| In Brooklyn, hundreds of men have languished in a city-run facility, taking cold showers, eating bad food, and sleeping inches from one another.  Illustration by Anuj Shrestha Last summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of arrived migrants from his state to New York City, in a cruel political stunt. As more and more migrants arrived, the city government scrambled to find room for them. Entire hotels were rented out. When the hotel rooms ran out, local officials constructed emergency shelters, like the large tents on Randall’s Island, in the East River. At the end of June, as the city’s shelter population neared a hundred thousand, the commercial real-estate firm RXR entered into a licensing agreement with New York City Health and Hospitals, the city’s public-health-care network, to convert the company’s “unique workplace campus” called the Hall—which sat mostly empty throughout the pandemic—into a larger-capacity migrant shelter, a process that could take months. In the meantime, according to RXR, the firm was asked to quickly build a shorter-term “respite center” with space for four hundred and fifty male migrants. In a deeply reported feature, Eric Lach tells the story of how, in July and August, buses filled with migrants arrived at the Hall nearly every day—even after the respite center reached its initial capacity. This resulted in nearly eight hundred men from all over the world living at the Hall, sleeping inches from one another. Many had never heard of Brooklyn before. “It was like a prison,” a recent resident said. There was no privacy, or places to congregate indoors. There were a few toilets on each floor, but no showers (there were four shower trailers outside, but only cold water came out of them). Violence sometimes broke out. In the meantime, the facility, as a respite center, did not help with immigration cases, or applying for work permits. “Mostly,” Lach writes, “the men were left to fend for themselves.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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