NEW YORK -- A chaotic scene was playing out at a Hell's Kitchen hotel Monday as some asylum-seekers who have been living there are refusing to be transferred to Mayor Eric Adams' new migrant shelter in Brooklyn and instead opting to sleep in tents on the hotel's sidewalk, according to homeless advocates and city officials.
The Adams administration started moving migrants on Saturday from the Watson Hotel on W. 57th Street near Ninth Avenue to its newly built Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on the Red Hook waterfront.
More than 1,000 male, mostly Latin American migrants have been staying at the Watson for weeks, and the administration initially planned to get them all transferred to the Red Hook facility by today, said Joshua Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Homeless Rights Project.
But that timeline now appears to be up in the air as the planned transfers have been met with resistance from the asylum-seekers, Goldfein and other advocates who've been at the hotel since Sunday told the Daily News.
Some of the first migrants taken to Red Hook were shocked by the conditions at the site and turned back around, said Ariadna Phillips, founder of the South Bronx Mutual Aid advocacy group.
"They said it was freezing inside, that there were no blankets and they fled. The conditions are inhumane and they don't comply with right-to-shelter," Phillips said, referring to the local law that requires the city to provide "decent" shelter for anyone who needs it. "They described it as prison conditions, they said it was like the detention camps on the southern border, and they fled back to the hotel."
A spokesman for Adams disputed Phillips' account about conditions inside the Red Hook shelter, which has capacity for 1,000 people and is located in one of the warehouses at the cruise ship terminal.
"Of course the building at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal is heated," the spokesman said. "It is a temperature-controlled structure like any other indoor facility."
Videos posted on social media from inside the Red Hook facility shows hundreds of beds lined up in tight rows, without any privacy partitions.
Phillips said her group has been told by migrants at the site that shower facilities are in a separate building. "So residents have to exit into the cold to shower [and] return wet ..." she said.
The migrants who returned to the Watson after being admitted at the Red Hook site were told they could not get their hotel rooms back, Goldfein said.
That created a tense situation, as those migrants stuck around anyway demanding to get their rooms back, according to advocates. Goldfein and Phillips said they had both spoken to migrants who were shut out of their hotel rooms before being able to retrieve their belongings.
Some of the migrants removed from the hotel proceeded to set up tents on the sidewalk, where they spent the night Sunday, according to advocates. The tents were still there Monday morning, and some migrants were seen sleeping directly on the sidewalk despite the January weather.
Amid the commotion, New York Police Department officers were called to the hotel late Sunday, an Adams spokesman confirmed.
"The NYPD only responded yesterday after individuals who are not asylum-seekers assigned to the Watson Hotel began rushing the hotel and trying to enter spaces that they were not authorized to enter," the spokesman said.
The NYPD said no arrests were made.
According to Goldfein, hundreds of migrants still resided in hotel rooms at the Watson as of Monday morning, and it was not immediately clear what will happen to them. Advocates were expected to hold a rally outside the hotel on Monday afternoon.
The Adams spokesman accused advocacy groups of instigating the Watson chaos.
"It looks like the disruption outside the Watson Hotel yesterday was organized by local organizations and individuals who have repeatedly sought to stop our efforts to support the 42,000+ asylum-seekers here in New York City," the spokesman said.