A former employee of New York City’s largest migrant shelter claimed that hotels involved in resettlement are benefiting from the city’s shelter program.
Carlos Arellano previously worked at Row NYC, which grew from a four-star hotel to the city’s largest temporary migrant shelter just under two years ago.
Speaking from personal experience, Arellano claimed that hotel staff at such shelters were running the city “for whatever little thing they could.”
“And when you see 10 workers on the first floor of the hotel lobby, only two of them are actually working,” Arellano told Fox and Friends guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
“Meanwhile, the hotel will continue to bill the city for the 10 employees, and you don’t really know what’s going on there until you work at one of these places, but the costs keep going up for the hotels.”
Carlos Arellano, a former employee of the Row NYC Hotel, claimed that hotel owners were profiting from the city’s immigration crisis.
During an appearance on Fox and Friends, Arellano claimed that hotel staff were running the city ‘for every little thing they can.’
Arellano, who appeared on Fox News last year to raise accusations about the dire conditions inside the hotel, claimed that politicians and hotel owners “love this because the money is going around and around.”
The 1,300-room Row Hotel is among the Big Apple’s Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Centers, or HERRC.
The city signed a $40 million deal in October 2022 to purchase ownership of the building through mid-April 2023, making it one of the first downtown hotels to house solely immigrant families. It is now overseen by the city’s Health and Hospitals system.
He previously appeared on Fox News to reveal the filthy conditions inside the hotel, which has become the city’s largest temporary migrant shelter.
Toward the end of 2022, the city entered into a contract of up to $980 million with a trade group to pay hotels that offered to house migrants.
Participants would receive up to $185 per night per room, whether the rooms were occupied or not, an attractive offer for hotels still struggling to recover from post-pandemic plummeting numbers.
About 135 of the city’s approximately 680 hotels entered the Sanctuary Hotel Program.
However, this turned out to be a temporary solution to a much bigger problem: there was simply not enough space and now there was even less to accommodate tens of millions of tourists.
Last October, the city implemented a 60-day limit on shelter stays for families with children. Those who had not found alternative housing were redirected to the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center, to reapply for placement.
Last October, the city implemented a 60-day limit on shelter stays for families with children, driving dozens of families out of the Row Hotel.
While the order would have initially evacuated families around Christmas, it was postponed until January 9.
Dozens of families began leaving the Row Hotel that month, around the same time as New York City Comptroller Brad Lander announced an investigation into the implementation of the 60-day shelter-in-place limit.
In a letter sent to the City Council, Lander warned against “the potentially harmful impacts of the policy on asylum-seeking families, especially children who may be displaced from their public school as a result of being transferred to a shelter far from their school.” .
He criticized Eric Adams’ administration for “implementing one of the cruelest City Council policies in generations, evicting families from their shelters in the dead of winter and displacing children from their schools in the middle of the school year.”
Lander promised to investigate the use of funds to bus and transport immigrants and the impact of the order on the effort to obtain work authorizations, among other issues.
More than 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the Big Apple since April 2022, when busloads began arriving from the southern border.
Adams projects the city will spend more than $12 billion through fiscal year 2025, and the figure reflects the total cumulative cost from 2022.
His administration has been trying to roll back the city’s decades-old right-to-housing rule, which guarantees housing to the homeless, since last May.
Against the backdrop of the migration crisis, this rule put additional pressure on an already overburdened city, as tens of thousands of newcomers arrived without a clear path to employment.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams anticipates the city will spend more than $12 billion through fiscal year 2025, with the figure representing the total cumulative cost since 2022.
The city reached an agreement with the Legal Aid Society in March, imposing a 30-day limit on shelter stays for some immigrant adults without the opportunity to reapply for placement.
In March, the city reached an agreement with the Legal Aid Society, imposing a 30-day limit on shelter stays. for some adult immigrants without offering them the opportunity to reapply for placement.
The development came after 10 months of back-and-forth discussions between city representatives and the group, which represents people living in shelters.
Those two conditions that allow for an extension of shelter are whether a migrant is disabled or has an “extenuating circumstance,” although the definition of that term remains open to interpretation.
Young adults, classified as under 23 years old, will have 60 days to stay in city shelters.
According to the Legal Aid Society, the terms only apply to single adults and do not alter the underlying decree on the right to housing.
In a statement, Adams acknowledged that New York City had “led the nation in responding to a national humanitarian crisis” by providing care to more than 180,000 immigrants since spring 2022.
However, he continued, “we have made clear, from day one, that the ‘right to housing’ was never intended to apply to a population larger than that of most American cities that reached the five boroughs in less of two years.”