New York City plans to send asylum seekers upstate, infuriating local leaders
NEW YORK
New York City will send hundreds of asylum seekers to two upstate hotels to alleviate pressure on the city’s overcrowded shelter and emergency housing systems, Mayor Eric Adams said Friday after learning the city will get less than $31 million in federal aid for the local migrant crisis.
The upstate initiative — which involves Adams’ administration housing migrants in one hotel in Orange County and another in Rockland County — did not receive a warm welcome from elected leaders north of the city.
“This is absurd, and we will not stand for it,” Rockland County Executive Ed Day, a Republican, said in response to Adams’ announcement.
“There is nothing humanitarian about a sanctuary city sending busloads of people to a county that does not have the infrastructure to care for them. It’s the same as throwing them in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to swim.”
Day claimed he had learned Adams’ administration plans to house 340 adult male migrants at the Armoni Inn and Suites in Rockland’s Orangeburg for four months in hopes that they can obtain U.S. work permits and get integrated into the local community.
Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said Day was mistaken in his tally of the immigrants who’d be sent to Rockland County.
The city plans to house 300 migrants total between the Armoni Inn and another hotel in the Orange County city of Newburgh. Levy noted that the administration may scale the program later on, though.
Orange County Executive Stefan Neuhaus, a Republican, did not immediately return a request for comment.
The upstate transfers will be voluntary, and migrants will only be able to stay at the hotels for four months at a time, city officials said. The hotels they’ll stay at will operate in a similar fashion to the city’s Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Centers, where migrants can access some health care and social services, according to city officials.
Word of the upstate effort came after it became clear earlier in the day that Adams’ administration will receive just $30.5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first round of funding set aside for U.S. jurisdictions feeling the strain of the national migrant crisis.
That’s a drop in the bucket of the $1.4 billion that Adams’ administration estimates it will have spent by July 1 on housing, feeding and providing services for the more than 60,000 mostly Latin American migrants who’ve arrived in New York since last spring.
“This is both disappointing and woefully insufficient for a city that has carried the cost of sheltering, feeding, and supporting more than 60,000 asylum seekers in the last year,” Levy said of the FEMA allocation. “New Yorkers have stepped up tremendously throughout this crisis and we look forward to working closely with our congressional delegation to remedy this serious mistake.”
Adams, who despite being a Democrat has criticized President Joe Biden’s administration in an increasingly heated manner lately over the migrant crisis, said in a statement that the upstate hotel program is the result of “a vacuum of leadership” on the federal level.
“New York City has been left without the necessary support to manage this crisis,” he said.
Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said Adams has partially himself to blame.
The failure to secure more funds from the feds is a sign that Adams’ administration is “incompetent,” Awawdeh said, arguing that his administration filed its application with FEMA “incredibly late” — just four days before the deadline, as previously reported by The New York Daily News.
The effort to shuttle migrant upstate, meantime, is “irresponsible” and “Abbott-like,” Awawdeh added, a reference to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who Adams has criticized for busing migrants to the city.
“It’s unfortunate that this is the step the mayor is taking at the moment. Instead of prioritizing getting people out of emergency shelter and into affordable housing, he’s moving them further away from the services they need,” Awawdeh said. “We don’t want the city of New York participating in an Abbott-like busing situation. It’s irresponsible.”
The FEMA allocation for the city comes from a $350 million program set up to reimburse jurisdictions and non-profits across the U.S. that have helped accommodate the waves of migrants crossing into the country from the southern border.
Although the Big Apple is believed to have accommodated far more migrants than any other U.S. city, its award only clocks in at third place of all jurisdictions in line for cash from the FEMA program, funding documents show.
Above the city on the FEMA aid ladder are Catholic Charities of San Diego, which is getting $33.6 million, and Catholic Charities of San Antonio, Texas, which is getting $39.7 million, according to the documents.
The city of El Paso, Texas, which is where many migrants first arrive when they cross into the U.S. from Mexico, is set for
$22.1 million from the FEMA program. However, the county of El Paso will get a separate allocation of $17.4 million, putting the total award for the border jurisdiction at $39.5 million — also more than New
York City.
In its application, Adams’ administration asked FEMA to funnel the entire $350 million allocation into New York City’s coffers, arguing its need for relief surpasses all other jurisdictions in the country. The administration’s application also asked for an extra
$350 million from unspecified sources.
Beyond the feds, Adams’ administration has received a commitment from Gov. Hochul’s administration for $1 billion in migrant-related relief.
But the mayor has made clear he does not think that’s nearly enough as his administration estimates it will shell out $4.3 billion migrant costs by July
2024.
In 2020 and 2021, a Georgia-based labor recruiter traveled to San Luis Potosí — a Mexican province where close to half of the population lives in poverty — to find workers willing to pick blueberries at a Peach State farm for up to $1,400 a week.
The workers say that what awaited them in Georgia was a harrowing experience of forced labor in dangerous conditions with little to no pay — and not enough food to eat. That’s according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of farmworkers who took up the recruiter’s offer. Ongoing abuse, threats of violence and deportation, and the confiscation of their passports allegedly made it difficult for workers to leave.
The suit, a proposed class action, was filed last month in Georgia federal court. It was brought by three Mexican nationals on behalf of over 200 workers who legally came to work in Georgia during the 2020 and 2021 harvests through a federal guest worker program, according to the complaint.
Defendants include
MBR Farms, an Atkinson County, Georgia, blueberry grower, and two of its labor contractors: brothers Enrique and Jose Duque. The Duques and a fourth defendant, Maria Patricio, were among the dozens of individuals indicted in South Georgia in October 2021 in what may be one of the nation’s largest-ever human trafficking cases.
That scheme, which allegedly netted conspirators more than $200 million, trapped migrant workers in conditions akin to “modern-day slavery,” according to federal prosecutors. The investigation that yielded the indictment was dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion.”
Last month’s class action suit sheds additional light on the way the alleged South Georgia traffickers may have treated vulnerable migrants.
Plaintiffs say they had to contend with squalid, rat-infested living quarters, with some being forced to sleep on the floors of overcrowded trailers.
Defendants also allegedly forced the migrant farmworkers to perform manual labor outside the scope of their agricultural visas. Some of that labor took place in other farms, where Enrique Duque would “rent” out the workers he managed, according to the complaint.
In one instance, after a worker called 911 to complain about Duque, the labor contractor allegedly berated and threatened workers.
“He said, ‘[Expletive] idiots, you guys do not have rights here’ and proceeded to threaten that he would deport them and make sure that they would never return to the U.S.,” the complaint states.
Duque did not reply to emails from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution seeking comment for this story. MBR Farms’ CEO, Barton McKinnon, also did not respond to the the AJC’s call and texts requesting comment.
According to the lawsuit, the defendants’ treatment of the migrant workers broke federal human trafficking, racketeering and labor laws.
Jim Knoepp, a senior supervising attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, says that the allegations out of South Georgia are “pretty typical of the experience that a lot of [guest workers] have.”
“It’s a common thing that we see, [where] people are promised a certain level of wages, good working conditions, good living conditions and then they get here and find that it’s a different story.”
According to the suit, plaintiffs are seeking compensation for economic damages, as well as for “significant emotional and physical pain and suffering.”
The plaintiffs’ legal team would not agree to be interviewed on the suit, but released a statement saying Vedder Price, P.C. and Radford & Keebaugh, LLC were partnering to represent the workers. “We look forward to advocating on their behalf to ensure their stories are told and to secure justice for these workers,” the statement said.
A growing but controversial federal guest worker program, known as the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program, is at the heart of the lawsuit’s allegations, as that’s the mechanism defendants used to import their workers.
Meant to help fill farmers’ labor needs when U.S. workers can’t be found, the H-2A program has been booming in Georgia. According to federal data, Georgia had 35,205 positions for H-2A workers certified in fiscal year
2021, putting it only behind Florida for most guest workers in the nation.
Farmworker advocates say there aren’t enough worker protections in the program, and that violations and exploitation run rampant.
Agribusiness representatives say that participating in the program can be bureaucratically cumbersome, with H-2A requirements for employers including housing, feeding and transporting workers. Additional H-2A rules stipulate that employers must at least pay guest workers a wage high enough to not “adversely affect” the wages of U.S. workers. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor determined that such a wage in Georgia is $13.67 per hour.
According to the proposed class action lawsuit, the Georgia labor contractors not only failed to compensate workers as required by law, but they also charged them over $1,000 each in bogus fees, sinking them in debt.
Anxiety over that debt and threats of deportation and violence allegedly prevented workers from fleeing.
Also weighing on H-2A workers’ minds is the fact that their legal status is tied to their employers. In most cases, getting away from an abusive situation would leave workers not only jobless but also undocumented. That would bar them from participating in the H-2A program again.
Pursuing a court case or filing an application for a T-visa — a type of immigration benefit victims of trafficking are eligible for — is difficult because access to pro-bono legal services is very limited. Those who can get those processes started must contend with the fact that it might take years to see them through.
There are additional deterrents to leaving and coming forward, Knoepp explained, when the people in charge are connected to a vast crime ring of the kind described in Operation Blooming Onion.
“If the scheme is largescale and the people who are running the scheme are making a lot of money, workers start to worry about, ‘Well, what’s going to happen to my family if I speak out against this?’ “he said. “So I definitely have a lot of respect for people who are willing to stand up for others and say, ‘This isn’t the way we should be treated.’ ’’