New York City shutters migrant hotel known as ‘Little Ellis Island'

Washington Post

2 days ago

New York City officials have closed the historic Manhattan hotel that sheltered thousands of migrant families arriving with little more than the clothes in their backpacks after long treks from the southern border.
The Roosevelt Hotel, dubbed the city's 'Little Ellis Island,' shuttered its doors to migrants on Tuesday. The early-20th-century hotel once served as the backdrop to dozens of Hollywood films and closed after a series of financial losses in 2020. But the city reopened it in May 2023 as an 'arrival center' for the scores of migrants taking buses and trains from Texas.
Inside the Roosevelt's cavernous lobby, city workers devised a processing system that converted the front desk into a registration area. Asylum seekers from as far away as China were medically screened for physical and psychological maladies, and nurses administered vaccines.
Beneath the ceiling's yellowing depiction of a blue sky and puffy white clouds, exhausted families waited to learn where the city would place them. While some were given a room at the Roosevelt, others were sent to different hotels, emergency shelters and living spaces. New York City officials reasoned that if they did not offer migrants a place to sleep, they would camp out on the streets instead.
Ultimately more than 230,000 asylum seekers filed through the hotel as they began their New York journeys. Border crossings subsided a year after opening. But demand for housing persisted as migrants waited for work permits and struggled to get their footing financially in a new country.
Inside the hotel's hundreds of old, wallpapered rooms entire families lived in cramped quarters like generations of New York immigrants before them. Babies were born. Birthdays were celebrated. Immigrant aid organizations delivered supplies. Air-conditioning units went down.
New York City said there are fewer than 45,000 migrants remaining in the city's care. Social workers and resettlement case managers are still helping them. But the Trump administration has ended the reimbursements funding much of the programming, and the number of new arrivals has waned. Many of those who had arrived in recent years are now at risk of deportation.
Jairo Garcia, 39, was one of the last migrant residents at the Roosevelt. He had arrived two years earlier with a congenital heart condition that left it functioning at less than 10 percent. The hotel offered him and his partner the privacy, flexibility and time to manage his multiple surgeries and medical visits.
'I'm pretty sad. The Roosevelt has been a blessing and support for so many. Before I was in a tent shelter and getting sicker,' Garcia said. 'I don't know where I would have been without it.'
Photographer Stephen Yang spent time inside the Roosevelt Hotel for the past two years as part of an in-progress documentary, 'The Arrival Center.'