In January, the city began enforcing its policy of a 60-day limit on the amount of time families seeking asylum could remain in shelters.

After a monthslong investigation, the city comptroller's office said the policy has been carelessly implemented and had damaging outcomes on those impacted.

“The policy was implemented in a haphazard and arbitrary way,” City Comptroller Brad Lander said at a press conference Thursday along with other city officials outside of the Row Hotel in Times Square.

Lander’s report outlines outcomes for some of the more than 10,000 families with children the city has issued 60-day notices to since the start of the policy on Jan. 9 until April 28 of this year. Lander called the outcomes troubling.

“The Adams administration announced that they would exempt women in their last trimester of pregnancy or families with newborns from being evicted under the policy,” he said. “The policy was never established.”

The report laid out additional findings, including:

• While the 60-day eviction rule exempts families in Department of Homeless Services shelters, there’s no system to determine who is placed in those shelters.
• Families with kids in kindergarten through sixth grade who apply for re-intake after reaching the 60-day shelter limit are not placed in DHS shelters, allowing them to avoid eviction.
• Very little intensive case management is offered to migrant families to track their well-being.

A woman, who is originally from Venezuela but asked not to be identified, said she is living in a shelter at the Row Hotel in Times Square, but does not have consistent case management.

“We don’t have [lawyers], but we get help sometimes from social workers,” the woman said. “Some of them do help, others just say they don’t have information or send us to other places to find information.”

Among the recommendations in the report:

• Assign a new contractor overseeing implementation that offers comprehensive case management.
• Clarify policy for staff and families in shelters.
• Suspend the 60-day rule for good, at least until the end of the school year so that children’s lives will not be further disrupted.

The woman staying in the shelter at the Row Hotel has a 4-month-old baby, so her shelter stay has been extended until July. She said she plans to reapply for shelter at that point. 

“I’m going to have to reapply because honestly, work is really hard,” she said. “Right now, I can’t really work because I have two small children and I don’t have the money for childcare. I can’t leave them with my other children because they are still minors.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said the shelter limit is to help migrants transition out of temporary housing.

“Our 30- and 60-day notices are one tool in our very limited toolbox to help migrants to exit shelter. Nearly half of all families who have seen their 60-day notices expire, and more than 65% of all migrants that have come through our care, have moved out of our shelter system — without a single migrant family with children being forced to sleep on the street," the statement read.

The city also said it has already implemented some recommendations in the report and will consider others. Meanwhile, officials continue to call on Washington for a national solution to the migrant crisis.