Midtown hotel cleared of single male migrants, but encampment standoff drags on outside

There are no more single male migrants staying at the Watson Hotel in Manhattan — but dozens of recently removed residents remained camped out on the sidewalk in front of the building Wednesday, advocates for the asylum seekers told the Daily News.

The Hell’s Kitchen hotel on W. 57th St. has become a flashpoint for the city’s migrant crisis, as hundreds of male, mostly Latin American asylum seekers who lived there for weeks or even months started getting removed from their rooms this past weekend.

Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society who has been posted outside the hotel since the weekend, said Wednesday morning he had been informed by city officials that the last male migrants were evicted from their rooms at the Watson the night before.

[ Mayor Adams claims right-to-shelter law does not apply to NYC asylum seekers ]

The removals appear to have taken place without any commotion, Goldfein said. Some of the ejected migrants still have belongings remaining inside, though, and “may come back for them,” Goldfein added.

Spokespeople for Mayor Adams did not immediately return a request for comment.

Adams’ administration kicked the single male migrants out in order to make room for asylum seeking families with children who are supposed to take their place at the hotel as early as Wednesday.

The administration’s initial plan was to transfer the roughly 1,000 single males who are believed to have been living at the Watson to a newly-opened mega migrant shelter in a Brooklyn Cruise Terminal warehouse on the Red Hook waterfront.

But several of the migrants who were first transferred to the Red Hook facility refused to stay there because they say the warehouse is freezing at night, and access to basic amenities like showers and toilets is scant. They’ve also lamented that the site is located in a part of Red Hook with poor transit access and accused Adams’ administration of treating them in an “inhumane” way.

[ Migrants set up camp on NYC sidewalk after refusing beds at Mayor Adams’ ‘inhumane’ mega shelter in Brooklyn ]

Some of the evicted migrants returned to the Watson on Sunday and set up camp on the sidewalk outside in protest of the administration’s hotel shuffle. The encampment has kept growing larger since then, as more migrants being removed from their rooms join the ranks of men sleeping in tents and other makeshift structures on the sidewalk.

Goldfein said about 50 migrants were still posted up on the sidewalk Wednesday morning despite the freezing January temperatures, many bundled up in sleeping bags and blankets. He said the actual number of men staying in the encampment is larger, though, as many of them leave early in the morning to work.

It’s unclear if Adams’ administration plans to at any point remove the migrants from the sidewalk outside the Watson.

Ariadna Phillips, founder of South Bronx Mutual Aid, a group that’s been donating food, tents and other supplies to the migrants, said Department of Sanitation workers showed up at the Watson before dawn Wednesday, but that they did not immediately take any action.

“We are waiting to see what happens,” Phillips said.

Manuel Castro, Adams’ immigrants affairs commissioner, has tried to convince the migrants in the camp to accept beds at the Red Hook facility and gave a small group of them a tour of the site Tuesday.

But the migrants refused Castro’s offer and returned to the Watson, saying the tour did little to assuage their concerns about the Red Hook site.

[ Migrants at Midtown hotel double down to fight move to Mayor Adams’ Red Hook shelter site ]

Adams hasn’t answered questions from reporters about the Watson dilemma, but his spokesman Fabien Levy has taken to Twitter to accuse some of the volunteer groups of exacerbating the situation.

“Instead of encouraging asylum seekers to sleep in warm, indoor, temperature-controlled quarters at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, these groups are telling migrants to sleep in tents on the streets. The lack of reasoning here is astounding,” Levy tweeted earlier this week.

Adams’ office also posted a video in which the mayor visited the Red Hook facility on Monday and said he found it to be warm and hospitable.

“Even the snacks are healthy — we just need to stop the anxiety,” Adams said in the video.

[ Biden, Adams silent on migrant crisis while appearing together in NYC ]

The Watson chaos should also be an impetus for the federal government to immediately allocate more financial and logistical aid for the city, as it scrambles to house and provide services for the more than 40,000 migrants who have arrived since last spring, Adams said in the video.

“We are doing our job,” Adams said. “We need the national government and Congress to do their job.”