From the Red Hook pier where the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal sits, the Statue of Liberty is plainly visible across the water.
The terminal now houses hundreds of migrants who have arrived in New York City in recent months. For some of these men, their proximity to Lady Liberty evokes a sad irony.
“The statue is a symbol of freedom,” said Omar Fall, a 40-year-old asylum-seeker from Senegal, gesturing to the famous landmark. “[How can we be] free if you cannot live in a standard place? Here you see a factory in a terminal.”
That “factory in a terminal” he was referring to is the Red Hook shelter, which has the capacity to house 1,000 men in cavernous dormitories.
It’s been just over a week since the city began moving hundreds of single men from shelters and hotels in other parts of the city to this new facility.
Here, hundreds of cots are pressed against each other in rows, according to photos and videos shared by migrants and posted by the mayor’s office.
This new shelter has the capacity to house 1,000 men in cavernous dormitories.
Immigration and homeless rights advocates widely criticized the move to the Red Hook facility, citing concerns about safety and its location on the waterfront, which is far removed from public transit.
On Wednesday, activists for immigrants and homeless rights said their worst fears about the space were confirmed when a young asylum-seeker staying at the facility attempted suicide, which was first reported by the New York Post and later confirmed by a city official not authorized to speak to reporters. The 26-year-old man was taken to the hospital in stable condition, a police spokesperson said.
“That is exactly the fear, individual needs get missed,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who chairs the council’s immigration committee. She toured the facility last week and said many of her worries about the facility still stand.
“There were hundreds of people and the lack of spacing, no privacy,” she said. “It screams unsafe, it screams undignified.”
A spokesperson for the mayor insisted the city was doing the best it could in a difficult situation.
“For months, we have said we are nearing our breaking point, and now we are at our breaking point,” spokesperson Fabien Levy said. “There are limitations to what we can do and yet everyday we meet and surpass our moral obligations by providing asylum-seekers with shelter, food, health care, education, legal support and more.”
The city is ‘driving a truck’ through a loophole, advocates say
Mayor Eric Adams has said that the city’s “right to shelter” law – which guarantees minimum standards of housing to anyone who seeks it – does not apply to shelters serving asylum-seekers.
So far, his administration has been able to bypass those standards by running shelters through the offices of NYC Health + Hospitals and Emergency Management, rather than through the city’s Department of Social Services.
As long as the city continues to provide the migrants an option to go to intake in the regular DHS system, they have little legal recourse, said Joshua Goldfein, an attorney for the Legal Aid Society, which has sued the city in the past for failing to comply with the “right to shelter” law.
“They have a loophole and they’re driving a truck through it,” said Goldfein.
On a tour of the Red Hook facility last week, Goldfein said he observed many conditions that wouldn’t be allowed in traditional congregate shelters overseen by the Department of Social Services. The rules governing that agency state that beds must be separated by at least 3 feet, and also require a minimum amount of personal space per person as well as a specific number of people per bathroom on site. They also state that a single shelter can't have more than 200 beds, among other requirements.
Goldfein added that Legal Aid had been monitoring conditions at the facility and was in regular contact with the administration over ways to improve it.
Hanif said she’s in the process of drafting legislation that would apply the minimum standards for other shelters to the so-called “Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers,” or HERRCs.
“What are we doing to ensure that we're not creating this shadow shelter system that is its own, own entity without any rules,” she said.
Levy, the mayor’s spokesperson, said the city was doing the best it could given the unprecedented arrival of migrants. Recently arrived asylum-seekers make up about a third of the nearly 77,000 people in traditional city shelters and HERRCs, according to City Hall. Over 500 men were staying at the Red Hook site at last count, he said.
Levy said the city aimed to use the Red Hook terminal to house migrants until the start of cruise season in around three months. After that the men would have to move again, and the city was in the process of searching for other locations to relocate them, Levy said.
'We’re like sardines in a can.'
On the tarmac outside the terminal on a recent afternoon, men traversed a sparse parking lot abutting the Red Hook Ferry stop to get to the warehouse where they were staying. Some said they didn’t mind the change from their previous accommodations at the Watson Hotel in Midtown, and mentioned that the food was a big improvement. Others said the dormitory was warmer than they thought it would be, though some areas were draftier than others.
“We have to be thankful, they’re doing a lot for us, truly,” said 47-year-old Colombian asylum-seeker Gerald Rodríguez in Spanish.
Both Rodríguez and his friend Eugenio Caballero, 44, said they preferred the Red Hook facility to the Watson Hotel. However, both admitted that there were substantial tradeoffs: cots instead of mattresses, and a total lack of privacy.
“We’re like sardines in a can,” Caballero joked in Spanish. “Stuck up one against the other.”
Several Muslim men described having a hard time accessing clean water needed to wash their hands and feet ahead of their daily prayers, while a Russian asylum-seeker said he’d been waking up thinking he was back in immigration detention, where he’d been held for three months.
“You just wake up and thinking, ‘Where I am. I'm again in detention.’ You have like this kind of flashback,” said the man, who declined to share his name due to fear of consequences over his immigration status. “For me, it feels the same.”
Levy said the comparison was unfair. Unlike with immigration detention, he said, men are free to come and go at any time, and were offered free buses to local transit lines.
Armando, a 25-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker who declined to give his last name, fearing immigration ramifications, said the Cruise Terminal was more of a warehouse than a place to live.
“Nothing about this is normal,” he said in Spanish. “It’s not humanitarian.”
If someone you know exhibits warning signs of suicide: do not leave the person alone; remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt; and call call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. You can take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional.
