The Roosevelt Hotel, nicknamed “the new Ellis Island” for its role as an arrival center during New York City’s migrant crisis, will shelter its last immigrant by June, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Monday, as officials dismantle the emergency shelter system they established nearly three years ago.
The century-old hotel in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, which closed in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic but got a second life as a migrant shelter, drew national attention in 2023 when hundreds of migrants waiting for beds briefly slept outside. As thousands of migrants cycled through its faded lobby, the Roosevelt emerged as an unlikely lightning rod in the country’s immigration debate: both as a reminder of the depth of the crisis and as shorthand for critics opposed to the expenditure of taxpayer money on migrants.
The welcome center in the lobby where migrants received shelter assignments and the hundreds of rooms housing families upstairs will close, city officials said. It was not immediately clear whether the hotel would reopen to tourists.
The announcement on Monday was a watershed moment in New York’s migrant response as the number of migrants arriving in the city continues to slow.
The Roosevelt shelter, which is housing 2,852 migrants, is one of more than 50 that the city has closed or announced it will shutter as the number of new arrivals has decreased. The city also recently closed two sprawling tent shelters on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and on Randall’s Island.
The closures have coincided with President Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has raised the prospect among immigration activists, lawyers and city officials that migrant shelters could be easily targeted by federal immigration authorities.
The announcement of the Roosevelt’s closure came shortly after the Trump administration cited the hotel in its decision to abruptly claw back about $80 million in federal funds the city had received to subsidize some of its shelter operations. The city sued the federal government on Friday, calling the clawback a “money grab” and disputing the Trump administration’s characterization of the Roosevelt as the headquarters of a Venezuelan gang.
The average number of migrants arriving in the city each week is now about 350, down from a weekly high of 4,000 at the peak of the crisis. Nearly 45,000 migrants still live in converted hotels, offices and warehouses across the city, down from a high of 69,000 in January 2024.
The mayor described the closure of the Roosevelt as a milestone. The hotel was the first stop for more than 173,000 migrants seeking shelter in the city since May 2023.
“The fact that, within a span of a year, we are closing 53 sites and shuttering all of our tent-based facilities shows both our continued progress and our ability, when faced with unprecedented challenges, to do what no other city can,” Mr. Adams said.
The city says it has spent more than $7 billion to house, feed and provide services to migrants since early 2022, paying hotels an average nightly rate of about $156 per room in 2024, according to the city comptroller. Migrant families staying at the Roosevelt will be relocated to other shelters, but it was unclear if the city would open a new intake center.
The Roosevelt, an 18-floor building with more than 1,000 rooms on East 45th Street near Grand Central Terminal, opened in 1924 and was named after former President Theodore Roosevelt. Guy Lombardo was a mainstay during the first half of the 20th century, leading the house band in the hotel’s grill. And its rooms became popular office space for the Republican Party, housing the campaigns of Fiorello La Guardia when he ran for mayor, and those of Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight D. Eisenhower when they ran for president.
In 2000, after multiple ownership changes, the hotel was bought by Pakistan International Airlines, which closed the hotel indefinitely in December 2020 as the pandemic decimated the city’s tourism industry, leaving the hotel’s future in limbo.
In May 2023, as the influx of migrants overwhelmed the existing shelter system, the city struck a multimillion-dollar deal with the owners to convert the hotel into a shelter. It was one of more than 100 shelter contracts the city entered into with hotels across the city, from large hotels in Times Square to budget spots in Queens and Brooklyn.
City officials turned the Roosevelt’s lobby into the main intake center for migrants seeking beds in the city. The hotel’s once-grand lobby, chandelier and all, was transformed into a temporary command center for city contractors responsible for interviewing migrants and conducting health screenings.
But the hotel also became synonymous with the most negative consequences of the migrant influx.
In July 2023, hundreds of migrant men slept on the sidewalks outside the Roosevelt after the mayor announced the city had run out of shelter beds. The city found more shelter space within a few days, but the images crystallized the city’s sometimes-chaotic response and the Biden administration’s lax border policies.
Later on, the Roosevelt and other hotels-turned-shelters in Midtown became associated with a string of snatch-and-grab robberies, mostly in Times Square, that the police attributed to a small number of recent migrants, some of whom lived in shelters. The police have said that some of them, including young boys, live in the Roosevelt and belong to an offshoot of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that Mr. Trump has railed against.
The Roosevelt also became a frequent target for conservatives upset about the use of government resources to provide free shelter to migrants at the expense of American taxpayers.
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