A former employee of New York City’s largest migrant shelter has claimed that hotels involved in resettlement are taking advantage of the city’s shelter program.
Carlos Arellano previously worked at Row NYC, which was converted from a four-star hotel into the city’s largest temporary migrant shelter just under two years ago.
Speaking from personal experience, Arellano claimed that hotel staff at such shelters gave the city money “for every little thing they could.”
“And if you see 10 employees on the first floor of the hotel lobby, only two of them are actually working,” Arellano told Fox and Friends host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
“Meanwhile, the hotel is still charging the city for all ten of its employees, and you don’t really know what’s going on there until you work at one of these places, but the costs are just being driven up by the hotels.”
Carlos Arellano, a former employee of the Row NYC Hotel, alleged that hotel owners were taking advantage of the city’s migrant crisis
During an appearance on Fox and Friends, Arellano claimed that hotel staff gave the city money ‘for everything they could’
Arellano, who appeared on Fox News last year to raise allegations about the hotel’s dire conditions, claimed that politicians and hotel owners “loved this because the money keeps going around.”
The 1,300-room Row Hotel is part of the Big Apple’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs).
The city signed a $40 million contract in October 2022 to buy out the building through mid-April 2023, making it one of the first Midtown hotels to house only migrant families. It is now overseen by the city’s health and hospital system.
He previously appeared on Fox News to lift the lid on the squalid conditions at the hotel, which has become the city’s largest temporary shelter for migrants.
By the end of 2022, the city signed a contract of up to $980 million with a trade group to pay for hotels that offered to house migrants.
Participants would get up to $185 per night per room, regardless of whether the rooms were occupied or not — an attractive deal for hotels still struggling to recover from the post-pandemic slump.
About 135 of the city’s approximately 680 hotels participated in the Sanctuary Hotel program.
However, this turned out to be a temporary solution to a much bigger problem: there simply wasn’t enough space, and now there was even less space 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 directed 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, forcing dozens of families out of the Row Hotel
Although the order initially would have evicted 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 to City Hall, Lander warned of “the potentially harmful impact of the policy on families seeking asylum, especially for children who may be displaced from their public school as a result of being transferred to a shelter far from their school.”
He blasted Eric Adams’ administration for implementing “one of the cruelest policies in generations of City Hall, evicting families from their shelters in the middle of winter and expelling children from their schools in the middle of the school year.”
Lander pledged to investigate, among other things, the use of funds to transport migrants and the order’s impact on efforts to secure work permits.
More than 100,000 asylum seekers have come to the Big Apple since April 2022, when busloads arrived from the southern border.
Adams predicts the city will spend more than $12 billion through fiscal year 2025, with this figure reflecting total costs incurred since 2022.
His administration has been trying since last May to roll back the city’s decades-long right to shelter policy, which guarantees housing for those without shelter.
In the context of the migrant crisis, this rule put additional pressure on an already overburdened city, as tens of thousands of newcomers poured in without a clear path to work.
New York Mayor Eric Adams expects the city to spend more than $12 billion through fiscal year 2025, with this number representing the total costs incurred since 2022.
The city reached an agreement with the Legal Aid Society in March that imposed a 30-day limit on the stay of some adult migrants, who had no way 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 migrants without offering them the opportunity to reapply for placement.
The development came after 10 months of back-and-forth discussion between city representatives and the group, which represents people living in shelters.
These two conditions that allow for an expansion of reception are if a migrant is disabled or has an ‘extenuating circumstance’, although the definition of that term remains open to interpretation.
Young adults, classified as those under the age of 23, are given 60 days to stay in city shelters.
According to the Legal Aid Society, the conditions only apply to single adults and do not change the underlying decree on the right to shelter.
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 migrants since the spring of 2022.
However, he continued, “It has been clear from day one that the ‘Right to Shelter’ was never intended to apply to a population larger than most American cities that would fill the five boroughs in less than two years.” live.’
