How We Documented Life Inside New York’s Migrant Shelters | A Times reporter and photographer spent months with new arrivals as they navigated the city’s pop-up shelter system.

I was overwhelmed by the whirlwind of activity inside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

The bellhops had been replaced by National Guard soldiers in military fatigues. Instead of a concierge, there were workers conducting health screenings. The splendid chandelier was still there, but gone were the tourists.

They had been supplanted by migrants from Venezuela and Guinea and Haiti, most of whom had recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. It was last February, and I had been writing for months about the steep influx of asylum seekers in New York City, and the city’s struggle to house them. But this was my first time inside the Roosevelt, the unlikely welcoming center for migrants seeking free shelter in the city.

The century-old lobby had become the epicenter of the emergency. And this was Day 1 of what would become an eight-month project to document life inside the country’s largest shelter system for migrants.

Migrant shelters have become common across the city. They are hotels in Times Square. Converted office buildings in Queens. Even tents on a Brooklyn airfield. “Migrant shelter” was not even a common term in New York two years ago. Yet the facilities quickly became lightning rods in a debate over how openly the city, and the nation, should welcome immigrants.

Keep trying, NYT. No one cares.

“...a debate over how openly the city, and the nation, should welcome immigrants.”

“Immigrants?” You mean illegal invaders? How about welcoming them with handcuffs and a quick ride back across the border? Those that are able to get over the wall, that is.

The splendid chandelier was still there, but gone were the tourists.They had been supplanted by migrants from Venezuela and Guinea and Haiti,

Gone were the producers and economic boosters, supplanted with the consumers and treasury resource drainers.