New York City to shut down notorious migrant shelter at Roosevelt Hotel

Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday that New York City’s migrant shelter at the Roosevelt Hotel, which had become a symbol of the Biden border crisis, would soon shut down.

The shelter had become a nexus of crime, including the high-profile beatings of two police officers last year. At one point, it housed the migrant who killed Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student whose death last year galvanized the immigration debate.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat, said the hotel’s closure is a sign of improvement.

“While we’re not done caring for those who come into our care, today marks another milestone in demonstrating the immense progress we have achieved in turning the corner on an unprecedented international humanitarian effort,” the mayor said.

The hotel opened in May 2023 as the main welcoming center for all new arrivals to New York and processed more than 173,000 migrants.

Matt O’Brien, research director at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, said the shelter was part of the now-discredited approach to immigration during the Biden administration, which welcomed millions of unauthorized migrants and helped them farm out across the country.

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He said the problems at the Roosevelt shelter were “a clash of reality and fantasy.”

“Them closing this down is, in a certain sense, an admission by the anti-borders globalists that everything they were doing was not working. This was sort of the epicenter of all that in New York,” Mr. O’Brien said.

The Roosevelt closure tracks with similar shutdowns across the country, where officials say the flow of migrants has virtually dried up.

Experts say President Trump’s border policies are responsible for the massive change.

The White House says encounters with illegal immigrants at the border are down 95%, and “gotaways” — those known to have evaded capture — have gone from a high of 1,800 daily under the Biden administration to just 48 on Friday.

Mr. Adams said New York’s 4,000 arrivals weekly in 2023 have dwindled to just 350.

He said the city will have closed 53 migrant welcoming sites over a year.

New York has spent more than $7 billion on migrants over the past three years.

It established shelters in other parts of the state and bused migrants to those locations, even as it complained about Texas busing migrants into New York.

In 2023, the city leased space at a National Park Service site in Brooklyn and set up an overflow tent camp for migrants.

In September, the city said it had extended the lease another year. By December, Mr. Adams said he was shutting it down, and it closed last month just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The Roosevelt is listed as a four-star hotel in midtown Manhattan.

The Department of Homeland Security said the hotel was a base of operations for Tren de Aragua, the notorious Venezuelan street gang that infiltrated the U.S. over the past four years by taking advantage of relaxed Biden border policies.

The hotel made headlines last winter with a viral video showing a mob of migrants attacking two police officers. Police said migrants stomped and kicked the officers.

The hotel at one point housed Jose Ibarra, who killed Georgia student Laken Riley last year.

This month, New York received more than $80 million in reimbursement from Homeland Security to help defray the costs of housing the newcomers.

After top presidential adviser Elon Musk highlighted the money, Homeland Security clawed it back from New York’s bank account. The city has sued to ask a judge to return the money.

That clash aside, Mr. Adams has been more cooperative with federal immigration authorities and has promised to let them back into the city’s central jail.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has moved to dismiss a federal criminal case the Biden administration brought accusing Mr. Adams of bribery.

Immigration groups in the city have been aghast at the mayor’s new cooperation with the Trump administration.

“Mayor Adams sold out immigrant New Yorkers for a ‘quid per pro’ deal to participate in Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda,” the New York Immigration Coalition said. “New Yorkers have had enough and are rallying to demand Mayor Eric Adams be removed from his post, immediately.”