New York City is shuttling new arrivals into a different propped up shelter system than the general homeless population — a process that’s leaving older teens and young adult migrants without access to existing services designed for them, providers and advocates said.
Homeless young people between 16 and 24 generally have the option to stay in separate facilities from the adult homeless population if there’s room. Yet the city isn’t screening migrants by age other than distinguishing between adults over 18 years old and families with or without children, its own data shows.
More than half a dozen housing and legal providers say migrants in their late teens and early 20s have unique housing, mental health and education needs and could be eligible for other forms of immigration relief.
But they face a double-edged problem: The city isn’t formally referring younger arrivals to homeless youth shelters and the resources that come with it — and even if it did, there still aren’t enough beds to meet demand. That means eligible migrants could be missing out on help with school enrollment, GED resources or applying for a juvenile visa.
Instead, providers say migrant youths are finding these shelters through word of mouth. And providers are creating a network among themselves to help younger migrants secure youth shelter beds that aren’t subject to the short-term stays the city has imposed across its other adult shelters for migrants.
“All their focus is on the adult population and they’re not taking into account the youth migrants that are coming in,” Stacy Stewart, who manages housing services at The Door, a youth development organization, said of the city. “To categorize them and just automatically group them with the adults, I think it’s a huge disservice.”
Youth shelter providers want the city to boost their funding so they can help more people, but the Adams administration has repeatedly said it needs help from the federal government and has run out of room to house the 65,000 migrants in its care.
That’s left social workers, volunteers and homeless youth advocates scrambling to create their own informal patchwork of aid, texting and calling each other to find emergency housing placements or lawyers for anyone who comes to their door. They say it’s exacerbating the youth shelter system’s existing deficit of beds and the lack of a central processing center.
Providers say young adult migrants may have never lived on their own before or held a job, and are most likely in the United States alone and without knowledge of some of the resources available to them.
“They are more child than adult in how they interact with systems that provide resources to them, but are treated exclusively as adults by those very systems,” said Andrew Heinrich, founder of Project Rousseau, a legal and social services provider.
The city funds 753 beds for homeless youth aged 16 to 20 and another 60 beds for those 21 to 24 years old. But the number of beds hasn’t changed since 2020 despite the influx of new arrivals.
The Department of Youth and Community Development, which oversees the network of youth shelter beds, isn’t counting the number of migrant youth seeking services or how many qualify and says there’s no central referral process for migrant youth seeking shelter.
The department “continues to work closely with our providers and agency partners to ensure all youth, including young asylum-seekers in the city, are supported,” agency spokesperson Mark Zustovich said.
He said anyone ages 14 to 24 can access the agency’s services through its drop-in centers and connect with specialized resources.
Those who work with newcomers say more new youth arrivals are seeking their services in the last few months, and they’re increasingly arriving from West Africa.
Ismail Gangue, 20, arrived from Mauritania last month on his own. He was staying in an adult migrant shelter until last week when the city told him he needed to leave or reapply for another shelter bed.
“I need to do my asylum here because in my country, I’m not free,” he said.
‘Sent all over the city’
Samir J., 20, arrived from Venezuela about a month ago with his sister and her family, he told Gothamist. But when they requested a shelter together, the staff at the Roosevelt Hotel, the intake center for the newest arrivals, told him he was an adult and would be housed separately with other single men.
Samir stayed in a Brooklyn shelter until he was evicted 30 days later as part of the city’s policy of limiting shelter stays for single adults to one month, he said.
Samir, who didn’t want to give his last name for fear of jeopardizing his immigration status, work and housing opportunities, said he was kicked out at 11 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day and spent the next four nights with nowhere to sleep.
“From the Bronx to here in Manhattan and back — that’s how they have me, as if I were a toy,” Samir said in Spanish as he waited outside a former Catholic school in the East Village earlier this week, hoping for a new shelter placement. As temperatures plunged into the 30s, Samir said he slept inside an outdoor dining shed across the school hoping to try again the next day to get a warm bed. He was finally placed back in a Brooklyn shelter.
But Samir said he didn’t know the city sets aside shelter beds for homeless youth or the eight drop-in centers for youth where they can rest indoors, shower and wash their clothes while providers help them find shelter.
Most of the migrants who show up at drop-in centers say they heard about them through a friend, shelter workers say. Some don’t want to return to the city’s shelter system or had their shelter stays expire and didn’t know where else to go. Others are sleeping inside mosques, in the subway or on the street, and return to the former Catholic school every day to see if a bed opens up.
“We’re seeing about 25 young people a day that we cannot find a shelter placement for,” said Joe Westmacott, director of housing and benefits at the Safe Horizon Streetwork Project for runaway and homeless youth.
To make space for the new arrivals who come every week, the city has been curtailing how long adult migrants can stay in a city-funded shelter — both those housed in its municipal shelter system run by the Department of Homeless Services and the main emergency housing system for migrants known as Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, or HERRCs. The youth shelters, a separate system, are not subject to these rules.
City data shows an average of 2,600 migrants exit the shelter system every week. But while the city said that means its policies of encouraging them to find other housing are working, Westmacott said the 30-day limits are leaving young migrants navigating a byzantine set of systems on their own.
“The end result is that people are kind of jerked around and sent literally all over the city,” Westmacott said. “They might end up traveling from Randall’s Island down to the reticketing center, up to the Bronx to the waiting room and maybe somewhere else in between and they still end up street homeless.”
Shelter providers and immigration advocates are turning to each other, communicating via texts and calls to see who has an open bed.
“You’re just dialing numbers and crossing your fingers that somebody just happens to have had someone move out that day or that you’ve called at the right moment,” said Kate Barnhart, founder of New Alternatives that works with LGBTQ+ homeless youth. “Otherwise, you can just run out of options pretty easily and then there’s nothing to do.”
Barnhart said there’s also no designated LGBTQ+ space within the migrant sheltering system and sometimes queer migrant youth are in shelters with other people from their countries whose homophobia they were trying to escape.
‘Losing people in the shuffle’
In recent months, the city has boosted its efforts to help migrants in its care apply for work authorization, asylum and temporary protected status — a special federal designation the Biden administration extended to Venezuelans who arrived in the United States by July 31 — that gives migrants the right to live and work legally for a certain period of time.
The city has three application centers that have already helped migrants submit 13,000 such cases. But teen migrants and those in their ear say migrant youth could be eligible for another legal pathway: Special Immigrant Juvenile status if they’ve been abandoned, abused or neglected by a parent. It’s a much more complicated court process and has an age limit.
“If someone comes in and says ‘I turn 21 in two months, but I think I’m eligible for special immigrant juvenile status,’ like 21 is the deadline. That’s it. That’s when immigration needs to receive the visa petition,” said Alexandra Rizio, managing attorney for policy and partnerships at Safe Passage Project, which works to represent immigrant youth.
“We are kind of losing people in the shuffle even though we’re trying to serve everybody that we possibly can. And that’s just because we don’t have the funding,” she said. “There are not enough lawyers in New York City to represent the number of people who need this kind of help.”
The New York City Department of Education said youth ages 18 to 21 need to visit one of the referral centers for the city’s alternative school district to enroll. Students will usually be assigned to a transfer high schools for students who have dropped out or are behind.
Jaaxiel Garcia, 18, who arrived from Venezuela, said he only completed the eighth grade, but would like to go back to school. “If I get the opportunity, yes,” he said.
He was never told at the shelter that going back to school was a possibility, nor at the ticketing center, Garcia said.
David Miranda, director of legal services at Covenant House, said it’s important to consider migrant youth a part of the city’s social fabric.
“We have an obligation to young people, no matter where they’re from,” he said. “They’re our newest New Yorkers and we want to have them in the best possible posture to be as prepared as possible.”
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