Mayor Eric Adams has issued an executive order suspending parts of the city’s “right-to-shelter” law.
According to Fabien Levy, a City Hall spokesperson, with the more than 130 emergency sites and eight humanitarian relief centers in New York City, the city reached its limit and "had to resort to temporarily housing recent arrivals in gyms."
“This is not a decision taken lightly and we will make every effort to get asylum seekers into shelter as quickly as possible as we have done since day one,” he said in a statement in response to our partner Gothamist.
Here’s the executive order @NYCMayor has issued: pic.twitter.com/WZccZSyiO2
— Mariya Abedi (@msabedi) May 11, 2023
The law, which has been in place since the early 1980s, provides shelter to anyone in need.
However the city's migrant crisis is draining municipal resources — with more than 61,000 asylum seekers being bused to the city from the southern border.
The city's latest move would suspend the provision of the right-to-shelter law which provides someone a bed "in a timely fashion."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently allocated the city more than $30 million in funding for migrants, despite city officials applying for more than $350 million.
The order comes a day before Title 42, an order that allowed the government to curb migration to protect public health during the pandemic, is set to expire.