The Difficult Lives of Asylum Seekers in New York

AFP/APP
New York: Sally Hernandez, age 12, sobbed Wednesday as the New York hotel where she and her immigrant family were sheltering expelled them before she could say goodbye to the Girl Scout troop she belonged to at her makeshift home.
Such painful departures are more and more common as the city applies new housing rules for a flood of migrants, while border control and people like Sally who lack residency papers take center stage ahead of the November general election.
New York’s city hall, overwhelmed by the crisis, is implementing a new rule under which migrants cannot spend more than 60 days in any one shelter. Some people have been living in the same place for up to two years.
They also cannot apply for a new place until the day they leave the old one. So, when their time is up, asylum seekers like Sally and her family have to start from scratch and apply that day for a spot in a different shelter, competing with new people arriving every day, mainly from Latin America.
Sally and her Colombian family mother Karol Hernandez, father Sebastian Arango, and an 18-month-old baby had to lug heavy suitcases a few blocks away to a hotel serving as a processing center for migrants like them and all this messy coming and going is happening amid frigid, rainy winter weather. On Tuesday night, 2,000 people living in tents in Brooklyn had to be relocated because of torrential rains.
“Sixty days is not much time… the legal paperwork takes much longer to get a work permit or Temporary Protected Status,” said Angelo Chirino, a 22-year-old Venezuelan who arrived in New York in November with his wife and infant son.
More than 160,000 people have come to New York since this immigration crisis started almost two years ago, often in buses chartered by governors in Republican-led border states to protest what they label President Joe Biden’s lax border policies struggling to cope with the sea of humanity, last week Mayor Eric Adams sued bus companies that have brought migrants to the city, seeking $700 million in damages to offset the cost of housing them.
The mayor is also asking for federal assistance money and wants it to be easier for such people to get work permits historically Democratic and liberal New York City by law has to provide housing to anyone who requests it and is the only city in America to offer this kind of help.