New York City preparing to evict asylum seekers to make space for arriving families, Mayor Adams says
NEW YORK -- New York City is preparing to evict some asylum seekers from shelters to make space for more families arriving with children.
Mayor Eric Adams says there is no room left to house people.
Legal Aid Society staff attorney Kathryn Kliff says the organization is busy reviewing the legality of the mayor's latest announcement.
"The city is still bound by the state constitution, the consent decrees that guarantee the right to shelter, and the local laws that ensure that everyone gets a bed who needs it," she told CBS New York's John Dias.
In a few days, Adams plans on giving out 60-day notices to adult asylum seekers in shelters, demanding they find alternate housing. If they can't, they will need to reapply for a new placement.
He says he's doing this to ensure migrant children have a place to go. But Kliff says he's going about it all wrong.
"If the city is focused on trying to provide better case management and focused on trying to help people get out of shelters in 60 days, to move onto more permanent housing, obviously that is something we would support, but we have a lot more questions than answers," she said.
One of the main questions advocates have is where will the asylum seekers go if they can't find a place to live? Many don't have a pathway to housing.
"Many of these folks, unless they have been here for a long time, aren't authorized to work legally," said Sara Newman, of the Open Hearts Initiative.
The mayor insists the city has reached its limit, with about 55,000 asylum seekers being housed in humanitarian relief centers here. So city housing is now closed to new arrivals.
"Right now, we have no space. So wherever they can wait, they are waiting," he said Wednesday.
CBS New York's Naveen Dhaliwal and her crew saw that Wednesday night at the Roosevelt Hotel, which is a city-designated arrival center for asylum seekers. Instead of a safe place to sleep, they were handed unexpected notices, saying there was no housing for them.
One man said it took him four months to travel from Venezuela.
"They are telling us to go find somewhere to go, where are we going to go with no money?" he said in Spanish.
Adams says New York has been carrying the weight of the nation's crisis and continues to cite the absence of state or federal aid.