Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, the first stop for tens of thousands of migrants arriving in New York City, will close by the end of June, Mayor Eric Adams pledged Monday.
The 1,022-room hotel, a block from Grand Central Terminal, is the latest large-scale migrant shelter that city officials have lined up for closure, following announcements about the tent shelter for families at Floyd Bennett Field which closed in January, the Randall’s Island shelter which is expected to close by the end of February, the tent shelter at Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility expected to close in March, and the Hall Street mega-shelter closing by June.
The city opened the Roosevelt Hotel to arriving migrants in the spring of 2023, when thousands of people were making their way to New York City every week. As the city on the sidewalk during a heat wave.
But in recent months, the city has seen a steady decline in the number of migrants living in its shelters, now down to around 45,000 people from a peak of nearly 70,000 in December of 2023, as fewer people are entering the city’s migrant shelter system while the number of move-outs has remained steady, with 30 and 60-day limits on many people’s stays.
“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,” said Mayor Eric Adams in a press release.
City officials opened another new large-scale shelter for adult migrant men in the Bronx just this week, The Bronx Times reported.
‘Unsubstantiated Media Reports’
The Roosevelt Hotel, which became a symbol of the city’s migrant crisis, previously drew the ire of allies of President Donald Trump including Vivek Ramiswami and Elon Musk, who cited its foreign ownership by an LLC controlled by Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Limited.
The city pays $202 a night for each of the 1,022 rooms at the hotel, according to of the contract obtained through a Freedom of Information request, for an estimated $75 million a year.
More recently, the Trump istration used the Roosevelt Hotel as an excuse to claw back $80 million from New York City coffers and withhold an additional $100 million more that had been allotted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse the city for some of the money it’s spent sheltering migrants from the southern border.
In a Feb. 18 letter, sent a week after the $80 million disappeared from city s, FEMA official Cameron Hamilton wrote to the New York City Office of Management and Budget claiming that the “vicious Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua” — which the Trump istration designated days later as a terrorist organization — had “taken over the hotel and is using it as a recruiting center and base of operations to plan a variety of crimes.”
The letter cited a New York Post story about mothers there upset by TikTok reports about the gang’s presence and a story that ran at ABC7 where a NYPD assistant chief said a group of young migrants that had been robbing people in midtown were of the gang.
City lawyers have sued to try and reclaim the withdrawn and withheld money, disputing the Trump istration’s claims about the hotel.
“Having visited the Roosevelt Hotel twice, FEMA did not identify any purported gang or illegal activities at the Roosevelt Hotel in its Compliance Review Findings,” Muriel Goode-Trufant wrote the city’s lawsuit filed last week. “The recent ‘noncompliance’ letter provides no first-hand in of FEMAs allegations of criminal activity and instead relies solely on characterizations of unsubstantiated media reports.”
