Apathy for migrants and the unhoused collide in New York City

“If it doesn’t work out, I’m going back,” said the Venezuelan woman through an interpreter. Since escaping her country along with 7.7 million others, she was running out of options for housing, and her desperation was palpable. 

She was one of the many newly arrived migrants from South and Central America I interviewed last year across Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of my work as a journalist. I expected these interviews to be easy, mostly because the assignment was out of my wheelhouse, and I didn’t fully grasp the enormity of the controversy surrounding immigration to the U.S. As a former service member who has seen nightmares before, I assumed I was ready. 

I was not.

According to the Associated Press, more than 230,000 migrants have come to New York since 2022, with roughly 50,000 migrants being housed in temporary shelters in New York City. Now under the Trump administration, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) halts payments for migrant housing in New York, it has become painfully clear how little the government values immigrants in a city that has historically personified America’s “melting pot.” For a land of immigrants, we sure don’t like foreigners very much. The callousness with which many people—including some Latinx immigrants—suggest that asylum-seekers and other undocumented immigrants should come to the U.S. “the right way” negates the struggles migrants face within their own countries. If your options are murder, human trafficking, threats from organized crime, or trying your luck at freedom in the U.S., it’s hardly an option at all. 

One of the most troubling horror stories I’ve heard came from a woman I’ll call Guadalupe. A native of Honduras, she had a family not too long ago. “We were happy,” she told me through an interpreter. Together, the family decided to go to the U.S. in mid-2024. Guadalupe’s husband died not long into the journey somewhere in Mexico. Before she and her son arrived at a Doctors Without Borders post in Mexico City, she was sexually assaulted multiple times. This is not unusual. 

According to Doctors Without Borders, anemia is responsible for many migrant deaths, and while Guadalupe couldn’t say for sure if this contributed to her husband’s death, she suspected it’s what killed her son in Texas before the pair could migrate to New York. There was no real time to mourn, she told me. Guadalupe didn’t want to discuss the topic further, and I didn’t push.  

“I used to want something,” said Guadalupe, a short woman with light brown hair and chestnut eyes. The pain and trauma she endured en route to the U.S. robbed her of the spark she once had. Now in the country alone and living at a tent camp for migrants in Brooklyn, she used opiates to get by.

Guadalupe’s shelter—if you can even call it that—is one of many that have sprouted up in large American cities to serve newly arrived migrants, many of whom have been bussed to the area by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The shelters are often horrific, and in major cities like Chicago, children as young as 5 years old have died as a direct result of shelter conditions. 

Before interviewing Guadalupe, dozens of migrants declined to speak to me. People didn’t want to talk about what they endured to get to the U.S. and what they encountered inside the shelter system. I was initially frustrated by this, and equally frustrated by how difficult it was to find an interpreter willing to enter the shelters with me to conduct interviews. Over time, I came to understand the reluctance. The conditions inside shelters were a dirty little secret, and now that Americans have made a hard-right turn on immigration, why would they care about their newly arrived unhoused neighbors?

Rather than addressing houselessness, the U.S. spends an extraordinary amount of money each year targeting the unhoused, including with anti-encampment and police sweeps and torture devices like hostile architecture and sound design. Through public policy and resource allocation, it’s clear our priorities are not with those in need, especially the unhoused migrant population. When announcing the preliminary budget for fiscal year 2026, the administration of New York City’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams trumpeted harsher border policies implemented by the Biden administration as a win for reducing costs associated with housing the city’s newly arrived asylum-seekers. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan told me that the government had data 20 years ago that should have ended homelessness. Egan has reported on homelessness for The New Yorker and worked with the unhoused community in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. In 2003, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies instituted four initiatives targeting chronic homelessness. Collectively known as the Collaborative Initiative Effort to Help End Chronic Homelessness, the government initially allocated $35 million to fund the effort—a paltry sum, given that states like California have on their own spent billions on similar efforts. 

Just as migration is a very American story, so is squandering resources that could help unhoused people. An audit by the city’s comptroller revealed in August that $1.7 million meant to shelter thousands of migrants was instead billed to New York City for vacant hotel rooms by contractor DocGo, a company notorious for fiscal mismanagement. 

David Giffen, executive director of New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless, said that when migrants come to New York, the local government tries to stop their right to shelter, a decades-old policy requiring the city to provide temporary shelter for every unhoused person who requests it. It was Giffen’s opinion that city officials care less about the right to shelter and more about the “crime of survival.” 

In New York City and other regions across the U.S., laws that criminalize homelessness have an even harsher effect on unhoused migrants, who can be funneled into deportation proceedings as a result of any interaction with law enforcement. In part, this reality first spurred me to interview migrants. Several months ago, a little girl passed me selling candy on a subway train around Times Square. Her mother followed closely behind, also selling candy, with an infant nuzzled to her chest. Among newly arrived migrants without work authorization, selling fruit and candy on New York City subways has become a popular way to make money. However, these vendors are operating without a license to sell—a crime that can lead to a $1,000 fine, imprisonment, or, in their case, detention and deportation.

With President Donald Trump in office again, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expected to carry out mass deportations nationwide. The target of these raids will likely be newly arrived migrants like Guadalupe, people who sacrificed everything to come to the U.S. and now find themselves homeless and criminalized in a country that hates migrants and the unhoused. Each day under the Trump administration comes with a barrage of distressing news. My greatest fear is what happens next. State and local authorities—even in so-called sanctuary cities like New York—have turned on migrants. When federal deportation forces arrive for unhoused migrants, will we even care?