In Line at St.Brigid

THE CITY'S CAMPAIGN TO PUSH MIGRANTS OUT HAS TURNED THEIR LIVES INTO AN INTERMINABLE LOOP.

- JAY BULGER and PAULA ACEVES

In October, a line started to form outside St. Brigid, a former Catholic school on the corner of East 7th Street at Tompkins Square Park. No one in the neighborhood really knew what it was. Soon, hundreds of people—almost exclusively men, almost exclusively underdressed for the freezing weather—began arriving around five every morning and staying until evening. The line became longer as the year ended, and by mid-January, as temperatures dropped into the 20s, it was more of a throng.

St. Brigid had been quietly transformed into what City Hall describes as a “reticketing center,” the first in the city: a place where migrants can be processed into a new shelter after their stay in another one runs out. Shelter stays never used to be time-limited. The city’s “right to shelter” decree, which has been in place since the 1980s, technically guarantees every person in need, including migrants, a safe place to stay. But as the migrant surge has continued—178,600 have arrived since the spring of 2022 with a notable recent influx of Africans who have flown to Central America and crossed the southern border—the Adams administration has been working to subtly push single migrants out of the system entirely. Over the summer, the city instituted a 60-day limit on shelter stays for single adult migrants. In September, that limit narrowed to 30 days. Adams seemed to hope the inconvenience of reprocessing would discourage applicants, and, in fact, the city offers anyone at St. Brigid a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world. The length of the line— with a wait time that can stretch to two weeks—reflects a colossal civic miscalculation.