By Anna Oakes |Editorial credit: Leonard Zhukovsky / Shutterstock.com

Mayor Eric Adams celebrated the Roosevelt Hotel’s closure and the city’s handling of the migrant crisis. A mother who spent a year there offered her own mixed assessment.

The Roosevelt Hotel, which became the first stop for 155,000 migrants as it was remade into the city’s welcome center for an influx that Mayor Eric Adams once said “will destroy New York City,” closed its doors to them last week. But people continue to arrive.

“One guy came today and was asking me to help him find a shelter, and I had to explain to him that I don’t work with the city,” said an employee of the hotel’s owners, Pakistan International Airlines, who has worked at the Roosevelt for over 20 years.

“He didn’t really get it, so he kept persisting with me trying to find him a shelter and unfortunately I just don’t know any shelters.”

The employee, who declined to share his name for fear of backlash from his employers, said the migrant, a man from Francophone Africa who appeared to be in his 60s and spoke little English, had followed instructions from Google and gone to another site — the former St. Brigid school in the East Village — earlier in the day. But St. Brigid, which served as a “reticketing center” for thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, also closed last week.

“He looked more terrified, more scared because I’m figuring – first time in a new country, first time in a new city and all that, and don’t know where you’re gonna sleep tonight,” said the hotel employee. “And I just couldn’t help him, which made me feel bad.”

The worker leaned on a fence outside the hotel just after Adams and other city officials held a press conference in the building’s ornate, marble-floored foyer to mark its closure and claim credit for an “historic accomplishment” after 237,000 migrants passed through the city’s ad-hoc new shelter system for them over the last three years, including one period where the city said it was out of space and people slept on the streets outside the building.

Adams, flanked by current and past city officials including Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro and former Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom — who resigned in February following Adams’ alignment with the Trump administration’s immigration strategy — praised “the amazing team.”

“What they were able to accomplish in a short period of time, history is going to be kind to them and how they provided service in a humane way, in spite of all the politics,” Adams said. “The present day may not be kind, but history will be kind.”

He called the closure the end of a story, and complained about how “over and over again, we were criticized. There was so much reports that we were inhumane to immigrants.”

“As we take this final step, we can look back and say, ‘Job well done,’” Adams concluded. His administration, he said, had “showed the world what humanely managing a national humanitarian response looks like.”

‘We Arrived Lost’

One person who experienced much of the city’s migrant response firsthand had a different perspective — appreciative of the help her family had received but painfully aware of its limits.

Days before the mayor proclaimed a “job well done,” Dina, 32, sat on a stoop outside the newly empty Roosevelt with her baby daughter on a sweltering afternoon as they waited for the bus to drop off her son from elementary school.

As raids by sometimes-masked federal officers have accelerated inside courtrooms and around the city, Dina faced a new set of fears. “We barely go outside any more,” Dina said in Spanish. She asked to be identified by that name to avoid endangering her immigration case. “I leave to pick up the boy, and that’s it.”

She, her husband, and her then-eight-year-old son had sold everything they owned in Maracaibo, Venezuela and spent their life savings to reach the United States. They spent two days in Texas after crossing the Rio Grande in December 2023, before a local organization offered them tickets out of the state.

“My husband and I asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do in New York? We don’t know anyone there,” said Dina. “And he said, ‘Well, we don’t know anyone, anywhere.’ So we chose New York.”

After 40 hours of travel — a plane to Atlanta, a bus to New Jersey, a train to Penn Station — they arrived in Manhattan in the middle of a frigid night, without winter clothes or cell phones. Dina was a few months pregnant. They were directed to a bus that brought them to the Roosevelt.

“When we got here, we arrived lost,” Dina said. “I didn’t even know where we were. They brought us here to the shelter, and they gave us a hand.”

Dina, her husband, and her son huddled in the lobby for hours before they were given a shelter placement in Queens. They set out into the cold. “We didn’t have any clothes beyond what we were wearing,” said Dina. “My son began to cry from the cold.”

Another asylum seeker offered her pink winter coat to Dina’s son. He was too cold, Dina recalled, to object to the color. Hours later they were sent out to find their way, without a working cell phone, to a shelter in Queens.

The family stayed for 30 days in the Queens shelter, then returned with all of their possessions to the Roosevelt for another wait to be assigned a room in Brooklyn.

Dina’s son didn’t go to school while they were in Brooklyn. “I fell into a depression there because my son couldn’t study,” she said. “I was very lost.”

A month later, they returned to the Roosevelt for another placement. Dina was visibly pregnant and they were assigned a room there. A social worker — the first one she mentioned encountering in the shelter system — helped Dina and her husband apply for work permits.

At the Roosevelt, the family of three  shared a single room and one bed. They didn’t have access to a kitchen, and the family missed having home-cooked Venezuelan food, Dina said. Her son lost weight.

“They never told us what was happening,” she said, “but we put up with it because they gave us stability, more than anything.”

Later the same month, in March New York City reached a legal settlement with Coalition for the Homeless and The Legal Aid Society regarding the “right to shelter” requirements the Adams administration had been trying to roll back for the city’s newest arrivals.

Migrants would now be guaranteed a room for no more than 60 days. When their time ran out, families would have to pack up their belongings and return to the Roosevelt to request a new stay.

Dina and her family gradually settled into the hotel. Parents, she said, would look out for each other. “Everyone helped each other,” she said. “If there was a mother who was working, the others would offer to help” with their children.

Dina had some limited prenatal support from the hotel, she said, but there was “no support” for her eight-year-old son, who was adjusting to a new country and language. “There was never anyone looking out for him, not one person caring for him, not even a social worker.”

By the time their 60 days were up, Dina was eight months pregnant. The family was granted an extension at the Roosevelt.

Dina gave birth a month early, through an emergency cesarean section.

The family was still at the Roosevelt this March, when later reporting revealed that Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and longtime Adams ally Kaz Daughtry worked with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan to plan large-scale immigration raids at the Roosevelt and another Manhattan shelter. Those plans were scrapped after Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch blocked the effort, the New York Times reported.

In May, just as her baby was turning one, Dina and her family were told the Roosevelt was closing and they would need to seek a new placement. They were assigned to a shelter 20 blocks south.

The family packed up their belongings and moved again, to their fourth assignment in 18 months. In a few weeks, with minimal information from shelter management, they’ll have to apply for another new placement.

‘The Same Scared Look’

School dropoffs are done for the summer, and the Roosevelt’s welcome center is no more. Pakistan International Airlines is reportedly looking to sell the property as their three-year, $220-million contract with the city winds down.

Still, at least ten people arrive at the hotel every day seeking shelter, the 20-year hotel employee said. That comes as the Adams administration reports that fewer than 100 migrants are now arriving in the city.

Some come with babies and small children. “They look lost,” the employee said. “They all got the same scared look.”

They walk up to the shuttered doors of the hotel, read the notices pasted to the glass — in Spanish, Fulani, Bengali, Ukrainian, and other languages — informing them of the permanent closure of the arrival center and redirecting them to other intake centers around the city. Then, they continue on their way.