NYC Upper West Side Moms Take On the Ballooning Migrant Crisis

Mia Gindis, Nacha Cattan and Melina Chalkia
·6 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Erica DePiero used to conjure up ways to make Citigroup Inc.’s 200,000 employees more innovative. Gina Cirrito produced entertainment reports for Fox News.

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But for the past two years the Manhattan mothers have spent their time helping migrant families settle in New York, whether it’s arranging legal services, helping with clothes and laundry to organizing summer and after-school programs for kids.

The women are part of a vast system of non-profits and volunteers that have stepped up to help New York cope with the influx of more than 180,000 migrants since 2022. It’s been a constantly moving target as the city has gone from chaotically welcoming waves of families to curtailing services and shifting regulations.

Mayor Eric Adams, who’s warned the crisis will “destroy” New York City, has said the city will have spent roughly $10.6 billion to care for migrants in the three years through mid-2025. He’s challenging right-to-shelter requirements and recently shortened limits on how long families can stay in shelters, making it harder to keep children in schools and undercutting work by nonprofits such as Cirrito’s and DePiero’s Mañana Otro Día.

The new measures have been like “lemon juice on the paper cut,” said Cirrito. “What could be a really incredible, new, thriving population is total chaos.”

Cirrito and DePiero have focused their efforts on the Upper West Side, where their kids go to school. They started working together at the onset of the city’s migrant crisis in 2022, when Texas Governor Greg Abbott first began sending buses of migrants from border towns to the Big Apple. The city now has about 19,000 families in hotels, tents, and other types of shelter across the city, with a few hundred on the West Side of Manhattan.

The duo saw an opportunity to help primarily Spanish-speaking families navigate shifting and at times inefficient rules and requirements. They came together after hearing about a wave of newly-arrived students slated to be enrolled in their kids’ school. Hours later, they led a group of parents to gather food, clothing and backpacks.

Within the first few months, the pair organized a series of donation drives for everything from strollers to jackets for 38 families, created a WhatsApp group to quickly disseminate information to new arrivals, and got kids enrolled in after-school programs. They matched more than 250 families with pro-bono legal counseling services and started a program to provide kitchen access to migrant parents.

Lately they’ve been toiling with 60-day shelter rules that dictate families must reapply for placement once the limit is up. Adams says the measure is meant to ease a system that’s “full and past its breaking point.”

“We had a lot of families come into the Upper West Side schools last year, and it was everything that you would imagine — ‘Where am I gonna live? How are my kids going to get to school?’ And now it has changed,” said DePiero. “They’re losing their housing.”

For John Flores, who arrived from Peru 16 months ago with his wife and two sons, the rule meant a sudden transfer from the Upper West Side to a shelter in Jamaica, Queens — a two-hour subway ride from P.S. 87, where his 10-year-old attends. After weeks of struggling to get his son to school on time, Flores turned to Mañana Otro Día for help.

After their “insisting and insisting” a shelter manager moved the family back to a residence in Hell’s Kitchen, said Flores.

Not all families are so fortunate. Just five of the 38 families which enrolled in P.S. 87 at the onset of the crisis are still in attendance, according to Cirrito. The rest, she said, dropped out after being resettled at a shelter that was inconveniently far.

“You have all this community building falling apart every two months,” Cirrito said.

In some cases, families don’t know they can reapply for shelter and opt to leave the city.

The 60-day limit serves to “make things uncomfortable enough in the shelters that people will just pick up and go somewhere else,” said Dave Giffen, executive director at Coalition for the Homeless. In October, Adams opened a reticketing center in the East Village, where asylum-seekers can get a free, one-way ticket out of the city.

“Some families are going to Indianapolis, New Mexico, Albany,” said April Diaz, a parent coordinator at P.S. 242 in Harlem, where she says about 30 migrant families have pulled their children from school. “They give them a one-way ticket with no job, and just a dream of something better than what they’re dealing with now.”

But for many families with young kids, it’s too big a disruption after months of instability.

“They’re starting all over again,” said Díaz. “They’re not going to absorb because they feel like they’re being tossed.”

At the makeshift shelters on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, where migrants sleep on cots and have reported children shivering through the night, some parents are petitioning to extend their stay, according to Carrie Gleason, a member of a parent group in Flatbush that supports migrant families.

Jennyfer, a mother of three from Ecuador who withheld her last name because of her immigration status, said after traveling to the Mexican border and crossing the Rio Grande, going days without eating, all she wants is to keep her kids in one place to help them integrate. Because her four-year-old is too little to take the school bus, she’s fought to stay on Floyd Bennett Field despite the conditions.

Migrants have been sent to the “Bronx, to Queens, to other places that are very far away and that causes a change of school, which affects the children more than anything,” she said.

To help the families facing removal, Mañana Otro Día and City Council Member Gale Brewer wrote a template for a letter students can present to the city asking to remain in the same school district.

Diaz says that so far, the letters — which are signed by the school’s principal — have prevented about 40 families from being uprooted from her school.

The crisis has been “this beautiful opportunity for new people and new life to be blown into our communities and into our neighborhoods. And I don’t want it to be for nothing,” Cirrito said.

“This is what you would do for any neighbor in need.”

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