Along the banks of Randall’s Island, dozens of people are living out of a constellation of tents, cooking over open fires and even bathing in the East River on steamy afternoons.
The ad hoc encampment, just a few yards away from a city’s mega shelter on the island that houses thousands of adult migrants, has grown in recent months.
Many of the people camping there say they did so after getting ejected from the Randall’s Island shelter when their 30-days ran out, under the increasingly strict rules implemented by Mayor Eric Adams to try and drive down the number of migrants in city shelters.
On Monday evening dozens of men and women, mostly hailing from South America and West Africa, milled around the waterfront, listening to Reggaeton, braiding each other’s hair, washing and cooking, while others fortified their tents with plastic tarps in preparation for Tropical Storm Debby.
“We’re here, awaiting what comes, because where are we going to run to,” said Guillermo Contreras in Spanish. The 23-year-old from Colombia said he’d been living by the riverside for three months. “We don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Early Wednesday morning, as rain briefly subsided, around 20 tents dotted the East River bank, while other migrants huddled under tarps using black trash bags as blankets.
“When it rains that hard everything gets wet. The tent, your clothing, your shoes, your food,” said Rafael Enrique Fernandez in Spanish. The 50-year-old Venezuelan spoke as he peeled wet items from his tent, splaying them out to dry on nearby tree limbs. “You have to sleep wet, and wait for the next morning to be able to dry your clothing.”
Residents of the riverside encampment described accessing water for drinking and bathing from a jerry-rigged water fountain, using public restrooms at one end of the park, and pooling their limited resources to cook communally over fallen branches foraged from the woods nearby. Those without tents spent nights sleeping on inflatable air mattresses, camping mats or cardboard.
“I’ve gone through the cold, the heat, I’ve gotten so sick,” Stefano Pachon Romero, 24, said in Spanish. He’s spent about five months living in the park since getting denied shelter when his 30 days ran out in the spring. The 24-year-old said months of living outdoors have worn on him. “I would love to have shelter, on Randall’s Island on a little cot, wherever it is.”
Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly boasted that “you don’t see encampments” in New York City that are commonplace elsewhere and regularly touted migrants leaving shelters as evidence that they “got on the pathway to self‑sufficiency.”
Many of the roughly 135,000 migrants who have stayed in city shelters and then moved on have rented their own apartments or traveled to other cities and states. But an increasing number are continuing their journey just a few feet away from their old shelters, on the streets and in city parks.
The Randall’s Island encampment has grown as winter temperatures have given way to swampy summer months — and as the new rules established a March court settlement limiting some adult migrants to one 30-day shelter stay, have eroded the city’s unique and longstanding right-to-shelter protections.
The majority of migrants seeking another 30-day stay once their time runs out are able to get an extension under other state protections if they’ve applied for asylum or temporary protected status.
But an increasing number of people who haven’t been able to submit their paperwork are falling through the cracks, advocates warn.
‘Not OK’
The city issued denials at 700 of the 14,500 appointments between mid-May and mid-June where migrants were seeking another 30-day shelter stay, according to data from City Hall. These figures could include the same person attending multiple appointments and getting denied multiple times. A spokesperson for City Hall didn’t have up-to-date statistics immediately.
For those who get denied, “it represents a communication failure,” said Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, which is monitoring the situation involving what he said remains a “relatively small group of people,” on behalf of Coalition for the Homeless.
“They reached the end of the eligibility process without understanding what was required of them. Whether, because they didn’t have any case work, they had never had any contact with the case manager, they have a literacy issue, or a disability or even they just couldn’t communicate in their preferred language,” Goldfein said. “The frustrating part is trying to figure out how this group of people are slipping through the cracks.”
Some of those camped out on Randall’s Island said they’d been unable to get appointments to fill out their asylum application — and then been booted from shelters because they hadn’t applied. Others said their applications had been denied, or that their vital immigration paperwork had been lost or stolen. Others still described not being blocked from shelter, but receiving a new 30-day cot assignment at the far- flung JFK warehouse shelter, and opting to stay outside the Randall’s Island shelter with people they knew, near where they’d been able to find some work, instead.
The Adams administration doesn’t want anyone setting up residence outside of shelters.
“That’s not OK,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said, asked whether she was concerned about the number of people camping outside migrant shelters at a mayoral press conference on Tuesday. “We’re not trying to be heavy handed, but if you’ve had your time, you’ve had your case management, and you have to leave, you have to really move on.”
From a Park to ‘a Skid Row’
Over the winter, the city saw a surge in newly arriving migrants and a wait for shelter spots that stretched to more than two weeks as hundreds of adults slept in streets, subways and indoor city waiting rooms without cots.
The number of newly arriving migrants declined sharply in recent months, coinciding with a June executive order from President Joe Biden that dramatically restricted who could cross the border and apply for asylum.
Still, the number of migrants living in city shelters has hovered at around 65,000 with relatively little change for months, despite the city’s efforts to shorten stays.
As migrants have hit the new time limits, some of them ended up joining what had been smaller encampments until then populated mostly by people who’d been booted from city shelters for breaking rules.
Advocates say that similar but smaller scenes to the one on Randall’s Island have been playing out for months near a Bushwick shelter, with around two dozen people setting up camp outside a community farm, as well as under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Neighbors of the Hall Street shelter have also described a recent surge in homelessness in Steuben Playground, a scruffy greenspace tucked into a bend in the BQE, several blocks away from the Hall Street mega shelter in Clinton Hill, where around 4,000 people live in several cavernous warehouses.
That situation drew wider attention earlier this month after one of the migrants who’d been living in the park, Arturo Jose Rodriguez-Marcano, 30, was gunned down, allegedly by a city Parks Department employee, the same night two others were shot several blocks away outside the adjacent shelter, putting the whole area on edge.
“Steuben Park has effectively transformed into a Skid Row due to the mayor’s 30-day and 60-day ruling that forces individuals to leave the shelter if they cannot find work within these time frames,” neighbor Mary Chang railed at a recent press conference in the wake of the triple shooting, where residents again called on the city to reduce the size of the shelter from 4,000 people down to 400.
“The policy is unrealistic and has resulted in chaos.”
At Randall’s Island several days later, three more people were shot, including a woman who was looking forward to becoming a grandmother, though the shooting occurred in an area removed from the shore encampment.
In response, the NYPD emptied the entire shelter out during the heatwave last week searching for contraband. They found none and made no arrests, Gothamist later reported.
‘Nowhere Else to Bathe’
The Randall’s Island encampment is seemingly the largest, due to its relative isolation.
Men living there described keeping vigilant watch over their belongings to keep them safe from city officials and thieves. Parks workers and police make the rounds daily, warning them to dismantle their tents and people living there say city workers — they weren’t clear from which agency — have sometimes confiscated tents and luggage.
One 24-year-old from Ecuador, who declined to provide his name, fearing retaliation, said passersby visiting the park often heckled or filmed them.
“‘Migrants, why are you invading our park,’” he recalled someone jeering as people washed in the open air with water from a bucket.
“We have nowhere else to bathe, it’s not that we’re invading your space.”
He said he’d found some stability in the riverside encampment, noting he had more space there than in the overcrowded shelter on the island that also enforces a curfew and that the public restrooms on the island were cleaner than those in the shelter.
“At night there’s a stupendous view,” he added.
Still, it’s far from how he imagined life in the United States would unfold. He’s been picking up day labor gigs from a Home Depot in East Harlem after police slapped him with a ticket for selling water bottles from a cooler.
“If we could get jobs none of us would be here like this in the street,” he said. “In my county I was a nurse. What am I doing living like this?”
The Colombian migrant, Contreras, said in his desperation after getting kicked out of Randall’s Island when his time ran up, he’d jumped a fence back into the city shelters to speak to case workers inside only for them to tell him there were no available appointments at the city’s asylum application help center.
“If I had all my papers I’d find a job and I’d be able to pay rent,” he said. “The goal isn’t this, I come from the fight, and I’m going to keep fighting to achieve my goals.”
Asked about people denied shelter after struggling to secure legal appointments to apply for asylum, mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia pointed to a network of legal services, and added that the city’s help center is only for shelter residents.
Enrique Fernandez said he’d applied for asylum and got a 30-day shelter extension, but was sent to the JFK warehouse and returned to Randall’s Island a day later after getting his phone stolen there. He’d spent the past four months on the river’s edge sharing a tent with a Mauritanian man who’s teaching him French.
He expects his working papers to come through in under two months.
“I’m waiting for my papers and then I’ll leave, to do what I came to do, to work,” he said in Spanish. “I’m waiting for that.”
