Migrants at the Midtown Hotel redoubled their efforts to fight the move to the Mayor Adams Orphanage in Red Hook.

Migrants gathered in a makeshift camp outside a Midtown hotel stepped up criticism of the mass shelter the city has set up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on Tuesday, saying it doesn’t meet the needs of asylum seekers and that they don’t want to leave. .

According to one migrant, some migrants agreed to tour the Red Hook site on Tuesday but returned to the Watson Hotel unconvinced.

The city hoped that the new Brooklyn Relief Center, located in a cruise terminal warehouse in remote Red Hook, would provide a precious haven for the roughly 1,000 migrant men who lived at the Watson Hotel on West 57th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

But many men would rather sleep on the cold Manhattan cement outside the hotel than move to a beachfront hideout for fear that the warehouse is running out of space. Dozens of migrants lay on the sidewalk near Watson on Tuesday, wrapped in donated clothes and blankets, but many were still shivering from the cold.

“We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters,” said Carl Garrison, minister of the Manhattan Church of Christ, at a press conference in which several advocates spoke out about the terms.

Migrants who moved into the Red Hook shelter will be left to sleep on rows of cots and forced to go outside to use the bathroom, Garrison said.

“It’s not a decent way of life for me,” he said.

The shelter, which opened over the weekend, has 85 to 90 toilets inside and temperature-controlled showers in trailers outside, according to Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mayor Adams.

The migrants who refused to move to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal are pictured outside the Watson Hotel at 57th Street and 9th Avenue early Tuesday morning.

The city has faced a massive influx of migrants in recent months, bringing the city’s housing system to a halt. At a press conference less than two miles from a hotel where migrants sleep on the street, President Biden touted federal spending on a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River, but did not respond to Adams’ incessant pleas for more federal resources.

This latest chapter began as officials launched a plan to relocate the men from Watson and repurpose the hotel to house asylum-seeking families with children. The migrants returned from the facility claiming it was inadequate and started camping on the street outside the hotel as they had already lost their rooms.

Video from the shelter showed closely organized rows of cots. The layout appears to reflect the controversial migrant tent that the Adams administration briefly opened on Randalls Island last year.

On Monday, Adams said the shelter was warm and had healthy food.

“Even snacks are good – we just need to stop worrying,” Adams said in the video. posted by his office on Twitter.

But many migrants seemed unconvinced and uneasy about conditions in Brooklyn.

“We are not only here because we want to protest – we are here because we need decent places to live,” said Keider Escalona, ​​a 28-year-old migrant from Venezuela. “That’s what we’re asking for.”

The migrants who stayed overnight at the Watson Hotel transfer their belongings to buses on Tuesday and head to the Brooklyn cruise terminal.

After the press conference, City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn Democrat, expressed her disappointment with the city’s efforts to communicate with migrants about the Red Hook shelter.

“One of the big mistakes of this moment is that the lack of information creates a level of fear that these people are being shuffled into the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, that they are being picked up by ICE, or that they are going to be detained. Hanif said, referring to Immigration and Customs.

She added that she also opposes the conditions stipulated in Red Hook.

At some point on Tuesday afternoon, two ambulances and a fire truck pulled up and the migrant man was taken out of the hotel on a stretcher. He did not speak, but was conscious, and it was not clear how he had suffered or what had happened.

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