Migrants report sleeping outside or on trains for days as they await shelter assignments

Dozens of West African asylum-seekers are parked outside the city’s so-called reticketing center and hanging out at Tompkins Square Park. Bundled in jackets, they ask questions among themselves about the future.

The East Village “reticketing center” is where adult migrants who have come up on shelter stay limits must report if they want to receive a new shelter assignment. City officials have said that the policy requiring adult migrants to leave shelter after 30 days and reapply for a new shelter assignment has allowed the majority of those people to leave the system. But those left without anywhere else to go have taken to sleeping outside the center while waiting for a reassignment.

A group of asylum-seekers from Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea waiting in the park and outside St. Brigid, the former elementary school that houses the reticketing center, on Friday said that they’ve rotated between sleeping outside the center or in the subway. Some said they’ve spent five or seven days waiting for an assignment.

Getting increasingly frustrated with their situation, several individuals said they planned to demonstrate outside St. Brigid on Saturday.

From Feb. 12 to Feb. 18 more than 1,300 new migrants have entered New York City, according to City Hall data shared with City & State. There are 216 shelters currently, including 17 temporary humanitarian emergency relief centers around the city. Since 2022, 178,600 migrants have come through the city’s intake center.