After his arrival at New York Since a long trip on buses sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a group of migrants, including Venezuelans and Dominicans, go door to door through a Staten Island neighborhood begging for food, clothing and jobs.
Among them is the Dominican Enrique Reynoso who, together with his wife Yudellka Encarnacion, 22, and their young son emigrated to the country, but the help has been insufficient, if not absent.
Before we came here they told us that a social worker would come to help us,” Reynoso said, “but most of what he tells us is: “I don’t have that information for you,” he added.
For Enrique and his wife, the most important thing is to know where to take their son if he gets sick, where he can go to school and how he can get a job to guarantee the sustenance of his family.
The Dominican family arrived in Staten Island under the promise that they would stay for five days, however, other migrants in the same situation have remained in the city for more than two weeks, without knowing the next steps they should take.
“I have gone from door to door to businesses asking for a job, but many of the businesses say that since I don’t have papers they can’t give me a job,” lamented the 25-year-old man.
In addition to the lack of employment and economic resources of the migrants, many of them were not prepared for the high temperatures of the Big Apple.
The newcomers are staying at a Travis-Chelsea property, which includes several hotels including the Staten Island Inn, Holiday Inn and Fairfield Inn and Suites Marriot, The New York Post reported.
“We don’t have clothes and we don’t eat well, we need a place to work,” said Geraldine Silva, a 31-year-old Venezuelan who has spent a few weeks at the Staten Island Inn, a hotel that is already at its maximum capacity and awaits the arrival of more migrants in new buses, according to the American newspaper.
The situation in the middle-class neighborhood is divided between locals who complain regarding the number of migrants they have received and undocumented immigrants who do not have the necessary supplies to survive, which has led them to wander the streets asking for help, raising the immigration crisis in New York to another level.
“They were speaking Spanish. I just said that I only speak English. It was like three times,” said Terrence Jones, a business owner who was surprised by several migrants who rang the doorbell of his residence.
“They were naked, they had slippers, a Red Cross blanket. I thought it was weird,” the 56-year-old recalled.
Meanwhile, an employee of the hotel where the group of migrants are staying said, “Why do we have 50,000 people when they might have been sent to another state. We are 10 minutes from New Jersey, there is nothing here,” said the employee while explaining that there is nothing for immigrants to buy and wash their clothes.
“I have no idea how they’re going to do it,” the young employee mused.
Other residents of the place have contributed with clothing, even restaurant owners have given them food, however, they express their concern that this situation leads immigrants to do something desperate.
The migrants find themselves without clothes, in an unknown place, where they cannot access medical services or pharmacies or buy food for themselves, despite being in a hotel, where at least members of the same family stay together.
“Leaving people in a roadside motel is bad, but leaving people, who are desperate for their needs, in a neighborhood with few options is much worse, said City Councilman Joe Borelli.
The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, declared a state of emergency last Friday to respond to the arrival in recent months of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers, many of them sent on buses by the authorities of the state of Texas.
According to the mayor, since last April more than 17,000 asylum seekers, mostly South Americans, have been bused to New York from the southern border of the United States.
