May 5, 2023, 11:05 AM
Updated 600 days ago
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Last night, hundreds of asylum seekers arrived in New York City, after hundreds more arrived the day before, and thousands more in the days and week earlier. Once again, we are stepping up, in the absence of a national solution to this national crisis and are coming up with our own decompression strategy. New York City has single-handedly opened up 122 emergency shelters and eight large-scale humanitarian relief centers in the last year. But we are now receiving reports that a network of activists are organizing large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers to New York City via plane, bus, and other modes of transportation — taking advantage of city and state laws and luring them here with false promises. As a result, yesterday alone, we received hundreds of additional asylum seekers and we reached our limit of new shelters we could open. We currently have no other options but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms. We’ve been asking for support for a year, and now with Title 42 being lifted next week and with hundreds of asylum seekers already arriving in New York City every day, we desperately need federal and state support more than ever to quickly manage this crisis.