Fear is still fresh in Carmen Sosa’s memory after her husband was able to save her drowning son.

“The river was taking him away. The current was really strong. As a mother you are desperate, we didn't know what to do, Sosa said.

The family was attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. Carmen left her hometown of Esmeraldas on the coast of Ecuador with her husband and five children in the fall of 2021, fleeing the violence that has plagued her country for the past decade.

They arrived in the city in early 2022 and are still trying to find a foothold in their new home. They’re alongside more than 140,000 other migrants that have come to seek asylum in the city over the past year-and-a-half. Finding housing, work and providing healthcare for them has been one of the biggest challenges facing the Adams administration.

Sosa recently went to Bellevue Hospital with shoulder pain.

“Everything here [at Bellevue Hospital] has been designed by New York City Health and Hospitals. We have doctors like me that are in charge, and they put together the array of medical services based on what we saw asylum seekers or our patients needed,” said Ted Long, senior vice president of Ambulatory Care and Population Health at New York City Health and Hospitals, the largest public health care system in the U.S.

Long has been tasked with leading New York's response to the influx of migrants.

The Roosevelt Hotel serves as the city’s main intake center for homeless migrants. NY1 got access inside where asylum seekers are screened for a variety of illnesses and diseases, such as Covid, tuberculosis and chickenpox.

Screenings for depression are another important component of the health care services provided to the new arrivals.

“Everyone who walks into our clinic, they're getting their blood pressure checked, but they're also getting a depression screening test. People have had really challenging situations in their home country, often have had a very difficult journey,” said Mahsa Slavin, a primary care physician at Bellevue Hospital working closely with families seeking asylum.

Those experiences, especially in the Darién jungle, still haunt Sosa and her children. She said she’s in the process of setting up appointments for her and her children to speak to a mental health specialist.

“They would ask me, ‘Mom, why did we do this? Why did we come here?’ Sometimes I have felt the need to go back because of all we're going through, but then I think of how much we suffered in that jungle. My husband almost died, as well as my daughter, and that keeps me here, fighting for a future for my kids,” Sosa said.