D.C. has begun to scale back its migrant assistance program and plans to close one of the hotels it uses to house those bused in from Texas and Arizona, even as other cities across the country plead with the Biden administration for more resources to deal with an influx of asylum seekers crossing the border.
No buses have arrived in D.C. since November, sparing the District some of the recent strain that other cities have felt in trying to house and support thousands of migrants. But some immigrant groups say the city is unnecessarily forcing out those who had been staying at three Northeast Washington hotels.
As of Tuesday, there were 637 migrants still inside two of the hotels on New York Avenue in Northeast Washington, said the city’s Department of Human Services (DHS), which oversees the Office of Migrant Services. A third hotel, the Days Inn, is nearly empty as the city plans to close down its operations there Friday, DHS said.
In total, more than 13,000 migrants from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere have arrived in D.C. since the first buses began heading to the city in April 2022 as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) Operation Lone Star, an effort to shame the Biden administration into doing more to curb border crossings. Buses from Arizona followed.
While the heavily Democratic nation’s capital was once the symbol of choice for Abbott, it has largely slipped off the radar as buses have gone to New York, Denver and other cities — which have pleaded for more aid from the Biden administration to help them with the thousands of arrivals. The lull in buses to D.C. stems from an overall drop in illegal border crossings since December and a decision by the faith-based center that was handling the bus departures in Del Rio, Tex., to no longer do so.
Meanwhile, Arizona has ruled out D.C. as a destination, opting to transport asylum seekers to nonprofits within the state or nearby as a cost-cutting measure, a spokesperson with Arizona’s Department of Emergency and Military Affairs said.
With just a trickle of families still arriving in the District on their own, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s (D) administration has avoided calling attention to the slowdown while working to get the aid recipients to live on their own.
Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), who is chair of the D.C. Council’s housing committee, said the city has to set limits on the amount of migrant aid it can provide or risk being overwhelmed like other cities.
“If we send a signal — even if it’s not deliberately — that we have endless resources to help migrants, then we encourage more to come here and we would be setting them up for disappointment,” White said. “What we want is the best possible resettlement, but for a manageable number of people.”
Migrant services have been an expensive proposition for the District; since the buses began arriving, the city has spent about $59.3 million on migrant services such as housing and food, with about $9 million of that amount reimbursed by the federal government, according to DHS.
Some of those funds have gone toward efforts to move the families out of the hotels and into permanent housing, a challenge in one of the nation’s most expensive rental markets.
Last April, when the border buses were arriving several times a week, there were 1,250 people crowded into the three hotels on New York Avenue, with some families there for longer than a year, prompting the Bowser administration to restrict new entries to extreme cases of hardship.
Now, apart from the dwindling hotel population, there are 223 people staying at a city respite center, also on New York Avenue, that seeks to limit stays to about three days unless a family is in dire need. The center has become the Bowser administration’s preferred route for new migrants.
Migrant advocates say some of the reduction at the hotels can be attributed to removals that initially targeted residents who had been there longer than a year, then were based on “code of conduct” violations that have included incidents of domestic violence, cooking inside the rooms or consuming alcohol on the premises.
Police records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request also show several stabbings, assaults and thefts outside the Days Inn since the migrants arrived to what was already a troubled area of the city. One man living at the hotel was injured in a shooting at a nearby gas station last summer.
In all, 30 people have been removed from the hotels based on conduct violations, according to DHS.
Most of the hotel residents were not involved in those incidents. But they have nonetheless felt pressure to leave while still not able to find steady work, advocates said.
“A lot of the times, it’s not outright evicting them; it’s heavily implying that they’re going to be evicted or telling them they have to move out by a certain date — in conversation but not on paper,” said Madhvi Bahl, an organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network. “They’re being pushed out verbally.”
The city has programs in place to help migrants find permanent housing and work. While some migrants — such as those who have temporary protection status or one-year humanitarian parole status — are allowed to work legally, others cannot.
Under federal law, U.S. asylum seekers must wait six months to apply for a work permit after filing an asylum claim. Many of the migrants have yet to formally apply for asylum, prolonging their economic instability, advocates said.
In December, White and several other D.C. Council members urged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a letter to allow migrants to apply for work permits at the same time they apply for asylum.
White criticized Bowser for not being vocal about such obstacles while other mayors — particularly New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D) — have called on the Biden administration to make it easier for the migrants to legally work.
“DHS and our community partners work with migrants to access legal pathways to work which is a crucial component of resettlement plans,” DHS said in a statement in response to the critique.
Residents still inside the hotels said they realize their stay is meant to be temporary, sharing a mixture of guilt and helplessness over not being able to leave.
On a recent morning, Carlos Montaña stood outside the entrance of a La Quinta Inn & Suites hotel, scrolling through a jobs website on his phone for potential leads.
“I haven’t been able to find anything stable,” he said with a weak smile.
Montaña’s family of four, from Colombia, had recently been moved to the La Quinta Inn from the Days Inn, where they had lived for about a year since arriving by bus from the Texas border.
His wife, Monica Montaña, said they received no explanation for the move, but the message seemed clear: The clock is ticking.
“At any moment, they can tell us to leave and, in my personal case, I’d love to be able to say ‘I’m leaving now. Thank you very much because I’ve found something.’”
But that day still seems far off without work authorization for herself or her husband, she said.
“Almost every place asks for a work permit,” she said. “If one doesn’t have it, it gets complicated.”
Nonprofits contracted by the city have worked to help more families overcome such obstacles, seeing some results as more families start to settle in Baltimore and other parts of the region where housing is cheaper.
A pilot program that the nonprofit Central American Resource Center, or Carecen, operates inside the city’s respite center offers participants a $1,000 stipend while matching them with other immigrants who can offer tips on job searches or dealing with U.S. government bureaucracy.
The money is meant to go toward a rental security deposit but that doesn’t always happen, said Abel Nuñez, director of Carecen.
Some of the program participants have used the extra cash to help relatives back home or to fund the journeys of those on their way to the United States, prolonging their stay inside the hotels, he said.
“We’re very proud of the successes we’ve had, but it’s not 100 percent,” Nuñez said. “What we’re trying to do is build a system that doesn’t create dependency.”
Katherine Torres Vidal and her husband, Andrés Padilla Berrio, used the stipend to move into a two-bedroom house in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood with their son and daughter, ages 7 and 6. The family escaped death threats over a land dispute in their native Colombia and walked through the Central American jungle and Mexico to get to El Paso in December 2022.
After they arrived in D.C. on a state-chartered bus, they kept to themselves inside the Days Inn, worried about the scenes of violence there while scraping together money earned through odd jobs, such as picking up debris at construction sites.
Torres Vidal now has legal permission to work and handles food preparation inside a Sweetgreen salad shop. Her husband is still awaiting his work authorization and meanwhile looks for off-the-books jobs every morning with other day laborers.
They found their current home, in part, by luck after a family they met the day they arrived — when they were huddled outside a Southeast Washington youth homeless shelter whose doors were locked — told them of a house owned by a group of church members in the area that they rent to people in need of affordable housing.
The two-story home became available in December, and the owners agreed to allow the family to move in for $1,500 per month.
“We are very grateful, to this country and to this city,” said Torres Vidal, who is taking English classes so she can advance to the higher-paying salad assembly line. “That hotel was more than housing. It gave us our start, a base to propel ourselves forward.”
Nuñez said the mayor’s administration must do as much as possible to absorb a population whose mass arrival has disrupted D.C. while not alienating other immigrant groups that did not receive that level of support.
“As a general rule, immigrants are going to find their way,” Nuñez said. “The longer they stay within the hotels and the respite center, the longer that undermines that argument.”