NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Roosevelt Hotel migrant shelter to close in coming months

The Roosevelt Hotel, a historic building converted to process tens of thousands of homeless foreign migrants as New York City's main intake shelter for almost two years, will close operations in the coming months, Mayor Eric Adams' office said Monday.

The city began leasing the Roosevelt Hotel in May 2023, years after it closed in the fall of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

An average of 4,000 migrants was arriving each week at the peak of the crisis in May 2023. That number has decreased to about 350 per week in recent months. More than 173,000 migrants have been processed at the hotel between May 2023 and this month, according to a press release from Adams' office. 

"While we’re not done caring for those who come into our care, today marks another milestone in demonstrating the immense progress we have achieved in turning the corner on an unprecedented international humanitarian effort," Adams said in the release.

About 53 additional asylum sites and tent-based facilities will have closed between June 2024 and June 2025, the release said.

The Roosevelt opened in September 1924 in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt and has been a longtime landmark of the New York City skyline. Located near Grand Central Terminal, the hotel has been the site of notable cultural and political events such as the election headquarters for New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, who in 1948 was said to have wrongly announced from the hotel that he had defeated Harry Truman for president.

Speaking at a weekly news conference at City Hall,  Adams said that even as the head count declines, those who need help would get it, consistent with law and time limits.

"If it's not there," he said, "it will be somewhere."

Since spring 2022, more than 230,000 foreign migrants, mostly from Latin America, have come to the city, straining the municipal budget. Some, though not all, of the migrants have been bused to blue state sanctuary cities under a program by red state elected officials to protest the Biden administration's border policies. Until last year, when eligibility was tightened, a legal mandate in the city provided a near unlimited and perpetual right to room and board, at public expense, for anyone in need.

The Roosevelt made international headlines several months after the city took it over. Photos circulated of hundreds of migrants camped out on the sidewalk of the hotel after Adams said the city had run out of room for migrants.

There are currently fewer than 45,000 migrants in the city's care, down from a high of 69,000 in January 2024, the release said.

The hotel lease began around the time Title 42 expired, which had allowed federal officials to turn away asylum-seekers from the U.S. border with Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The hotel, with about 1,000 rooms for migrants, serves as a place where they must apply for services, as well as a temporary shelter for hundreds of families who can stay for only 60 days.

Last week, the city sued the Trump administration for pulling back $80.5 million in emergency reimbursement for the migrant crisis, money that had already been appropriated by Congress and paid into municipal bank coffers.