It's a dark day, New Yorkers.

Today, City Hall starts implementing the cruelest policy our City has seen in generations: the 60-day shelter limit for migrant families with children.

That’s why my office is launching a new investigation into the City’s implementation of the 60-day shelter rule. We'll review the protocols and processes being undertaken, the effects of those policies, and financial impacts on NYC.

Indeed, even as a brutal winter storm heads toward New York, the Adams Administration is starting to evict thousands of migrant families from shelter in the middle of winter, and displacing kids from their schools in the middle of the school year.

Hotels like the Roosevelt and the Row, which I visited this morning, have provided a small modicum of stability as our newest New Yorkers work to get on their feet. Sure, asylum seekers can maybe secure a new shelter placement — if only they wait in line at a re-intake center, freezing, outside, for enough days.

The 60-day shelter could also lead to the biggest disruption in New York City public schools since the pandemic. Even if some families are offered transfer to a different shelter, children will wind up having to transfer out of their public schools that have offered them a little stability after months of trauma – right in the middle of the school year.

Meanwhile, ahead of tonight’s storm, the New York City Office of Emergency Management is evacuating Floyd Bennett Field. Placing asylum seekers in Floyd Bennett Field in the first place, despite the known significant storm risks, highlights the mismanagement and waste of money that is all-too-present in City Hall’s approach to shelter and services for asylum seekers.

Let’s be clear: The city must immediately rescind the 30- and 60- day limit politices to evict families with children from shelter and improve conditions for people waiting for shelter.

As I wrote in an op-ed alongside Council Member Shahana Hanif, the right to shelter is a cornerstone of New York City’s social safety net that guarantees a roof over the head of every New Yorker. Since the 60-day rule was announced in October, I’ve been proudly standing with a coalition of families, teachers, advocates, and community leaders fighting to uphold New York’s right to shelter law.

Right now, City Hall is failing to manage this humanitarian emergency with competence and compassion. We could focus our efforts on providing the legal services and case management that would help people get work authorization, jobs, and land on their feet.

Instead, coupled with increasingly xenophobic rhetoric, Mayor Adams has handed no-bid, multimillion-dollar contracts to vendors ill-equipped to deliver proper services. The latest strategy of shelter limits is intended to make life so difficult that asylum seekers abandon hope — and New York City — altogether.

What will happen to the families? How many kids will be displaced from their schools? How will this affect the effort to help new arrivals get the work authorizations they need to secure jobs?

My new investigation into the City’s implementation of the 60-day shelter rule aims to answer these questions, and my office will keep you in the loop.

It’s clear that better management, care, and compassion are needed. We can’t be a city that heaps this kind of cruelty upon our most vulnerable new neighbors.

With hope for a more compassionate city,

Brad