Awaiting help from city, 150 migrants sleep outside Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel

A line of 150 migrants wrapped around the city’s central intake center in Midtown, Manhattan with some saying they’ve waited as long as five days in order to register for help from the city.

“I could not register and they aren’t going to help,” Fofana Hamed, from Ivory Coast, said in Spanish. “I’ve been here five days without grooming or showering.”

The line of migrants sprawled from the Roosevelt Hotel’s south entrance on 45th Street around the block, up Vanderbilt Avenue and around 46th Street nearly to the hotel's north entrance. The line was sectioned off with retractable crowd control stanchions as people slept on cardboard and used umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun.

Volunteer aid workers handed out food and water to the people waiting. Workers inside the hotel contracted by the city refused to answer questions about how the line functioned or how long people could expect to wait.

“There’s certain questions I can’t answer,” said a worker who refused to identify himself.

When asked if sleeping for days on the street helped a migrant’s chances of finding a bed, he said, “In the grand scheme of things, it is helpful.”

The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless issued a joint statement that said the city had run afoul of its own right-to-shelter law and a range of court orders.

“Our clients who are stuck without shelter is both heartbreaking and maddening, and should this continue, we will have no choice but to file litigation to enforce the law,” the statement said.

When asked for his response on Monday, Mayor Eric Adams said, “Now that we have run out of room, we have to figure out how we're going to localize the inevitable that there's no more room indoors.”

Adams did not elaborate on what he meant by “localize.” He said he was going to formulate a plan in the coming days, but that “this city is not going to look like other cities with their tents up and down. They're gonna say localize.”

“We’re waiting for an answer,” said Jhonathan Flores, who said he has been waiting two days outside the Roosevelt after fleeing a kidnapping attempt in Colombia. “They haven’t said anything.”

Omar Sall, who said he was persecuted in Senegal, said he's been sleeping on the sidewalk for three days.

“We need somewhere to sleep, to shower, to pray,” he said. “But America is good. We like the country."