Nearly half of the city’s available hotel rooms are currently occupied by asylum seekers and there are few rooms left to accommodate an expected surge in migrants following the expiration of Title 42 last week, Mayor Eric Adams claimed Wednesday.
But City Hall and the mayor himself quickly revised that claim.
Adams made the remarks in response to a reporter’s question about why his administration has moved toward housing migrants in school gymnasiums and other congregate settings instead of hotels over the past week, following an unrelated press conference. The city has used hotels as emergency shelter sites for housing a portion of the 67,000 mostly Latin American migrants who’ve flooded into the city since last year.
