Q&A: NYC Shelter Dir. on ‘Complete Destabilization, Chaos’ Facing Migrant Kids

Some were separated from their families during the journey. Others were forced onto buses without knowing their destination. Many more witnessed death firsthand – the bodies of children and adults scattered along perilous routes to the U.S. border.

Of the roughly 200,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since March 2022, about a third are school aged children. Late spring tallies estimate at least 36,000 have enrolled in the city’s public school system.

But experts serving them say the sanctuary city’s approach to housing and by extension school placement – which includes new 28- and 60-day shelter limits for some families – is “haphazard” at best, threatening the safety and stability of children.

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“We deal with trauma all the time. We work in homelessness, but what we are experiencing is a whole other level,” said Henry Love, vice president of policy and strategy for Women in Need, the largest family shelter provider in New York City and the nation.

WIN is operating several migrant-specific shelters throughout the city, predominantly converted hotels.

Love, who holds a doctorate in developmental psychology, explained migrant children are experiencing compounding traumas: violence or instability in their home countries, death and uncertainty during the journey to the U.S., and housing instability in the city. They are still in survival mode, and many are experiencing PTSD while attempting to find normalcy in schools.

“We’re not putting the resources into these kids for them to be able to grow and develop in the best way possible,” said Love. “… We’ve been in this for two years, we’re going to continue to be in emergency mode. At some point, we have to think about what’s happening for these kids long term.”

In conversation with The 74, Love discusses what migrant youth are experiencing in the city today and the failures of the systems serving them, while cautioning against the creation of a separate housing system for migrants.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Thinking about this particular population of newcomers, what’s top of mind for you right now?

The kids. I feel like that’s been the issue from the onset of this. I’m a former educator, I used to teach elementary school. Just knowing what these kids have gone through, and how young so many of them are, and how critical this age is in their development … the majority of the young people that we have who are asylum seekers are under the age of 6 or 7.

My barber, who’s from Venezuela, came with his son. He’s 56, telling me the story: Seeing a baby get his head smashed in and dying. Seeing dead bodies on the way up through the Darién Gap . All this stuff. What does that do to a six year old?

This is what I’ve heard from every single parent that I have talked to about what they’ve gone through to get their kids and their families here. There’s base level trauma of what caused them to leave wherever in the first place. And then there’s the trauma on the journey. And then there’s a trauma at the border. And then there’s the trauma being shipped to New York. And then there’s the trauma of being homeless here.

On top of that, now for no reason besides to harass people, [New York City] is gonna do the 60 day eviction rule? There’s no words for just how cruel that is. What does this mean, for a population that specifically needs to be stabilized more than any other population, and we’re doing one of the things that is the most destabilizing?

How have you seen eviction orders play out?

I feel like it’s purposely complicated.

Basically, for the purpose of this conversation, we’ll say there’s two systems. Agencies that fall under the jurisdiction of the city are having shelters open up underneath them, like Housing Preservation and Development, Emergency Management.

Then there’s the Health and Hospitals system – unique because it’s a quasi-gov agency. Because of that, the right to shelter doesn’t apply the same way to them as they do to the rest of the city agencies. [The 60-day rule is under effect for families with children staying in NYC Health and Hospitals shelters and several others .] That’s also why we think that the Mayor is trying to get people into these places.

Most families are in facilities that don’t have a 60 day order, but what we are experiencing is horrible. What the city has been doing is sending all of the families out of Department of Homeless Services tier two shelters, which is mostly what we run and specialize in, and into migrant facilities. They are mostly hotels.

It’s short notice. We’ve had buses just pull up like “get on” and we’re like, what? What’s happening?

Same day eviction sort of thing?

It’s a same-day eviction. We were like, “we need notification. What — you want 30-40 families?” We push back on that.

There was also another incident where we got notified within 24 hours. We communicated to the families at this particular [Brooklyn] site. When we first opened this shelter in that space a few years ago, there was so much pushback from community members against the opening of a homeless shelter. Eventually what happened was like some of the community members did a petition and they allowed us to open it. After that, there was a much better relationship with the school.

All that to say that when we had an influx of folks coming into our sites, particularly asylum seekers, all of them went to this one elementary school. Their PTA has just loved all these families. When they heard about this [move] notification, they were like, what the hell? They organized a protest … It’s been beautiful to witness.

There’s limited things that we can do. We can’t tell them no, we can’t stop them. We say, we can’t force you all to get on the buses, but eventually DHS police will come. And that’ll be really ugly. I don’t have words to describe sitting down with the PTA moms who were asylum seekers — they’re begging me to not transfer them.

One of the women took her phone out and had this really heartbreaking story from her 11 year old who was at school and was texting her, “Mommy, I’m afraid to come home, the police could be there.” That is what these folks are experiencing during this.

I’m seeing that transferring regularly — from our facilities to another which doesn’t have the 60 day rule. But forced transfers like that, that are all of a sudden, are very inhumane. I can’t even fathom what’s happening for those kids. And some of them are having to do this every 60 days.

Thank you for sharing those stories. You mentioned this was happening pretty regularly, sometimes 30 to 40 families at once. How and when were you able to successfully push back?

I guess [we were sometimes successful] in terms of delaying, but ultimately, the city’s argument is, ‘we’re transferring to the migrant facilities because we’re gonna provide better services.’ We know that’s just not true. It’s unequivocally untrue.

We opened up a migrant facility, took it over from the city. They had minimal services. They didn’t have anyone that spoke Spanish on staff. Once we put our staff in who spoke Spanish – we only hired people that did – there was a line out the door.

They’re like, oh, ‘we’re providing legal services.’ No, they’re not. ‘Oh, we’re providing food.’ I’ve never seen more disgusting food in my life, and I have seen prison foods and all kinds of stuff.

Again, this is in the migrant facilities specifically?

This is in the DHS migrant hotels where most of the families are, but there are still some families in the Health and Hospitals sites. Those are the big ones like Floyd Bennet Field [in southern Brooklyn]. Floyd Bennett is not a place where a child should ever be. It’s semi-congregate, it’s unsafe.

We saw what happened when there was that bad storm a few months ago. Everybody at the last minute was forced to evacuate and sleep on the floor in the gym of some high school down the street.

Are there loopholes you’ve been seeing used to move families in other shelters?

No, because of the court mandate [of the right to shelter]. But my concern based on how the city is moving is that they’re trying to create two separate and unequal systems.

Every time they’re separate, they’re always unequal because they’re not resourced the same way. This is our history in this country. Their justification is that they’re providing specialized X Y and Z [in migrant shelters], which is the same thing they said for segregated schools in the South.

I think that they will eventually try to ask the courts and the powers that be to apply the 60 day rule to DHS migrant facilities. They haven’t done that yet.

It’s murky. This has always been my question to them, OK, so when does somebody become a New Yorker? Is it two years? A lot of these folks have timed out and are undocumented. Do all of our undocumented families have to go through this system too? Is it 10 years? When do they get to use the New Yorker system?

What have you been hearing and seeing about their needs that you feel like is being ignored right now?

The kids and the trauma — I feel like no one’s talking about the kids at a very basic level in all of this. This is arguably one of the biggest issues of the presidential election, and no one is talking about the fact that the majority of these folks are families with kids.

We deal with trauma all the time. We work in homelessness, but what we are experiencing is a whole other level. We’re not putting the resources into these kids for them to be able to grow and develop in the best way possible.

Like I said, they’ve seen violence where they came from, which is often what made them leave … then they come here and it’s complete destabilization and chaos. The only rationale for the 60 day rule is to harass people, make them not want to come to New York.

Some I’m imagining are experiencing PTSD in your care as well. How are they finding support?

The moms to me was a highlight – how they’re helping families navigate all this, advocating. Yes, I feel some kind of way that I’m getting screamed at by this group of angry Park Slope moms. But at the same time, it’s a beautiful thing that these women are out here all day fighting for each other.

We had a group of kids that went to Central Park and a couple of them freaked out. I’m like, why?

‘Because it reminded them of the jungle .’

So for us as an organization, we’ve been thinking about trauma informed care. What does that look like for kids that have arguably been through some of the most intense trauma on earth?

How we think about our colors, how we’re interacting with folks, language access. Particularly in our migrant facility in the Bronx, we tried to be able to connect folks into the community. Part of the reason we took the shelter was because of where it was located — we knew we were gonna get lots of people who were gonna be Spanish speaking and this is a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. Just being intentional, because I think so much of what has happened in the past two years has been completely unintentional.

It’s in emergency mode. But we’ve been in this for two years, we’re going to continue to be in emergency mode. At some point, we have to think about what’s happening for these kids long term.

Most places haven’t really opened Pandora’s Box because they haven’t had the language access, particularly for mental health services. And if they did it all this stuff would come up. What’s happening is that it’s not, and honestly, in the first six months to year, people are still in shock. But now it’s coming out. It manifests in these really weird and interesting ways.

We’re talking tens and tens of thousands of the kids that need very specialized support. They may not be able to express it in our language, they may not be getting the services that they need and, or their parents may not know or be familiar with how to navigate our systems.

[During forced transfers] the way families were interpreting it is that we were kicking them out and that they had to go back to wherever they came from. There’s just like this overall lack of understanding of all these systems and a perpetual state of terror. I can’t even fathom it.

I get my haircut, and [my barber] is speaking to me in English the whole time. I was like, how long have you been here? Five months. I’m like, you’re fluent. How did you do that? ‘I want to learn English, I want to be here, I want to work.’ We have not given folks the resources they need to be able to do that.

The wait time for work permits is also exorbitantly long. Can you share about the work that families have been able to find?

Honestly, I haven’t heard very many people who are recent arrivals, who came after March 2022, who have work authorization and can legally work.

People mostly are working out the books. Everybody’s working. And they have to, to survive.

More so for the men is delivery, which has been interesting. There might be someone who has a Doordash account and he might rent his out to like two or three other people. It may look like he’s doing 12 or 20 hour shifts, but he’s actually doing like, maybe a five hour shift. If you go to any of the migrant facilities, there’s just tons and tons of scooters and motorbikes because that’s what they do.

For the women, I’ve heard a whole host of different things like cleaning. The folks who are vending on the streets and so forth — we’ve seen that skyrocket, because folks have very limited options.

People find a way, working manual or dangerous jobs that are often exploited .

We’ve seen that. We do legal clinics and help them with asylum applications and there was one woman who didn’t show up because she was like, I will lose my job. My boss said I would lose my job. We’re like, well, you need to come here so you can legally work. They feel, but if I do, I might not have a job at all. They dangle [employment] over their heads.

Often, they’ll say, oh, I’m gonna pay you next week. And then they don’t pay the next week.

Everywhere you turn in New York, you see and feel this population. Recently a 14 year old who was selling fruit with her mother was assaulted by a NYC Parks cop ; NYPD have also been cracking down on street vending at large .

It’s a cultural thing. People are here and they’re used to doing certain things maybe in Honduras or Sudan and they can’t do that here with their kids.

Specifically in shelters, like not being able to leave your 17 year old child at home. You can’t leave anyone in the shelter alone under the age of 18. There’s a lot of these situations where it’s like, if I’m a mom and I’m struggling and I have my four year old that has to be with me and I can’t afford daycare, he’s gonna come with me and we’re gonna sell candy. [That cultural difference] is putting them in really precarious situations.

And then Mayor Adams’s administration … were passing out flyers about, don’t have your kids street vending. As if that was going to make people stop.

That’s a piece to this conversation, too, that I think people have not thought a lot about. [Families] may have been in a situation where they’ve never been under surveillance now they’re under hyper surveillance. Their movement restricted.

For a lot of them, schools become the most stable place in their new lives. Our prior reporting showed some of the relationships jeopardized by the 60 day eviction rule and forced transfers. Can you talk a bit about whether you’ve seen families successfully enroll and stay in a given school?

My barber was just showing pictures of his son at school, how he was so excited to go learn and have friends, be social and play. It allows them to escape. The one thing that [the city] could not do is to mess up the kids’ schooling. At least let the kids go to school.

In your experience working with these various city agencies, what has concerned you the most?

They are still thinking the way they did about this in August of 2022. Advocates and everyone had warned them about all this years prior. People knew this was coming.

It’s not Governor Abbott – I mean he exacerbated it – but it wasn’t just him. This has been happening for a decade, but people have chosen not to pay attention to it.

The thing that keeps me up at night is the election and Trump’s immigration plan. Now we have created these systems where basically we’re going to have tens of thousands of kids [like DHS migrant facilities]. Will immigration buses show up and detain people? What does a mass deportation look like? That’s the thing that worries me the most — what are they thinking, are they planning for this?

The other thing is the way that Adams’s administration has gone about advocating for support from the federal government and the state has been deplorable. We need more resources, we need more support. But [their support] has been haphazard, and they are not thinking about this long term. People are in mass migration around the world that’s not about to stop any time soon. It’s just an utter disregard for reality.

One last question — the youth that were in Central Park and were triggered when reminded of the journey here, what happened that day? How are they?

I don’t know what the rest of the story was. I heard about it because at our migrant facility, we created a program called LEAD, which is legal empowerment and assistance for displaced families. We provide legal support but also social emotional services. The director has tons of stories.

The asylum process is horrible. It’s the least trauma-informed thing ever – basically tell me about the most messed up thing that’s ever happened to you in detail. We had many people breaking down. We were very mindful of who it was happening to, making sure that they were followed up with a clinical social worker to get some support. How do we make sure they have someone with them that they feel can support them? How do we make sure that if they’re couples that we break them up [to talk] because there might be domestic violence? Making sure they have food, making sure they have childcare so the kids aren’t hearing some of the stuff that may have caused them to leave.

This is all a work in progress and for us, we’re trying to learn what a longer term model looks like to support families that are going through this level of trauma.

When I was talking to one mom, I was like, look, my hands are really tight. The best thing that you can do is tell your stories. People need to hear this. People need to see the pain, they need to see what you’re going through.