New York City last week reached a deal with homeless activists to scale back the city’s “right to shelter” law, easing some of the pressure on the city to house thousands of new illegal migrants.
Under the new agreement, adult migrants will only be allowed to stay in city shelters for 30 days, city officials announced Friday.
Families with children will not be affected by the agreement, and some adults who meet certain criteria such as having a medical disability will be allowed to stay longer. Younger adult migrants ages 18 to 23 will have slightly longer, at least 60 days, in shelters before being booted. Homeless people who are not migrants will also not be affected.
“Over the last year or so, the humanitarian crisis stemming from large numbers of migrants arriving in New York City stretched to the breaking point the city’s ability to comply with existing requirements” of the consent decree, the judge overseeing the case said, according to The New York Times.
The new rules take effect immediately.
Previously, New York had a decades-old obligation to give a shelter bed to any homeless person who asks for one. No other major U.S. city has a requirement like this.
New York City has seen about 183,000 new illegal migrants show up in the city since the spring of 2022. About 65,000 migrants remain in the city’s care forcing the city to slash its budget and open new shelters.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, hailed the agreement in a statement, saying the “crisis” has had “far-reaching implications” for the city.
“We have been clear since day one that the right to shelter was never intended to apply to large-scale migrant populations arriving without housing or legal work status in such a short period of time,” Adams said.
“This new agreement acknowledges the realities of where we are today,” Adams said, adding that the city “has done and will continue to do our part to manage this humanitarian crisis, but we cannot bear the brunt of this crisis along with just a handful of other cities.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is dealing with an ongoing crisis at the southern border, with hundreds of thousands of migrants illegally crossing into the country every month. In December, authorities encountered 302,000 migrants at the border, the highest monthly total on record and the first time the total has ever topped 300,000. Overall last year, 2.5 million migrants were apprehended crossing or trying to cross the southern border, according to the CBP. However, that does not include the more than 96,000 “known gotaways,” migrants who were detected but not caught, or the unknown gotaways.
President Biden’s approval rating on immigration hit an all-time low of 32% last month, and his overall approval rating remains low as well.