Migrants ousted from city shelters due to new time limits are being offered free tickets out of NYC or being sent to so-called “waiting rooms” at local shelters with no assurance they’ll get a new bed, the latest signs the crisis is crashing the city’s social safety net system.

A newly-established “reticketing office” in Manhattan’s East Village is among the latest frontiers in the crisis, where migrants who spoke with the Daily News Monday said they went there after being told that’s where they could reapply for new city shelter beds. Their visits came after the expatriations of their 30- and 60-day allowances to stay in a city shelter — a policy enacted by Mayor Adams as a result of lack of space.

But once they arrived at the office, which is operating out of an old Catholic school on E. 7th Street, they were told the only option available there was accepting free tickets to any city in the country, Java Juarez, a 47-year-old Nicaraguan migrant, told The News.

Other migrants have been sent to a waiting room that’s described by Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, as makeshift with no beds.

Juarez showed The News a notice he received listing the address of the reticketing office as among a handful of sites he could go to should he need “further assistance” after being removed from his old placement in a Queens shelter due to his 30-day notice coming due.

Josephine Stratman / New York Daily News

Java Juárez holds a photo of a notice plastered on a shelter in Queens, where he was living until Monday, Oct. 30, 2023. (Josephine Stratman / New York Daily News)

“These are the places that [shelter workers] told me I can go to get relocated, but I come to these places and they tell me they can’t. None of this is right. All of the addresses are wrong,” said Juarez.

He said he does not want to leave New York as he has already applied for asylum and received an immigration court date for next year.

“I don’t know where they’ll send me,” he continued, “I don’t know if I’ll have to sleep in a tent. I don’t know if I’ll be out in the cold, if they’ll give me a tent.”

Last week, Mayor Adams said the city might be forced to provide migrants sleeping tents instead of lodgings if the shelter population swells.

Bryan Pazmiño, a migrant from Ecuador, came to the East Village location thinking he’d also be able to land a bed for the night after saying he has spent the past two weeks sleeping in a train station in Manhattan.

But Pazmiño, 26, said he was also informed that only reticketing was available.

“They send you from here, to here, to here,” Pazmiño said. “And they’ll give us refuge, but after a month, they’ll kick you out of there and you have to come back here, and they send you to another one until they kick you out again.”

Adams administration officials have previously said migrants should go to the city’s Roosevelt Hotel asylum seeker intake center if they need shelter.

But Legal Aid Society attorney Josh Goldfein, whose fighting the Adams administration in court over its push to suspend the city’s right to shelter, said he understands from speaking to migrants that many of them are sent directly to the reticketing site once their 60- or 30-day notices come due.

“The Roosevelt is off limits to them now,” Goldfein said.

A City Hall spokeswoman said she could not immediately comment on why migrants are being told they can reapply for new shelter beds at the reticketing site.

The spokeswoman did say the administration has offered reticketing services to migrants throughout the crisis, which started in the spring of 2022, as thousands of mostly Latin American nationals started arriving in the city in hopes of seeking asylum. The spokeswoman said she could not immediately provide data on how many migrants the administration has sent to other cities so far.

According to data from Adams’ office, more than 64,000 migrants remain in the city’s care, on top of nearly as many homeless New Yorkers who are also in city shelters. Predicting that the crisis could cost the city as much as $12 billion by mid-2025, Adams has said repeatedly that state and federal government partners need to help out more as hundreds of new migrants keep arriving every week.

Mayor Eric Adams flanked by City Commissioner is pictured during his week off topic press conference at City Hall Blue Room, Tuesday October 10, 2023. During the press conference hizzoner discussed his recent trip to South America to see with his own eyes the flow of migrants in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico and meet with listed countries officials.(Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News)

Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News

Mayor Eric Adams

“It’s not ‘if’ people will be sleeping on the streets, it’s ‘when,’” the mayor said last week.

Gov. Hochul, meantime, told reporters in the Bronx on Monday it’s mostly up to the federal government to see to it that fewer migrants make it to New York because the “rate is unsustainable.”

“I support the mayor’s efforts to let people know that we are at capacity,” the governor said. “There will be more support next year…but I just want to make sure that we’re managing expectations, because I also have to manage an entire budget that funds education, health care, childcare and other services that New Yorkers want to make sure are not cut.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul (Don Pollard/Office of the Governor)
Governor Kathy Hochul

The first iteration of the 60- and 30-day policies were implemented by the mayor in July, with Adams saying single adult migrants could only stay in the same shelter bed for 60 consecutive days before they’d need to reapply for a new placement if they were unsuccessful in finding their own “alternative housing” in the interim.

Since then, the administration has decreased the number of consecutive days single adult migrants can stay in the same shelter placement to 30 days, and put migrant families with children on a 60-day clock.

As first reported by the news outlet The City last week, some migrants whose notices are coming due have been sent to “waiting rooms” where they’re supposed to stay until a proper shelter placement becomes available.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that one such waiting room in the Bronx doesn’t have any beds and that migrants are told to sleep on the floor if they need to. Other migrants have been sleeping for days on the floor of another waiting room operating out of an old church in Astoria, Queens, according to the report.

Adams administration officials say the 60- and 30-day notice policies are having their intended effect as several hundred migrants have accepted offers to relocate to other cities so far.

Petter Aguliar, a 24-year-old Venezuelan migrant, is among them. Speaking to The News outside the East Village office, Aguilar said he accepted a ticket to Los Angeles, where he hopes to find work after spending the past two months in a Queens shelter.

“I just came here to get a ticket to leave New York,” he said. “I’m going to work.”

With Michael Gartland and Tim Balk

Josephine Stratman, Chris Sommerfeldt

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