Last year, the city began placing limits on the amount of time migrants could stay in city shelters: 30 days for adults without children and 60 days for families.

The policies have remained in place even as the flow of migrants into the city has slowed. And they continue to draw the ire of advocates and elected officials.

“Eviction after 60 days is not a trauma-informed policy,” Brooklyn City Councilwoman Alexa Aviles said Tuesday. “Fundamentally, it is not.”

Aviles, who chairs the Council’s committee on immigration, asked questions of city officials at an oversight hearing Tuesday, arguing that shelter limits create chaos rather than stability.

Council members raised concerns about everything from inadequate case management to discrimination to student hardships. They also heard directly from migrants and from service providers.

“These policies make it even harder for people to move out of shelter,” Kathryn Kliff, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, said. “Our clients often lose access to their mail once they move, including vital immigration documentation.”

To address that issue, the city announced this week it will create a centralized mail center for migrants. It will also allow families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade to remain at the same shelter location after their second 60-day notice.

City officials noted the migrant shelter population has now declined for 19 straight weeks.

“Before this policy was enacted, our numbers every week just kept going up and up and up,” Molly Schaeffer, director of the mayor’s office of asylum seeker operations, said. “And that was difficult from a space perspective. We couldn’t open sites fast enough to deal with the more than sometimes 4,000 people that came a week. We couldn’t get staffing, we couldn’t get nonprofits. We couldn’t even get the big conglomerates to give us staff to be able to open sites fast enough.”

Now, the city is closing shelters like the one on Randall’s Island, and says there has been no corresponding increase in street homelessness.

As for the impact on schooling, officials say of the 7,600 students affected by shelter limits, 73% remained enrolled in the same school.

One council member stressed that migrants could boost the local economy.

“We want to keep these families here,” Manhattan City Councilwoman Gale Brewer said. “We don’t want them to go to Texas and Minnesota. We have jobs here.”