How We Documented Life Inside New York’s Migrant Shelters

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I was overwhelmed by the whirlwind of activity inside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

The bellhops had been replaced by National Guard soldiers in military fatigues. Instead of a concierge, there were workers conducting health screenings. The splendid chandelier was still there, but gone were the tourists.

They had been supplanted by migrants from Venezuela and Guinea and Haiti, most of whom had recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. It was last February, and I had been writing for months about the steep influx of asylum seekers in New York City, and the city’s struggle to house them. But this was my first time inside the Roosevelt, the unlikely welcoming center for migrants seeking free shelter in the city.

The century-old lobby had become the epicenter of the emergency. And this was Day 1 of what would become an eight-month project to document life inside the country’s largest shelter system for migrants.

Migrant shelters have become common across the city. They are hotels in Times Square. Converted office buildings in Queens. Even tents on a Brooklyn airfield. “Migrant shelter” was not even a common term in New York two years ago. Yet the facilities quickly became lightning rods in a debate over how openly the city, and the nation, should welcome immigrants.

But most of us — reporters, New Yorkers, Times readers — had never gotten a good look inside. To scrutinize the oft-criticized living conditions. To see how migrants were settling into a new city. To document a defining and fleeting moment in the city’s history.

That changed when the photographer Todd Heisler and I gained long-term access to the shelter system this year.