New York City mayor Eric Adams will limit shelter stays for migrant families with children to 60 days as the city continues to be overwhelmed with a surge of asylum seekers.

The Democrat had already placed a 30-day limit for shelter stays for adult migrants back in July, as he scrambled to deal with the more than 120,000 new migrants in the city.

Adams is expected to make the announcement later on Friday, as reported by The New York Daily News. 

Like migrant adults, migrant families who can’t find housing on their own will be able to return to the arrival center at The Roosevelt Hotel and reapply for shelter placement, a source told the Daily News.

The historic hotel in Manhattan – dubbed ‘the new Ellis Island’ by one city official – has become the registering point for the migrants and is currently housing 3,000 asylum seekers. 

New York City mayor Eric Adams will limit shelter stays for migrant families to 60 days

Like migrant adults, migrant families who can’t find housing on their own will be able to return to the arrival center at The Roosevelt Hotel and reapply for shelter placement 

The city has a Right to Shelter law that Adams is desperately trying to amend as over 62,000 migrants remain in shelters – a year after he said he was proud to live in a Right to Shelter state. 

The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless called the move ‘a stain on our city’s long-standing reputation as a welcoming home for all.’

Adams had heralded the shelter requirement at the start of the crisis as a display of the city’s empathy toward asylum seekers. In the months since, his rhetoric has hardened as the city has spent more than a billion dollars to rent space in hotels, erect large emergency shelters and provide government services for migrants who arrive without housing or jobs.

‘This issue will destroy New York City,’ Adams said last month.

Governor Kathy Hochul, who also first welcomed asylum seekers last year, is supporting the city’s effort to suspend a unique legal agreement that requires it to provide emergency housing to homeless people.

The shelter requirement has been in place for more than four decades in New York City, following a legal agreement that required the city to provide temporary housing for every homeless person. No other big city in America has such a requirement. 

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Hochul endorsed the New York City’s challenge to the requirement in a court filing this week, telling reporters Thursday that the mandate was never meant to apply to an international humanitarian crisis.

The Roosevelt Hotel (pictured), Paul Hotel and Paramount Hotel are among those designated for housing migrants in Manhattan

‘I don’t know how the right to shelter — dedicated to help those people, which I believe in, help families — can or should be interpreted to be an open invitation to 8 billion people who live on this planet, that if you show up in the streets of New York, that the city of New York has an obligation to provide you with a hotel room or shelter,’ said Hochul, a Democrat. 

Many of the migrants have arrived without housing or jobs, forcing the city to erect emergency shelters and provide various government services, with an estimated cost of $12 billion over the next few years.

Last month Adams asked a court to allow it to suspend the mandate when there is a state of emergency where the shelter population of single adults increases at a rapid rate. New York state on Wednesday filed a court document in support of the city’s request, calling it reasonable.

Adams has made a series of urgent pleas for a shift in federal immigration policy and for funding to help the city manage the arrival of migrants, which he said could cost the city $12 billion over three years as it rents space at hotels, erects new emergency shelters and provides various government services for asylum seekers. 

Last year,  he went to the Port Authority to welcome a bus full of asylum seekers sent from Texas by Republican governor Gregg Abbot. At the time Abbot argued progressive cities should also bear the costs of the influx of asylum seekers crossing the southern border.

Adams said: ‘As the mayor of New York, I have to provide services families that are here, and that’s what we’re going to do – our responsibility as a city, and I’m proud that this is a Right to Shelter state, and we’re going continue to do that.’

But by May of this year, Adams had made major changes to the 40-year-old ‘Right to Shelter’ law that guarantees a bed for anyone who needs it in the city, as his government asked for federal and state help to deal with the surge of migrants that he now says could destroy New York as we know it.

Governor Hochul has also done a U-turn when it comes to asylum seekers, having first welcomed them with ‘open arms’ as she pledged to house them just three years before telling migrants to ‘go elsewhere’ because the city is at its limit.

‘We have to get the word out, that when you come to New York, you’re not going to have more hotel rooms, we don’t have capacity,’ Hochul said on CNN. ‘So we have to also message properly that we’re at a limit – if you’re going to leave your country, go somewhere else.’

New York City’s migrant crisis is expected to cost the city $4.7billion this year. Above is a list of some of the landmarks that have been turned into emergency shelters as officials struggle to house nearly 60,000 migrants in the city’s care