New York City easing rules on forcing foreign migrants to leave shelters

New York City is easing rules covering when certain foreign migrants will be forced to leave public-funded homeless shelters and seek placement anew, Mayor Eric Adams’ office announced Monday.

Under the change, families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade will be forced to leave only once, after 60 days. If they choose, they can reapply for shelter, and if they remain eligible to stay, won’t be forced to relocate again, according to Adams spokeswoman Liz Garcia.

The office also announced the city would soon centralize postal mail so migrants can more easily get government updates pertaining to their federal applications for asylum, temporary protected status and work permits.

Adams’ announcements Monday were a rare policy change that is favorable to migrants — 223,000 have come since spring 2022; 58,000 remain in shelter: Most of the announcements have recently been about restricting services and disincentivizing stays in city-provided housing.

A news release publicizing the new policies said they would "save taxpayers millions of dollars and allow the city to more effectively help migrants take their next steps towards self-sufficiency."

The city has spent billions on the crisis, mostly on providing room and board.

Initially welcoming, the city's approach to the migrants has grown progressively less hospitable as the influx kept apace.

It’s a contrast from summer 2022, when Adams personally welcomed migrants arriving in Manhattan who had been bused to the city from Texas, one of several red states whose leaders have sent migrants north in protest of the Biden administration’s border policies.

As the totals mounted, the city ended its decades-old, perpetual right to shelter — for single adults, it’s limited to as few as 30 days — and erected bureaucratic hurdles that make it harder to stay in shelters even for those for whom time limits don’t apply, such as families.

Before Monday's announcement, migrants who were technically eligible to stay in shelter needed to leave their prior placement, return to a central intake center and wait to be placed anew, a cycle that continued indefinitely. That means that the city needs to spend money on school buses to send the migrant children to their old schools, an added cost to the public the release said is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"By allowing families with school-age children to remain in their original shelters, we aim to minimize disruptions to their education and significantly decrease transportation-related costs," Adams’ chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, said in the release.

Under the change, following a second eviction notice — which applies after 60 days — "families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade can stay in the same shelter they were previously assigned to if they still need more time in the system," the release said.

The new mail policy, which applies to all migrants, addresses concerns that migrants would list on federal forms the shelter where they were living at the time of application, only to be evicted, or decide to move out on their own, and have no way to get updates sent by mail.

More than 84,000 applications have been filed with city assistance, the release said.

It’s unclear the status of those applications and what will happen with them under the new Trump presidency. Donald Trump has promised to conduct the largest deportation operation in American history.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.