Politics
What a Photographer Saw in New York’s Migrant Shelters
For months, a photographer and a reporter documented what daily life was like for those living in hotels, tent facilities and former offices across the city.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll hear from a photographer who documented the rhythms and routines in shelters that are home to migrants who arrived in New York City after crossing the southern border. We’ll also get details on a plan for a 72-story apartment tower and a hotel across from the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Two of my colleagues — Luis Ferré-Sadurní, who covers immigration for the Metro desk, and Todd Heisler, a New York Times photographer who looks for ways to personalize big stories — spent months documenting shelters in New York City through the eyes of those who live there. More than 225,000 migrants have arrived in New York since 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending busloads of migrants who had crossed the southern border to cities in other states.
I talked with Todd about what he learned as he met and followed the people in his photographs.
You spent the better part of a year on a story about people in a sprawling system of emergency housing that the city improvised. How did you find the people you photographed and Luis wrote about?
In a variety of ways, mostly through old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism — just talking to people outside the shelters, we met a few that way. We wanted to give a sense of the places migrants are coming from and the different living arrangements they were going into — hotels, from the grand Midtown hotels to the smaller, newer ones like the ones in Long Island City.
Then there are congregate spaces where single men are living in former office spaces in Queens and Brooklyn. And there are the tent complexes, like the one at Floyd Bennett Field.
