


The Big Apple is currently reviewing an additional 750 sites to potentially shelter migrants amid the surging crisis — as officials warn the system is “buckling” after 2,200 asylum seekers flooded into the city in the last week alone.
The hundreds of additional migrant sites being eyed by the city comes as Mayor Eric Adams’ administration struggles to cope with the ongoing surge, which has seen some 72,000 asylum seekers arrive in the Big Apple within the last year.
“We have reached a point where the system is buckling,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams Isom said Wednesday during a briefing on the migrant plight.
Currently, the city is housing 45,800 migrants in the 157 emergency sites that have been set up across the five boroughs.
It wasn’t immediately clear where the new sites being reviewed are located.
In a bid to deal with the ongoing influx, officials have started temporarily housing asylum seekers in various respite centers scattered across the city, some of which have been modeled off storm shelters that are set up by NYC Emergency Management in the wake of a disaster.
“We took the model that we use at New York City Emergency Management to bill to open up coastal storm shelters and adapted that — providing a temporary place for us to shelter asylum seekers as they are waiting for placement in other facilities,” Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said during the briefing.
“They are not long term, they are midterm solutions. They are ‘waiting rooms’, they are temporary placement while we wait for other spaces to open up to move them into.”
Iscol said seven other respite centers are already in the process of being set up, while the state-run Lincoln Correctional facility in Harlem was slated to open Thursday to help shelter migrants.

The city’s not-yet-set-up Office of Asylum Seeker Operations has been quietly recruiting municipal workers to staff those respite centers, according to an email sent out Tuesday to city health department employees.
“We continue to need city workers willing to serve at these respite centers,” the email read, calling for staffers to volunteer at the sites.
“An invitation to sign up to specific shifts, as well as more information about timekeeping, will be sent next week to those who sign up.”

The city is looking to fill 12-hour shifts that span 24 hours, seven days a week, according to the email.
Meanwhile, the Emergency Management commissioner stressed the need for additional help, specifically from the federal government, to battle the crisis.
“Emergency Management 101 is that when the local municipality has sort of maxed out its resources, we really turn to the state and the federal government for help and we’ve largely been alone in this effort,” Iscol said.
“We’ve turned around to hand off the football looking for help and it has not really been there.”