Migrants Protest Being Transferred to New Housing

By Matis Glenn

A group of migrants who were housed in a Manhattan hotel refused to relocate to their new city-sponsored home over the weekend, according to ABC.

Migrants who were stating at the Watson Hotel in Manhattan chose to stay in the street with their belongings outside the upscale hotel, and not accede to the city’s plan to relocate them to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.

Police were on hand to gather the single adult men, asylum seekers from Latin America who were mostly bused in from border states last year, as Mayor Eric Adams set out to use the hotel to house families with children. Police did not force the migrants to be transported.

Adams, along with other city officials, continues to lobby Washington for federal funds to house and take care of the migrants, over 40,000 of whom have entered the city.

Repurposing the cruise terminal is a lot cheaper than renting out upscale hotel rooms, and would save the cash-strapped city millions of dollars, but advocates say that the new surroundings aren’t up to par.

“Very basic beds, head to foot, no space in between them.” Sergio Tupac, one such advocate, told ABC. “There’s four bathrooms in the entire facility for a thousand beds. They’ve described multiple security gates to get in. They’ve described there’s only food in limited hours and sometimes the water runs out and more importantly, it’s cold in there. Despite the mayor’s claim that it’s heated, they said that it’s cold in there.”

City Hall maintains that the new housing will take care of the needs of the migrants, and that the unrest seen during the transportation was made by outsiders as a political ploy.