New York City moved toward halting the city’s 42-year-old right-to-shelter mandate, asking a state judge to modify or temporarily suspend the law as its unprecedented migrant crisis persists.
New York City’s senior counsel Daniel Perez, on behalf of Democratic mayor Eric Adams, submitted a letter Tuesday to state supreme court justice Erika Edwards, requesting the court reconsider the city’s legal obligation to offer temporary housing to anyone who asks. The right-to-shelter consent order was passed in 1981, making New York the only major city in the U.S. to have such a law.
The letter clarified city officials do not intend to “terminate” it, though.
“We seek only the immediate relief that present circumstances demand. New York City has done more than any other city in the last 18 months to meet this national humanitarian crisis,” the letter reads. “The Judgment’s onerous terms are demonstrably ill-suited to present circumstances and restrain the City at a time when flexibility to deal with the emergency is paramount.”
The city continues to struggle to provide housing to over 117,000 migrants who have entered its borders since spring 2022, and that number is only expected to rise. With only 210 shelter sites open, government officials are overwhelmed by the record influx of asylum-seekers as Adams continues pressing for federal and state aid.
The recent letter is part of Adams’s ongoing attempt to weaken the city’s right-to-shelter mandate, arguing it “has become outmoded and cumbersome in the face of the present migrant crisis.” In May, Adams filed a court motion to modify the law. Deputy chief administrative judge Deborah Kaplan agreed to let the case move forward and assigned it to Edwards.
Despite his calling for limitations to be put on the mandate, Adams slammed Staten Island judge Wayne Ozzi’s ruling last week for banning the city from using a former Catholic school as a migrant shelter. Ozzi’s decision, as Adams’s office put it, “threatens to disrupt efforts to manage this national humanitarian crisis” and “jeopardizes our ability to continue providing shelter at that scale.”
On Wednesday, Adams started a four-day trip to Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador in order to dissuade potential migrants from traveling to New York City after crossing the southern border, according to Politico. “We want to give people a true picture of what is here,” Adams said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We are at capacity.”
While visiting the three nations in Central and South America, the mayor will appear on radio stations, television channels, and in local newspapers as part of a campaign effort to combat misinformation about the city’s employment and luxury opportunities which are originating from migrant smugglers and social-media platforms.
“We need to counteract those forms of communications that are basically saying, ‘You come to the City of New York, you’re going to automatically have a job, you’re going to be in a five star hotel,'” Adams added.
Still, he called an open southern border “the official position of the city.”