On Wednesday, the Democratic Party administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched an assault on migrants, evicting adults from city shelters who have been denied extensions to stay beyond 30 days based on new rules announced in March.

According to news reports, the first series of evictions are impacting adult migrants without children who were notified one month ago that the city will no longer pay to house them in hotels, tent dormitories and other buildings maintained under the city’s right-to-shelter mandate. Those being evicted by the city have been denied requests for an extension of their shelter stays to 60 days because they do not qualify for any of the “extenuating circumstances” enumerated by the city.

Among the requirements to be granted an extension are showing documentation to city officials that “significant efforts” have been made to leave the shelter system such as meeting with legal providers or city case workers, applying for asylum, searching for a job or obtaining a government ID.

A report in the New York Times on Wednesday said:

The new policy, which goes into effect on a rolling basis, will initially apply to about 250 migrants this week. City officials said on Wednesday that they had denied extension requests to 74 migrants and had granted 118 extensions so far. Those denied extensions will be forced to leave the shelters.

The Times report says that the plan is being phased in and will eventually cover all 15,000 adult migrants in the city shelter system. In all, there are 65,000 people housed in shelters in New York City, most of whom are families with children.

The housing crisis in the nation’s largest city of 8.3 million people has become the focus of the Adams administration’s right-wing attack on migrants, which is designed to blame exorbitant rents and a lack of affordable housing—longstanding problems—on the arrival of 200,000 migrants in the city since the spring of 2022.

In a characteristically reactionary manner, Mayor Adams responded to criticism of his cruel attack on a most vulnerable section of the population by saying, “People said it’s inhumane to put people out during the wintertime, so now they say it’s inhumane to do it in the summertime. There’s no good time.”

Adams made his comment knowing full well that he had argued in court last October that the city’s right-to-shelter requirement, which has been on the books since 1981, should be suspended entirely. At that time, Adams said that removing the guarantee of shelter for migrants would send a message “to those seeking to come to the United States, to be upfront that New York City cannot single-handedly provide care to everyone crossing our border.”

New York City is not the only US city evicting migrants from shelters. As reported by the WSWS in February, hundreds of migrants were discharged in Denver under new regulations adopted by the Democratic Party administration of Mayor Mike Johnston that allow families up to a maximum of six weeks and migrants without children just 14 days to stay in a shelter in the city. Of the 40,000 migrants, many of them from Venezuela, who have arrived over the past two years, 3,800 are living in shelters.

The draconian evictions in New York City have been condemned by immigrant rights organizations. Speaking on a panel earlier this month, Deborah Berkman, a project director at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said, “[I]t seems extremely likely that we will see an increase in street homelessness.” 

Berkman continued:

It is hard for me to understand how within the first 30 days someone’s in the country, they’re going to be able to find work. Maybe some of them will be able to find some place to stay, but it’s very likely that some of them will not.

The measures being carried out in New York and Denver are part of increasing attacks on immigrants spearheaded at the national level by the Biden White House and by the Democratic Party Congressional leadership. The assault on the rights of migrants to enter and live in the US is a central part of the Biden administration’s strategy of proving to the fascistic and xenophobic Republican Party its anti-immigrant credentials in order to win approval for more funding and weapons for the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On Wednesday, before moving the Democrats’ immigration and border security bill in the Senate for a second time, which was defeated again by a vote of 43 to 50, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said:

Three months ago Donald Trump told his Republican allies to block the strongest border security bill Congress has seen in a generation. Luckily, we are trying again tomorrow, and I hope this time Republicans join us to achieve a different outcome.

Schumer went on:

We don’t expect every Republican or every Democrat to support this bill, it wasn’t designed that way ... It was intended to be a compromise that could pass and become law ... We need to have strong border support ...

In a statement issued by the White House after the Senate vote, President Biden made clear his stance against the fundamental rights of immigrants. He said:

Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system. If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.

Biden added that “while Congressional Republicans are choosing to stand in the way of border enforcement, I will not stop fighting to deliver the resources that border and immigration personnel need. ... We must make our border more secure ...”

Migrants in New York City who spoke to the WSWS said some of the biggest issues they face is uncertainty and a general feeling of uneasiness. Most do not have steady employment. Many who are employed work for food delivery firms such Uber Eats and DoorDash for long hours and low pay. The 11:00 p.m. curfew at shelters makes this work more difficult as the busiest hours tend to be in the evening.

Many of the hotel shelters require migrants to be out of the rooms during the day. Some only restrict males from being in the room during the day. This often leads to migrants milling about on the street or in the parking lot all day long. In extreme weather, the migrants are packed into hotel lobbies during the day, which makes for miserable conditions.

A number of migrants spoke about the lack of privacy in the shelters.

The latest crackdown on migrants by the Adams government will only intensify the housing crisis in the city under conditions where rents in NYC are rising, according to a recent study, seven times faster than salaries.