Guests at a Super 8 motel in upstate New York were kicked out without notice this week to make room for migrants being bused in from New York City, according to local reports.
Rotterdam town supervisor Mollie Collins told the Albany Times-Union that a Schenectady County official told her the migrants were transported from Texas to New York City before they were sent via bus to the motel in Rotterdam after the city signed a contract with the Super 8.
She said it was not immediately clear whether the motel stay was temporary or how long the migrants had been in the U.S. Their immigration status was also unclear.
“There are so many questions we have,” Collins said. “Because we haven’t been given any information.
“You have to remember this is a humanitarian effort,” she said later. “It’s human beings and you can’t lose sight of that.”
Schenectady County’s county manager Rory Fluman said the county was not expecting to receive migrants from the city and that most of the hotels in the county are already at capacity.
“We’re being told they are all asylum-seekers,” Fluman said Wednesday. The report indicated migrants self-identified as being from Peru, Venezuela and Colombia.
While the Super 8 at times houses people who receive assistance from Schenectady County Department of Social Services, Fluman said none of these people were living at the motel when guests were displaced this week. However, the motel was housing individuals who receive assistance from the Department of Social Services in Montgomery County, which neighbors Schenectady.
Guests were told they had to leave on Tuesday morning. New York City mayor Eric Adams’s office told the outlet that displaced guests were offered free “extended stay” lodging at another hotel nearby.
“Guests at that hotel were all offered to be relocated and booked for an extended stay at a comparable hotel in the same area free of charge,” Adams’s office said in a statement. “All but one reservation took our contractor up on that offer and instead preferred to be re-booked at the comparable hotel on a daily basis, which we facilitated.”
Fluman said he expects the migrants will ultimately seek help from the county’s social services system after the city’s help runs out. The city has offered to pay for migrant housing for anywhere from a month to a year.
State assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara accused mayor Adams of “thoughtlessly sending buses with migrants to (the) Super 8 Motel in Rotterdam, completely disregarding the fact that many of the individuals already residing there were struggling with poverty themselves and are now displaced. I am absolutely outraged by what has transpired.”
Santabarbara said he and town officials were not given a heads up about the plan by the mayor’s office and instead learned about the arrivals “through the rumor mill.”
“This level of disrespect and blatant lack of concern for our community by forcing this situation on us without notice and zero communication is unforgivable. The federal government must take action to put an end to this chaos,” he said.
Representative Paul Tonko (D., N.Y.), whose district includes Rotterdam, said in a statement shared with National Review that it is “never acceptable to kick families and long-term residents to the curb with mere hours’ notice.”
“The callousness shown towards these individuals by Mayor Adams and the motel is beyond belief,” Tonko said. “This is not about migrants — it’s about basic human decency and respect.”
“That we were only informed of these actions by the Mayor’s office after the fact makes these actions even more egregious,” he added. “We were assured communication, collaboration, and support to our communities throughout this process of relocating migrants. So far, that promise has been blatantly ignored.”
When asked about the situation at the Super 8 this week, New York governor Kathy Hochul’s office directed National Review to comments the governor made last month about migrants being sent to the Hudson Valley. She said at the time that she had told county executives her office will try to give them as much of a heads up as it can.
“[The migrants] are staying in hotels paid for by the City of New York. And so there’s some misunderstanding that this is going to be an additional expense for localities. It is not,” Hochul said then. “It’s the City’s legal responsibility to provide them not just a shelter, but the food, the services they need.”
She added: “So this is just a holding pattern until they’re able to start applying for asylum, or if we’re successful in getting those earlier work permits, which will change the whole dynamic. They’re anxious to get working, we’re anxious to have them working. We just have to get the White House and Congress to pave the way for that to happen.”
In May, the town of Colonie in neighboring Albany County went to court after a group of migrants arrived at a motel in town. New York City then sent buses of migrants to two hotels in Albany. Albany County has received more than 400 migrants, according to the report.
Several upstate counties, including Rockland County, are involved in ongoing litigation against the city over the migrant relocation program.