Nearly 70,000 migrants crammed into hundreds of emergency shelters. People sleeping on floors, or huddled on sidewalks in the December cold. Families packed into giant tents at the edge of the city, miles from schools or services. And New York City is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a month to care for them all. This fall, an official in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams referred to the city’s obligation to house and feed the 500 new migrants still arriving each day as “our new normal.”
It is a normal that could scarcely have been imagined 18 months ago, when migrants began gravitating to the city in large numbers from the nation’s southern border.
The migrant crisis in New York is the product of some factors beyond the city’s control, including global upheaval, a federal government letting migrants enter in record numbers without giving most of them a way to work legally, and a unique local rule requiring the city to offer a bed to every homeless person.
But the dimensions of the problem — the $2.4 billion cost so far, the harsh conditions, the number of migrants stuck in shelters — can also be traced to actions taken, and not taken, by the Adams administration, The New York Times found in dozens of interviews with officials, advocates and migrants.
As the city raced to improvise a system that has processed more than 150,000 people since last year, it stumbled in myriad ways, many never reported before.
For most of the crisis, the city failed to take basic steps to help migrants move out of shelters and find homes in a city famed for its sky-high rents. It waited a year to help large numbers of migrants file for asylum, likely closing a pathway to legal employment for thousands.
The city has signed more than $2 billion in no-bid contracts, some with vendors that have been accused of abusing migrants. It has paid more than twice as much to house each migrant household as it did to house a homeless family before the crisis.
And again and again, Mr. Adams, a Democrat with a prickly streak, seemed to make his own job harder by berating state and federal officials whose help he sought.
“The timeline is a series of late responses and antagonistic postures,” said Christine Quinn, head of the city’s biggest network of family shelters and a former City Council speaker.
City officials note that New York has received far more migrants than any big city outside the border states and that only New York must shelter them indefinitely. It has met that obligation over 99 percent of the time.
“While all of us have expertise in serving an aspect of this crisis, none of us are experts in essentially running a refugee system, which is what we are doing,” Molly Wasow Park, the mayor’s social services commissioner, said in October.
But too often, critics say, the city has made avoidable mistakes.
The Pioneers
On the warm spring morning of April 13, 2022, shortly after 8 a.m., a bus pulled up to a corner in Washington, D.C. Passengers got out looking lost, clutching manila folders of paperwork after a 26-hour ride from the Mexican border.
At least six men continued to New York City, in a van hired by Catholic Charities.
They were, in a sense, pioneers: passengers on the first migrant bus sent north by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas as a stunt to protest border policy, and the first group of those migrants headed to New York.
More migrants came as the coronavirus pandemic subsided, fleeing destabilized countries. Venezuelans, whom the United States did not deport in the early days of the influx, arrived by the tens of thousands. Others came from Ecuador, Senegal, Mauritania, China.
Some found their way to a Catholic Migration Services office in Brooklyn, where employees found them sleeping outside. Aid groups sent them on to the city’s homeless intake offices.
As the vacancy rate at family shelters dropped below 1 percent, officials scrambled to avoid defying the court decree guaranteeing a “right to shelter.”
Julia Savel, then a spokeswoman for the city’s social services commissioner, Gary Jenkins, said that Mr. Jenkins pressured her to hide a looming disaster from the public. “We don’t have a single answer on how we were going to deal with this,” she thought.
(Mr. Jenkins, who later resigned, said last week of Ms. Savel’s assertion, “That is not true at all.”)
By July 12, 2022, the situation was dire. On the phone with a relative, Ms. Savel broke down in tears: “I really think we’re about to break the law.”
A week later, Mr. Adams made his first extensive comments on the migrants. He said the city “welcomes newcomers with open arms.” After all, from New York’s historical perspective, this influx was unexceptional. What was unusual was how many migrants had no connections here and ended up at shelters.
The mayor added that the city had “a moral — and legal — obligation to house anyone who is experiencing homelessness.” He was confident help would come soon from Washington.
Ms. Savel visited the family intake office in the Bronx and found chaos. “Everyone coming in spoke Spanish; everyone working there spoke English. There was a woman in labor nine months pregnant sitting on the floor,” she said. “Children were crying because they were starving; we did not have enough food. It was wall-to-wall bodies.”
The city had violated its duty to house everyone. When the story broke, it had a minor scandal on its hands.
At one City Hall meeting that summer, nonprofits told officials that they should interview all the migrants to figure out what services could get them into permanent housing, according to three advocates who attended. The city and its contractors began doing some of this, but city officials acknowledged it was a year before they undertook a more comprehensive effort.
Without doing basic case management, critics said, the city did not know migrants’ immigration status, what benefits they were eligible for or whether they might have relatives they could live with.
Mr. Adams accused Mr. Abbott of manufacturing New York’s migrant influx. Mr. Abbott insisted he had sent buses only to Washington. It never became clear whose version was true.
But the governor did shift focus: “Governor Abbott decided that if Texas was going to get blamed for recent migrant arrivals to New York City, we may as well be sending them ourselves,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott, told The Times.
Early on Aug. 5, the first official Abbott bus arrived at the Port Authority terminal, the city’s main bus station. By month’s end, the city was sheltering nearly 6,000 migrants.
Most were grateful for a place to lay their heads. They came because the buses were free, but also because New York was an international symbol: the place where immigrants could make it.
One day in early October 2022, it rained in the Bronx.
Less than an inch fell. But puddles formed in the parking lot at Orchard Beach, where a city contractor who had built part of the Trump-era border wall was erecting a tent complex for migrants.
Critics had warned that the lot was flood-prone and impractically remote. But the migrant population had doubled, to 12,000. The city, desperate for emergency housing, had “looked at 50 locations and found the best location,” the mayor said.
Besides, he said, “People live in flood zones.”
The city’s first solution was to drill holes and pump water out. Then it discovered that the parking lot was built on old lumber, landfill and barges, and at risk of sinkholes.
City Hall about-faced and found a new spot: Randall’s Island, farther south. But then migration temporarily slowed. The facility sat mostly empty for a month until the city took it down.
It was a herky-jerky, costly approach to crisis management that would come to typify the city’s struggle to keep up with the ebb and flow of migrants.
That September, the agencies that might have been expected to run a homelessness emergency, the Department of Homeless Services or the Office of Emergency Management, said they were too overwhelmed. City Hall held a meeting and asked agencies to volunteer.
There was a pause.
“We’ll do it,” said Mitchell Katz, the head of the city’s public hospitals. Early in the pandemic, his agency ran isolation hotels. This seemed like a “very similar undertaking,” he noted.
The hospital operator had been praised…