When migrant families were evicted, neighbors invited them home
NEW YORK — The migrant family rescue mission began with a simple but unusual request right before Christmas.
It popped up on a WhatsAppchat group for the parents of children attending the second-grade duallanguage class at Public School 139 in Brooklyn.
“Hello, everyone,” the message began in Spanish. “Sorry. Who could give me two large suitcases?” The woman making the request, Suerkis Polanco, explained that her family was flat broke and facing eviction from their “chete” in early January.
A Spanish-speaking parent wrote that he had a suitcase he could donate, but first he wanted to know what “chete” meant. Other parents chimed in with an explanation: It was a phonetic Spanish rendering of shelter.
What happened next underscores the many unseen and unheralded gestures that average New Yorkers are making every day to help ease the migrant crisis that has roiled the city budget and its politics over the past year.
They are reaching into their wallets, opening up their homes, buying groceries, digging through overstuffed closets, giving rides, donating their time — even providing medicine.
Migrant families living in tents at the Floyd Bennett Field shelter have received essentials like a baby stroller through a WhatsApp group and gotten help navigating some indecipherable corner of the city bureaucracy. Other New Yorkers have opened their kitchens so migrant women could make arepas to sell. A Mexican eatery in the South Bronx gives hot meals to asylum seekers.
“We’re fulfilling basic needs,” said Carrie Gleason, who recently revived a pandemic-era GoFundMe for Flatbush families to now
help migrants. “It feels like there’s a humanitarian crisis down the block, and I think the reason why so many people have shown up is because they couldn’t live with themselves knowing the suffering that’s happening.”
For Ms. Polanco, 33, who
asked for the suitcases, the crisis clock started ticking in early November. That’s when someone knocked on her door at the Brooklyn Vybe Hotel in Flatbush, which was housing roughly 200 migrants, and handed her a 60-day eviction notice.
The flier, written in Spanish,
encouraged her to explore “other networks” for help and offered to “facilitate your trip to another destination.” Her heart sank.
It’s not that she was unaccustomed to hardship. Along with her partner and their 8year-old daughter, Ms. Polanco left Venezuela and crossed the treacherous Darien Gap between South and Central Americas in the spring and sold candy on the streets of Panama to get money for the trip to the U.S.-Mexico border.
They found their way into the New York City shelter system in the summer, and believed they had finally made it.
Then the eviction notice came, just as their daughter, Camila, a bouncy child who blurts out English words in a strong American accent, was finally adjusting to her new life. They knew they could not afford to stay near their shelter in the Ditmas Park district, known for its leafy suburban feel and Victorian homes. But where would they go, and how would they get there?
A ray of hope appeared on Dec. 19 when Ms. Polanco finally worked up the courage to ask for suitcases.
Suddenly, in this Central Brooklyn bubble, New York parents were confronted with the real-world implications of Mayor Eric Adams’s shelter eviction policy, which forces families to reapply for shelter after 60 days.
Still, the most pressing issue for Ms. Polanco and several other families was finding a way to stay near a rare source of stability: their children’s schools.
Ms. Bockman drove three people, including one of her child’s classmates and her
mother, to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan to reapply for shelter.
“School is an essential oasis — they are the centers of our communities,” said Holly Spiegel, a P.S. 139 parent and one of the migrant assistance organizers. “If we want them to be successful New Yorkers, we need to make them a part of our communities and to not ignore the community bonds that they’ve built over the last few months.”
The Polanco family got a lucky break in the new year, when the city delayed their eviction to Jan. 21. That gave organizers time to start a GoFundMe page titled “Help Shelter Families Secure Housing!” that blamed the looming evictions on the mayor’s “cruel changes to NYC’s right-to-shelter laws.”
The Adams administration and some top Democrats oppose applying the law to recent migrants. It has been interpreted to mean that anyone who requests shelter can get it.
But among the parents of students in Camila’s secondgrade class and many others, the fund-raiser struck a chord. Two days in, on the eve of the eviction, the fund had pulled in $15,000.
Although some of the Brooklyn migrant families were told they would be placed at a shelter near their children’s schools, they were instead offered housing in Queens.
The next day, three migrant families walked out of the Brooklyn Vybe and into the awaiting cars of school parents.
Bianca Bockman drove three people to the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the site of the main processing center, where they
were to reapply for shelter. Her daughter, Amí, attends the bilingual class with Camila and two other migrant children.
Ms. Bockman, who speaks Spanish and is the daughter of a Colombian immigrant, told two of her guests — Laura Sosa and her daughter, Megan — and other displaced families to send her hourly updates.
Inside, Ms. Sosa and Ms. Polanco said, caseworkers told them that every effort would be made to find them a shelter near their school, so their children’s education would not be disrupted. But as morning turned to late afternoon, the tone and outlook changed.
One mother whose son attends PS 139 was offered a far-off shelter in Queens. When the mother asked why, Ms. Sosa recalled, a caseworker told her that the message being delivered “upstairs” was different from “the reality that is happening here.”
That did not sit well with the Ditmas Park parents. They decided to temporarily open their homes to the migrant families.
“We were like, you should probably just come back here and ditch that whole process,” Ms. Bockman said. “And then they came here.”
Ms. Bockman and her housemates hosted two families for the night, while Ms. Spiegel, another parent, took in Ms. Polanco’s family. By midnight, the GoFundMe had hit $17,000.
The fund-raising pitch was updated the next day to reflect that the three migrant families had decided to stay with three families in the neighborhood.
“We’re not sure how long that will feel manageable,” the pitch said, “but we are glad we could find them good places to land.”
By then the donations had doubled to about $30,000. A week later the fund-raiser exceeded the $50,000 mark, more than halfway to the goal of $80,000.
In late January, two families came forward to provide housing — a basement and an apartment in a threestory house — to the three migrant families, assuring they will remain in the neighborhood and in P.S. 139 until the end of the school year in June. One family has already moved in.
Ms. Sosa and Ms. Polanco and their families will share the apartment in Flatbush later this month. Their longterm future is uncertain, but at least for now, they have somewhere to call home.