Is the Migrant Crisis a Democrat Profit Machine?
In a startling revelation, a former employee at New York City’s largest migrant crisis shelter has claimed that hotels participating in the city’s resettlement program are significantly profiting at the expense of taxpayers. Carlos Arellano, who previously worked at the Row NYC hotel, which has been converted into a massive temporary shelter for migrants, shared his firsthand experience with Fox News.
Arellano described how hotel staff were exploiting the system by billing the city for unnecessary expenses. “Hotel staff at these shelters are expensing the city for any little thing they can,” he said. “And when you see 10 workers on the first floor of the lobby of the hotel, only two of them are really working,” Arellano told Fox and Friends guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy. Despite this, the hotel charges the city for all ten employees, unnecessarily driving up costs.
This practice has raised significant concerns about the financial integrity of the city’s shelter program. Arellano, who had previously appeared on Fox News to highlight the poor conditions inside these shelters, suggested that both politicians and hotel owners are benefitting from the current arrangement. “Politicians and hotel owners are loving this because the money is just going around and around,” he asserted.
The 1,300-room Row Hotel is one of New York City’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs). The city secured a $40 million contract in October 2022 to lease the building until mid-April 2023, making it one of the first Midtown hotels to shelter migrant families exclusively. Currently, it is overseen by the city’s Health and Hospitals system.
Towards the end of 2022, New York City entered into a nearly $1 billion contract with a trade group to compensate hotels that agreed to house migrants. Participants in the Sanctuary Hotel Program could earn up to $185 per night per room, regardless of whether the rooms were occupied. This proved to be a lucrative deal for many hotels still struggling to recover from the post-pandemic downturn.
Despite around 135 of the city’s 680 hotels participating in this program, it has only provided a temporary solution to a much larger problem. The city’s ability to accommodate its tourist influx has been severely impacted. Last October, New York City implemented a 60-day limit on shelter stays for families with children. Families unable to find alternative housing were redirected to the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center, to reapply for placement. Although the initial plan would have seen families evicted around Christmas, the deadline was extended to January 9.
In response to these developments, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander announced an investigation into the implementation of the 60-day shelter limit. In a letter to City Hall, Lander warned of the policy’s potentially harmful impacts on asylum-seeking families, particularly children who might be displaced from their public schools. He criticized the Adams administration for “implementing one of the cruelest policies to come from City Hall in generations, evicting families from shelter in the middle of winter, and displacing kids from their schools in the middle of the school year.”
Lander pledged to scrutinize the use of funds for busing and transferring migrants and examine the policy’s impact on efforts to secure work authorizations. Since April 2022, more than 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, with busloads coming from the southern border.
Mayor Eric Adams projects that the city will spend more than $12 billion through Fiscal Year 2025 on the migrant crisis, a figure that includes the total costs since 2022. His administration has been working to modify the city’s longstanding right to shelter rule, which guarantees housing for those without it. This rule has placed additional strain on the city as it grapples with an influx of new arrivals without a clear path to employment.
In March, after months of negotiations, the city reached an agreement with the Legal Aid Society to impose a 30-day limit on shelter stays for some adult migrants without allowing them to reapply for placement. Exceptions include migrants with disabilities or other extenuating circumstances. Young adults under 23 will have a 60-day limit in city shelters.
The Legal Aid Society stated that these terms apply only to single adults and do not alter the right to shelter decree. Mayor Adams acknowledged New York City’s leadership in responding to a national humanitarian crisis by providing care to over 180,000 migrants since spring 2022. However, he noted, “The ‘Right to Shelter’ was never intended to apply to a population larger than most U.S. cities descending on the five boroughs in less than two years.”
This revelation underscores the urgent need for a sustainable solution to the ongoing migrant crisis and highlights the significant financial implications for New York City’s taxpayers.
