A mosque in the Morrisania neighborhood in the Bronx has become a de facto shelter for migrants, mostly from Western Africa. 

As temperatures have plummeted and the wait for a shelter bed has stretched to more than a week, well over a hundred men sleep on any given night at the mosque, its leaders told THE CITY. 

Some of them are waiting for a new 30-day stay the current limit imposed by the Adams istration for adult migrants.  Others have given up on that and are living at the mosque full-time. 

“The month of Ramdan is coming [and] honestly I don’t know how we’re going to handle this. It’s winter. We cannot kick them out,” said Ahmed, one of the mosque’s leaders, who asked that his last name and the name of the mosque be withheld fearing backlash from neighbors or a crackdown from city inspectors. 

While of the congregation have been donating food, the mosque has been hit with new expenses like skyrocketing heat and water bills.

“We’ve been trying our best, but it’s beyond our ability,” Ahmed said. “We’re not here to point fingers or blame anybody, but we really need help.”

Since migrants first began arriving in significant numbers in the summer of 2022, a patchwork of mutual aid groups, religious organizations, neighborhood volunteers and even community gardens have stepped up to help meet basic needs.

Those efforts have taken on a newfound urgency as the Adams istration has rolled out a series of policies aimed at ejecting migrants from shelters while temperatures slumped into the teens. 

Spaces like the Morrisania mosque are sheltering people overnight while other houses of worship are sheltering people, advocates say, while other volunteer-manned spaces migrants are cropping up to allow migrants to a warm place to spend the day, eat and try to find work and do paperwork. There’s no official record of the number of migrants being ed in informal arrangements on any given day or night, but it’s grown substantially in recent months advocates say, as securing a shelter bed has become more and more difficult.

Mayor Eric Adams has credited the strict limits on shelter stays, which now also apply to families, with saving the city money, and has pointed to data that suggest 80% percent of adult migrants who run out their 30-day stays don’t return. But at least some of these costs are borne by regular New Yorkers determined to help.

 ‘There’s No More Hope There’

At the Morrisania mosque, leaders say their facility became a shelter for migrants almost by accident. In November, mosque leaders say a few men who’d prayed regularly at the mosque started spending nights there. As the wait for cots in city shelters ballooned, more and more men kept showing up to do so.

“We’ve been encouraging them to move to other states,” said Mamadou, another of the mosque’s leaders. “But as this group leaves another one comes, and now they are not leaving at all because if you tell them to go they say we don’t have anywhere to go.”

Halimatou Diallo, 24, who has prayed at the mosque since she was a girl, said that she and other volunteers have collected more than 1,000 items of clothing for migrants, but also noted that the mosque was running out of space for its regular to use. On a recent afternoon, piles of migrants’ belongings were stacked up in a corner of a room where women come to study.  

Diallo, too, expressed worries about the start of Ramaden fast approaching on March 10.

“The community’s concern is Ramadan is coming up, and the people come to the mosque to pray but there’s no space,” Diallo said. “Right now, it’s just hard for everyone. We lack the proper infrastructure.”

On a recent afternoon, Mamadou Cellou Diallo, 21, a recent arrival from Guinea, said he’d started living there about a month ago when his 30-days in a city shelter were up. He spent about two weeks reporting to the reticketing site in the East Village every morning where migrants try to secure another 30-day stay, but eventually gave up, ripping off the neon wristband with a number on it that indicated he had a place in the line. 

“There’s no more hope there,” he said in French.

Living at the mosque has been rough. Quarters are cramped, food is scarce, the mosque’s bring what they can, but it’s rarely enough to go around. He still hasn’t been able to find work. 

“Frankly it’s a total mess,” he said. “It’s really, really difficult.”

‘You Feel Like You’re Going to Fall Over’

The city has made some efforts to bring in houses of worship to help shelter migrants in a more formal way, but bureaucratic delays have stymied the effort with just two of 50 religious institutions managing to the program after six months. 

The epicenter of the deteriorating situation — and thus of volunteer efforts to step into the breach — has been in the East Village, where hundreds of adults line up outside of the “reticketing center” at St. Brigid’s Catholic School in the predawn hours after traveling from a series of remote “overnight hospitality centers” where they are allowed to sleep on the ground until dawn.

Some people are eventually allowed to wait inside St. Brigid’s, while others are sent back into the cold with to-go boxes containing the only meal they’ll get that day.

With thousands of adults waiting for beds, some for weeks at a time, migrants can go days without showering or a hot meal, with nowhere to wash their clothes or even to use a bathroom.

“I’ve barely eaten anything,” said Thierno Leye in French. The Senegalese migrant was riding the trains on a recent afternoon, waiting for an overnight waiting room to open. It had been nine days since he left his last shelter, and he had barely slept. “You’re walking but you feel like you’re going to fall over.”

Ashleigh Holmes, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, which runs the reticketing site, said the current wait for cots is eight days as they’ve taken steps to reduce hours-long lines outside the reticketing site, expanded the hours the site is open and that the church has added porta-potties for those waiting outside. Holmes said the average wait to get inside the building is down to 45 minutes. 

While the hours-long lines outside the reticketing site are less frequent in recent days, many who aren’t likely to secure a cot that day are quickly sent back outside.

Many linger outside the reticketing site in a sunny spot on the southeast corner of Tompkins Square Park across the street plotting their next move, which in recent weeks has become a locus of local volunteer efforts. A rotating crew of East Village residents deliver pizza and other freshly cooked meals, leftovers from surrounding restaurants, hand warmers, hot chocolate, and warm clothes. 

“Before they had the shelter, at least they would have a couple meals a day,” said Mammad Mahmoodi, cofounder of the volunteer group EVLovesNYC, which has been delivering hot meals several times a week to the site. 

“Now that they are always floating, a lot of them, they get just that piece of bread and eggs a day or not even that,” he said. “You can clearly see the deterioration of the situation. It’s very obvious to the eyes. Hot food is all they crave.”

Volunteer efforts have expanded organically as conditions in the city’s operation have deteriorated and temperatures have plunged. One afternoon in mid-January, East Village resident Jess Beck said she struck up a conversation with another woman in the park, both of whom wanted to figure out how they could help. 

“I know it’s crazy. I said, ‘Listen, I have access to this space,’” she recalled, referring to the Earth Church, an old bank turned rehearsal and performance space for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, a group of street performers known for their climate activism.

Within days, the group, which Beck is a member of, opened the space, located just a few blocks away from the reticketing center, to dozens of migrants needing a warm place to weekdays.

“We’ve had people coming in who can’t feel their appendages,” Beck said. 

On a recent afternoon dozens of men warmed their hands, cooked a meal of rice and vegetables, and picked through donated clothing. Others slept in a darkened backroom that usually serves as a playroom for kids whose parents are in choir practice.

“We have this jerk of a mayor who just has not asked himself and has not asked anybody else to tell him what it’s like to stand in line all day long,” said Rev. Billy, whose given name is William Talen. “We are surrounded by 70 of the newest Americans and they are absolutely welcome.”

‘I’m Not Going To Kick Them Out’

New York City, with its unique “right to shelter” protections, has spent $3.4 billion to house and feed newly arrived migrants over the past year and a half, while the state has offered $1.8 billion and the federal government has allotted just $156 million. 

“While we are grateful for the assistance from our state and federal partners, for months, we have warned that, without more, this crisis could play out on city streets,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for City Hall said. 

While the rate of increase in shelter stays has slowed since the city began putting limits on them, the total number of people in the city system has continued to rise.  

As the crisis has played out, New Yorkers have stepped up, including some like Adama Bah of the group Afrikana, who have been working with newly arrived migrants for years. Her Harlem office, powered by donations and volunteers, is now doubling as another warm place where those without shelter can spend the day.

“Basically it’s a respite site. It’s a waiting area now. Where else are they going to go? I’m not going to kick them out,” said Bah. “They just want to be in a warm place.”

Among those waiting on a recent afternoon were two friends from Guinea who said they’d been waiting 14 days for a shelter bed, spending some of them sleeping on the subways after being told that the overnight waiting rooms had reached capacity. 

Bah said she regularly coaches men now on how to sleep on the trains. 

“You got to move around. You can’t be just, you know, sleeping on the same train every day,” she said. “You get noticed.”

Alpha Amadou, a 31-year-old volunteer at Afrikana, helping people fill out paperwork to get a New York City identification card and health insurance, said he’d just secured his own city shelter after 16 days. Now, he’s anxious about the Feb. 2 deadline for that cot. 

“I think of my brothers who don’t have a 30-day bed and they’re outside, it’s hard,” he said in French. “At least we can make things a little easier.”