Inside the Roosevelt, a migrant shelter no more, echoes of a crisis

Boston Globe

a day ago

Workers — with no one left to attend — dozed off inside the empty lobby, its chandeliers still pocked with deflated balloons that had welcomed migrants to New York City.
The luggage room, once just for tourists, held a few suitcases left behind by migrant families that had cycled through the hotel. The gift shop shelves were bare, except for the diapers that city workers had handed out to new mothers.
Advertisement
Upstairs, the grand ballroom was desolate. Gone were the migrants who had slept on cots as they waited for rooms, on the same carpet where New York politicians once campaigned. A map of the United States was all that remained, with small arrows pointing to New York, and a handwritten note in Spanish: 'You are here.'
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Those were the last traces of New York's migrant crisis inside the Roosevelt before the hotel stopped operating last week as the city's best-known migrant shelter — 767 days after it opened as a city-run shelter in May 2023.
Chaos, criticism, and conviction had greeted the shelter's arrival. It closed quietly, fading away with little fanfare, much like the migrant crisis, as the city relocated the remaining families to other shelters and housekeepers turned over its thousands of rooms.
Advertisement
On the day before the hotel closed, Maria Lumbi, 35, a mother from Ecuador, was among the last migrants to show up, along with her three children, ages 8, 12, and 16.
She was not seeking shelter but rather plane tickets to Ecuador to self-deport— as President Trump has encouraged migrants to do— two years after the family arrived in the country.
'I haven't been able to work,' she said. 'I prefer to go back.'
The Roosevelt's volatile chapter as a shelter turned the century-old hotel into an unlikely lightning rod in the nation's divisive immigration debate. Its role welcoming migrants drew comparisons to Ellis Island but also accusations from Trump that it was a waste of taxpayer money, a hotbed of criminal activity, and a beacon for illegal immigration.
The administration of Mayor Eric Adams announced the closure of the Roosevelt shelter in February as border crossings plummeted, slowing the flow of migrants to a trickle. The hotel's future remains unclear, amid speculation that the 18-floor building in midtown Manhattan may be redeveloped into a skyscraper.
But over two years, the Roosevelt cemented its place in the annals of New York's winding immigration story. It functioned as a base for city officials to process new migrants, transforming its marble lobby into a gateway for people arriving in New York, and the United States, sometimes just a day after they had crossed the border.
The numbers were staggering.
More than 155,000 migrants from 150 countries passed through the hotel's doors. The city, legally required to house anyone who is homeless, paid a nightly rate of $202 per room as part of a $220 million, three-year deal with the hotel's owners to use its more than 1,000 rooms to house migrant families.
Advertisement
'For them, this can be that memory of where their life turned around, where they were able to start a better life for their families,' said Dr. Ted Long, a senior vice president of the city's public health system, which managed the Roosevelt Hotel operations. 'This is going to be their memory of coming to America.'
The lobby — the arrival center, as city officials called it — once buzzed with activity.
Interpreters and caseworkers assigned migrants to city shelters and connected them to legal services as they applied for asylum and work permits. National Guard soldiers hurried past families from Venezuela and men from West Africa. City-contracted workers screened for diseases and offered vaccines — efforts meant to protect migrants but also guard the city against a public health crisis as it absorbed a mass of people from faraway countries.
Nurses worked 12-hour shifts in the lobby, treating migrants who often arrived exhausted and disoriented. Pregnant women who had not received prenatal care sought help. Some migrants arrived without medication and in dire need of treatment for cancer, diabetes, hypertension, or AIDS.
'For me, it was about taking care of my patients. Everything else was noise,' said Dr. Karen Sutherland, 54, who over two years helped vaccinate hundreds of migrant families, some of whom still text her. 'I met doctors, dentists, police officers, detectives — people who really want to make a difference,' she added.
What comes next for the Roosevelt is murky. Pakistan International Airlines, which is owned by the Pakistani government, has owned the hotel since 2000. Company representatives did not respond to requests for comment about the hotel's future.
Advertisement
Its past, a remnant of old New York, still lingers.
The hotel, which occupies an entire block on East 45th Street, opened in 1924 and was named after former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had died five years before. The suite where Thomas Dewey once lived and worked while he was governor of New York, the same suite where he learned that he had lost the 1948 presidential election in an upset to Harry Truman, is still there. So is the hotel grill where Guy Lombardo led the house band, right above the secret underground tunnel that guests once used to walk to Grand Central Terminal.
When the hotel opened, the city's mayor at the time, John Francis Hylan, proclaimed that it had 'fittingly chosen a name that stands as a tower of strength.' A century later, in a country seemingly divided over everything, the Roosevelt's second life as a migrant shelter took on different meanings.
For Adams and his top officials, the hotel became an underappreciated emblem of the extraordinary steps the city had taken, with little help from the federal government, to house thousands of migrants as border crossings reached record highs under former president Joe Biden.
Employees at the hotel, many of them the children of immigrants, saw themselves as front-line workers in a humanitarian crisis. At the Roosevelt, migrants received a lifeline — free food and housing, sometimes for months — as they found their footing in a new country.
Advertisement
But to some New Yorkers, the immigrants who crowded the sidewalks outside the hotel, sometimes smoking marijuana and blasting music, fed a perception of disorder that underscored quality-of-life concerns.
The flashes of violence and a string of robberies associated with some migrants turned the Roosevelt into a target for Republicans stoking fears about what they called a migrant crime wave, even as police insisted that most of the newcomers were peaceful.
'It's important to be real with people, and real with New Yorkers: Yes, there are a number of people at the Roosevelt Hotel who decided to join gangs or create gangs or be part of criminal elements,' said Manuel Castro, the commissioner of the mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. 'But it's only a very small number of people.'
'What makes us really sad is that there's this attempt to minimize what we've accomplished or disregard it, or even erase it,' Castro continued. 'I think that is not only sad, it's a great mistake, because we want this response to serve as an example of what a city can do in response to a humanitarian crisis.'
This article originally appeared in