fall semester in August.

When asked what would happen then, she replied, “So, these are some of the questions we’re asking right now. But we are looking at every possible property in the state of New York to help have a relief valve for the city of New York.”

Hochul said she’s working with Adams’ office to find hotels in communities that are willing to be “welcoming” to migrants.

“We’re helping him find places that are welcoming, and there are plenty of those,” she said. “It’s just sometimes you identify a community that wants them, and you have to find the hotel and the space.”

Meanwhile, Adams has grown increasingly impatient in his rhetoric regarding what he describes as the federal government’s inaction on the migrant crisis, and the unwillingness of other localities to assist as more people enter the city at a rapid pace.

The Democratic mayor has joined Republicans and others across the state in calling on President Joe Biden to issue an emergency declaration as the city struggles to meet the basic needs of new arrivals.

Adams said Wednesday federal officials have told him they are weighing “the pros and cons.”

“I'm willing to make the tough decisions and not get bottled down on what the optics are,” Adams said, on the optics of sending migrants to Rikers. “And whomever is telling us not to go somewhere, I have one question from them: You tell me where we should go then. … Because the worst optic we could have is for a family to sleep on our streets.”

The jail in question closed last June. The Adams administration has backed off a different plan for migrants to be placed in school gyms in Brooklyn, according to a report from the news organization The City.

The mayor has added some of the city's suburbs to his shortlist of critics on the migrant crisis as his administration fumbles to find alternative housing options for new arrivals. Orange County officials sued the city last week over its plan to transfer single adult men who voluntarily leave city migrant facilities into hotels in Orange and Rockland counties. Rockland officials won a temporary restraining order on the city’s plan for transfers to the county.