Scared asylum-seekers reach Rochester. Officials offer help, but won't spend tax money
Two buses pulled up to the Holiday Inn in downtown Rochester and let off 77 adults and children about 10:30 p.m. Monday, with reservations to spend the night.
These travelers are the first asylum seekers to be relocated to Monroe County. Rochester was the terminus — for now — of a long and uncertain journey.
They had boarded the buses about eight hours earlier in New York City. Before that they had been transported to New York after applying for asylum at the U.S. border, fleeing from violence and persecution in their home countries.
One Venezuelan woman gave birth to her fourth young child while journeying through Mexico to the southern border, Angelica Perez-Delgado, CEO of Ibero-American Action League, said at a press conference Tuesday.
“They were very scared. They don’t know where they’re at,” Perez-Delgado said. “It was very emotional. They were tired, but mainly just scared for their safety.”
The Holiday Inn still has space for more asylum seekers, Monroe County Executive Adam Bello said, and he expects more will arrive in the coming weeks. He did not have details about their place of origin or when they first crossed the U.S. border, among other things.
At the press conference, local leaders expressed their joint commitment to assisting the asylum seekers in Rochester but insisted that local taxpayers should bear no part of the financial burden.
“We’re meeting the moment, but we have every expectation that what we were promised will be delivered,” Rochester Mayor Malik Evans said. “We expect the food to be paid for, the security to be paid for, the transportation to be paid for. … The county of Monroe, the city of Rochester, these non-profits do not have a bottomless pit of resources.”
Bello, Evans both call for compassion and immediate aid, but are both very insistent that local government is not intending to pay for anything.
— Justin Murphy (@CitizenMurphy) August 8, 2023
Monroe County Executive Adam Bello in May issued an executive order barring local hotels from contracting to house asylum seekers without first submitting a comprehensive plan detailing how they would be provided for. The Holiday Inn on State Street submitted such a plan Aug. 4.
Once the buses left New York City Monday afternoon, a huge coalition of public sector and non-profit partners – the Dept. of Human Services, Ibero, Catholic Charities, the Rochester City School District and others – gathered food, toiletries and helping hands and went to the bus station to greet people.
“What we’re not going to do is be a community where buses of people are just coming here in the middle of the night and being dropped off in a parking lot,” Bello said. “People who don’t know where they are, why there’s here and who’s going to take care of them. That’s not going to happen in Monroe County.”
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have been bused to New York City from the southern border over the last year, and since May the city has moved hundreds to hotels in at least seven counties around New York as the city's shelters have filled.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has complained bitterly about the burden placed on his government. An estimated 90,000 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived there in the last year, he said earlier this month.
Bello called the asylum-seeking process an “abject failure of the federal government,” and said he is speaking with U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle and others in the federal government to help. One such action could be allowing people to work while they wait for their claims to be processed.
A Morelle spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Around 40 of the asylum seekers in Rochester are school-age children who will start classes in the Rochester City School District in one month. In a press release last week, the state Education Department said it was "exploring the possibility of regulatory flexibility" for districts seeing an influx of asylum seekers or migrants, but did not clarify what that might entail.
The lobby of the Holiday Inn on Tuesday morning was a hive of activity. Volunteers and community groups were in the loading area with bags and boxes of supplies, which then joined stacks surrounding folding tables where other people were taking information, conducting screenings and answering questions in Spanish and other languages. Security guards stood outside the automatic sliding doors.
"We're ready for this; this community has done this before," Perez-Delgado said. "We will integrate these people into our community. ... I'm excited for these families and the future we're able to be able to provide to them."
Justin Murphy is a veteran reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/CitizenMurphy or contact him at jmurphy7@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Asylum seekers reach Rochester. Officials help, won't spend tax money
