NYC decision to move migrant families to sites with fewer services slammed by advocates

The city’s Department of Homeless Services forced at least six migrant families to move from city homeless shelters into hotels that offer fewer services to make way for an expected influx of native New Yorkers who could be seeking shelter beds in the coming months, the Daily News has learned.

The move has sparked outrage among advocates like Christine Quinn, the leader of the Win non-profit who said Thursday that it represents “terrible policy.”

The six families forced to move into hotels Thursday had previously been staying at shelters managed by Win, according to Quinn.

“These are families that have been to hell and back,” she said of the migrants. “To upend them to a place without cooking facilities and with far fewer services is just cruel.”

Quinn noted that some of those residents have been staying with Win for more than a year.

A spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, Neha Sharma, pushed back on Quinn’s claims, saying they were “misleading” and contending that the use of kitchens in hotel rooms would constitute a fire hazard.

“We have emergency sanctuary sites,” Sharma said of the hotels being used as migrant shelters. “They are going to sanctuary sites that are equipped specifically with services tailored to asylum seekers.”

Sharma said the transfers were made in response to an emergency and that the policy of the city is to, when possible, shelter migrants and native New Yorkers in separate facilities because each group requires a different array of services.

For the last two years, the city has struggled to find temporary shelter for the thousands of migrants who’ve streamed into the five boroughs, mostly from Latin American countries. So far, more than 180,000 migrants have come to the Big Apple since Mayor Adams took office.

Adams has boasted that his team’s management of the crisis has become a national model and has repeatedly pointed to policies aimed at incentivizing migrants to end their stays in city shelters, which have reached record-breaking occupancy levels during his tenure.

Those policies include implementing limitations on how long migrants can stay in city shelters before having to reapply for housing, as well as seeking to limit the scope of the city’s long-standing right to shelter provisions. Both of those moves from the Adams administration have drawn harsh rebukes from Quinn and other homeless advocates.

Quinn said Thursday that the city had initially attempted to send a total of 70 families from Win facilities to hotels that are now being used as emergency homeless shelters.

Most of those transfers were halted, she added, after Win demonstrated to the city that the families were either on the verge of securing housing, work authorization papers or that children in the household were placed in an independent learning plan.

Quinn said “most” of the families who were transferred Thursday had to leave a Win shelter in Park Slope, but she would not say where the other families were transferred from. She added that the transfers had nothing to do with Adams’ policy of limiting the stay of migrants in shelters.