Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 21
Inside a Midtown church-turned-migrant help center, volunteer Alexia Sol has recently begun handing out a new form: a “record of daily activities.” The migrants are meant to use the form to track their efforts to leave the shelter system — in hopes that the accounting will help them remain in it.
Starting this Wednesday, May 22, adult migrants can be evicted from city shelters after reaching a limit of 30 or 60 days — depending on their age — with limited opportunities to remain, under new shelter rules agreed upon in a court settlement in March. Under the agreement, migrants who have reached their stay limit will only be allowed to remain in shelter under “extenuating circumstances,” including making “significant efforts” to find their own place to stay — hence the accounting suggested by Sol.
There are approximately 250 migrants whose shelter stays will expire in the first five days of the new policy rollout, between May 22 and May 27, according to City Hall spokesperson Noah Levine. Many more will face the same challenge. From April 24 through early last week, city staffers at migrant shelters and intake centers alerted some 6,500 adult migrants that their shelter stays would be limited to 30 or 60 days, and they’d only be granted extensions under certain circumstances, City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak said.
Source: Gothamist
