Attempting to break up a confrontation with men who had refused to go to a new city-run shelter in Brooklyn, police and sanitation workers swept asylum seekers from the pavement in front of a Hell’s Kitchen hotel on Wednesday night.
The migrants had earlier in the day organized a protest to demand work licenses to enable them to support themselves. While waiting, they looked for lodgings that offered greater amenities than those at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook, which some had seen during a scouting tour.
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Workers from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs showed up at the Watson Hotel on West 57th Street at around 4 o’clock to ask the migrants to relocate to the Brooklyn shelter. A few migrants then boarded yellow school buses with their belongings.
Until this past weekend, when the attempted transfer started, 600 migrants were sleeping at the hotel at the city’s cost; however, only a small number of them spent the night in Red Hook. Some passengers who were on buses when they saw the Red Hook shelter immediately returned to the hotel, sleeping on the pavement when they were denied re-entry.
City personnel made an effort to allay the fears of the migrants by reassuring them that it would take 150 days for them to obtain work permits after applying for asylum and by promising to assist them during the application process once they had transferred to the new facility.
As the migrants debated whether to give up and go to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, one of them said, “We deserve a dignified place.”
Others who had visited the terminal had shared unflattering comments with those camped out at the Watson through WhatsApp messages and word-of-mouth in person, including that the shelter was chilly and lacked inadequate spaces for them to properly keep their belongings. They also claimed that they would be sleeping on cots.
While some refugees opted to risk another chilly night, others gambled in the Brooklyn terminal.
Kennedy Gonzalez, a 37-year-old Venezuelan, who spent Tuesday night in front of the Watson, said, “To be suffering like this, why?” “One night and the cold weather was killing me. I didn’t come to The United States to suffer. I came here to work for my family.”
Early this week, Mayor Eric Adams said that mutual assistance organizations are spreading misinformation about the terminal refuge and questioned earlier on Wednesday if any of the people who had lingered outside of the hotel were indeed migrants.
In a statement, City Hall press secretary Fabien Levy said, “We are grateful that almost all single men who were staying at the Watson Hotel have chosen to heed our calls and come inside from the frigid temperatures tonight.” “The single men who were staying at the Watson have now all either chosen to transfer to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal — a humanitarian relief center that multiple elected officials today called a ‘warm’ location — or decided to leave our care by connecting with friends, family, or other networks,” reads the statement.
After returning from the terminal after touring it as part of a group of Watson residents with Commissioner Manuel Castro, Bruno, a 24-year-old immigrant, was one of those who had recently refused to go for the Red Hook site.
When the Watson’s employees informed him on Friday that he would have to leave the next day, he claimed he had only been there for less than two weeks. Bruno said that a hotel employee had given him a Spirit Airlines ticket to Charlotte, North Carolina, where a friend had arranged for him to work on a construction site. The flight was set to depart on Saturday, but Bruno was unable to board since his ticket did not include checked luggage.
Levy said in his statement that “six asylum seekers chose to be reticketed to meet friends or family in other cities,” although without mentioning plane tickets or the future locations of the guys waiting at the Watson.
Bruno had camped in front of the Watson for four nights by the time the cops freed the guys that evening. Even though the airline changed his travel to Monday, the disruption cost him his ticket.
He remarked on Wednesday in the afternoon, “The best thing we could have is the work permit to defend ourselves and so we can be independent,”
Nobody knows where Bruno was on Wednesday night.
