818: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Ira Glass

New York City, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a very cold night, a few weeks ago--

Ira Glass

This is one of the buses that Governor Greg Abbott sent to New York City, starting in the summer of last year. You probably heard about this. Hoping to make a point about what Texas is dealing with, he sent migrants on buses to cities run by Democrats-- Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and New York.

Over 27,000 people have arrived at this spot this way, where many of them have been greeted by a 5'2" Black woman, named Adama Bah.

Ira Glass

Thing is, Adama doesn't work for the city of New York. She runs a community center for newly arrived immigrants, called Afrikana. She's been doing this work with migrants for 18 years-- for a long time, just out of her car, though she still does a lot of work from her car, going around a city to where recent migrants are, talking to them in the car.

Ira Glass

When the very first bus arrived from Texas in August 2022, it was migrant aid groups like Adama's who got advance word that it was coming and greeted the bus-- not the city. But soon enough, the city government got on board. Mayor Eric Adams showed up at the Port Authority to greet one of the buses, ready to prove that New York City is a city of immigrants that loves and welcomes immigrants.

Ira Glass

Right to shelter-- that means that New York City had to provide temporary housing to anyone who needs it. And the city took that seriously.

Ira Glass

On that spot, the city would take people's names and information, and then send them on to shelters. Groups like Adama's would hand out food, clothing, toiletries. As word got out that New York City would house everyone who showed up, more and more people started arriving.

Today, the 27,000 people that Governor Abbott sent are just a tiny portion of the 150,000 who've shown up on buses, trains, cars, and planes since the spring of 2022. New York City was not set up to help this many people this way. The right to shelter was created for homeless men in the Bowery, not for thousands of new arrivals each week.

By this fall, it was costing the city $10 million a night, and the mayor completely changed his tune. Yes, New York loves immigrants, but not this many this fast, needing assistance. And the mayor became a kind of one-man unwelcome wagon, flying to Ecuador and Colombia and Mexico to hold press conferences saying, don't come to New York, declaring a state of emergency in the city, begging the federal government for help, which did not arrive.

By October of this year, the city had spent over $2 billion and opened over 200 emergency shelters. It had cut the amount of time that immigrants could stay in a shelter from as long as they needed to 60 days for families and 30 days for individuals. And finally, in October, New York went to court to change the law and suspend the right to shelter for the city. Mayor Adams started saying that migrants will be sleeping on the streets. It's not a question of if, but when.

Ira Glass

This is Mayor Adams this fall.

Ira Glass

Or maybe it's not quite that bad. The city's chief fiscal officer, the comptroller, says the mayor is overblowing the effects of the migrants on the city's budget. And one political question in New York is whether the mayor is now scapegoating the migrants to push through budget cuts he'd hoped to do anyway. Though it is true that money is tight, one day, Adama says, city personnel just didn't show up at Port Authority anymore to greet immigrants.

Ira Glass

Which brings us to why Adama's here, where her kids are with her parents at home, sleeping. If she weren't here, this bus that's arriving from Texas would drop off a few dozen people in this alley between 41st and 42nd Street. A couple National Guardsmen would sleepily emerge from the car they're sitting in across the street and hand out an address to go to and a map. And they'd have to make their way there on their own.

The address is for the Roosevelt Hotel, which the city has set up as the intake center for migrants arriving in New York. 20-minute walk from here, right through the center of Times Square.

Ira Glass

Adama's organization partnered with another organization to hire a bus.

Ira Glass

The other thing she's going to do is get on the bus and give them a little speech. The bus driver will translate to Spanish. The speech is partly practical. She gives out a phone number they type in their cell phones for somebody they can call once they're in a shelter, to direct them to the services they need.

But also, she's doing this herself, the head of the organization in the middle of the night, bus after bus, because she thinks it's important that somebody says "welcome," just in some basic human way, to people who have come so far, full of worry and fear and hope.

Ira Glass

But the thing you say is-- just so I understand, so the thing you're going to say is what? Give me the speech.

Ira Glass

She tells them that her organization can help with clothing and legal aid and anything else they need help with.

We've been standing in the cold for over an hour. Random people walk up to Adama to start conversations or ask for directions. She just seems like the kind of person you can do that with. At around quarter past midnight, she reveals something that I can't believe I'm learning after standing there so long together.

Finally, more than an hour after that, 1:30 in the morning, the bus from Texas rolls up.

Ira Glass

The bus door opens. She climbs the steps and stands at the front of the bus and makes her speech, which does the job. When everybody emerges from the bus after their three-day ride, they are not the exhausted, huddled masses that I expected they'd be. People are beaming, excited.

Ira Glass

Some carry suitcases. Some carry plastic garbage bags filled with their stuff. In my terrible high-school Spanish, I ask where they're from. And families look so happy when they answer.

Ira Glass

They tell me they've been traveling for a month and a half, two months, three months. It's a dangerous trip for many of them through the Darien Gap. Most are from Venezuela, a lot of Colombia. Plus, one family where the dad proudly shouted his answer like, I don't know about these people, but I definitely belong here.

Ira Glass

That guy has family in New York, who are on their way to come pick him up. Most everybody else got into the other bus Adama arranged and headed over to the migrant welcome center at the Roosevelt Hotel, a once-glamorous 1,000-room behemoth that fills a block of 45th Street, a place where, back in the day, you might spot JFK or Eisenhower or Guy Lombardo, that is now the city's new Ellis Island, the entrance point.

Ira Glass

Adama guides everyone off the bus into the lobby.

Ira Glass

The welcome center at the Roosevelt Hotel is one part of the city's response. It's pretty well run. They have legal services to help you apply for asylum. There are free diapers and warm food.

They'll replace your meds. The city started doing this when a kid showed up whose meds for epilepsy had been seized by border patrol. And from here, they'll send you to one of the over 200 shelters around the city, which are mostly not as nice as this.

Some are in school gymnasiums, office buildings. If you have family elsewhere in the country, there's a desk here where New York City will happily buy you a plane ticket to go live with them and not be New York's problem anymore. 1/4 of the arrivals take that option.

As this year ends, New York City is entering some new phase with this massive experiment at welcoming and providing services for so many new arrivals. It's put some 20,000 kids into schools. It's housing right now 60,000 migrants.

Though in lots of ways, it has not gone so well, it hasn't put newcomers on a path to jobs and places to live. But has any American city ever done this much for new arrivals on this scale? Mayor Adams has pointed out some cities do nothing. Texas, Governor Abbott, does nothing.

Ira Glass

Today on our show, we look at a city desperately trying to prove that it can be the sanctuary city it thinks it is. We look at the messy, flawed, generous, impossible, vast New York migrant experiment, how it's going, where it works, and where it fails so badly that people have accused New York of deliberately doing horribly so immigrants decide not to stay in the city, what it's like to arrive here and make your way right now in New York. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, No Sleep Till Brooklyn. So let's start with what's probably the most difficult thing New York City has faced with these new migrants-- figuring out where to house them. It's hard to find appropriate spaces. And some neighborhoods really don't want them.

Ira Glass

This is Staten Island, living up to every stereotype New Yorkers have about Staten Island when a migrant shelter got put there. There have also been protests in Brooklyn and Queens. With that in mind, the city opened up a new facility a month ago that the mayor said was chosen to be, quote, "the least intrusive as possible to current residents, while also being as humane as possible to migrants."

It is not in a building. It's four massive tents that, together, can house 2,000 people at a place called Floyd Bennett Field. One of our producers, Valerie Kipnis, visited right after it opened.

Valerie Kipnis

When I first heard that Floyd Bennett Field was going to be the city's newest migrant center, it struck me, because I knew exactly where it was-- in the middle of nowhere. And I can say that with some degree of certainty, because I grew up in the same middle of nowhere-- or at least close by.

It's called Floyd Bennett Field. But to me, it's always been the abandoned airport, slash place with the massive ice hockey rink, slash random chunk of land you pass just before Rockaway Beach. It's right on the water. There's not a lot of streetlights or ways to get there, unless you're in a car or on a bike.

And if you're driving around at night, it feels like you're in the middle of the woods, not New York City. I wondered what it was like to get sent there as someone brand new to the city. So I went out with Jika Gonzalez. She's a reporter I've worked with before, who covers immigration.

We arrived at around dusk. There was the faint glow of cop cars near a massive encampment lit up by fluorescent lights. And there were the tents, surrounded by a giant metal fence and security guards.

Jika and I arrived unannounced, hoping to talk to people hanging out around the shelter. But that night was actually so cold that there was basically no one outside, except for this one group of adults with some kids. The kids wore blankets over their heads, trailing on the ground behind them, cute, but cold, like little ghosts. And actually, they were on their way out, in a rush.

Valerie Kipnis

The Roosevelt Hotel, back to the welcome center. The little girl's name is Karlina, but she goes by Karli. She's eight, has big-sister energy, pigtails that some wisps of hair have escaped from. She rocks back and forth from heel to toe as she talks.

Her family arrived here only a few hours ago. And now, they're leaving, because this place isn't what they thought it would be.

Valerie Kipnis

"They said they were going to send us to a hotel, but it wasn't a hotel. It's a campsite," says one of the men, "where we're all sleeping on cots. And we need our privacy for the kids. You understand? And the bathrooms-- they're not in the main tent. You have to go outside to use them."

Sometime along the way, they began to wonder about public transportation. How are the kids going to get to school from here? The closest train station is over 4 miles away. Rafael, Karlina's dad, is like, how will I find work from here?

Valerie Kipnis

"That's why we're looking for shelter, so that way, we can start working, earning our own money, like you. That way, we can rent a house and take care of our expenses, you understand? They told us we were coming to a hotel, but then suddenly, when we were on the way here, we realized that this is like a desert, an island in the middle of nowhere."

The city says it shows people photos of the tents and maps of where they'll be going. But I later talked to other people here, and no one I spoke to had been shown photos. Lots of them were surprised when they arrived.

Karlina, her dad, Rafael, and the whole family, basically, as soon as they arrived, started thinking, we can't stay here. There has to be something else. Rafael seemed determined. He wanted to talk to the person who assigned them here, someone at the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street. They needed to get back.

This group-- turns out there are two families from Venezuela, the capital, Caracas. A mom named Daniela, her husband Rafael, also her brother Roni and his family, and two other guys who they met along the way. Consider their journey up to this point, the one that got them to these giant tents in the middle of an abandoned airfield.

They left Caracas in late summer, and for three months, made their way through Central America to Mexico, to Piedras Negras, and then into Texas. After they crossed, they were offered a choice of three buses-- Chicago, Denver, or New York. They knew Venezuelans in New York City who said they could get help here, that the kids could go to school, that the adults could find work. So they chose New York.

Valerie Kipnis

Daniela, Karli's mom, says they were told they'd get a place to live for two months. "We could rest and look for work to move forward, you understand? So we decided to come to New York, because we'd get help here. But here, it is something else. Here has been confusing."

You arrive at the Roosevelt Hotel in the middle of the city, with a warm lobby, the breakfast, the bag check, the shelter assignment, the moment of stillness after months of chaos. And then, you get put on this bus, and it starts driving you away from the place you've been imagining, away from all the skyscrapers.

And suddenly, you're in this other place, far away from the crowds of Grand Central. And then, you get off the bus, and you're processed in a place that looks very much like a tent. Because it is a tent. It is something else.

So the family had decided to leave and somehow try to make it back to 45th Street. The only way out seemed to be a city bus in a kind of parking lot. The neon sign scrolling across its front read "not in service." There was a man nearby in a Transit Authority uniform with a walkie talkie who seemed stressed out by the whole situation.

Valerie Kipnis

While he's talking, he starts walking towards the parked bus. So the group decides they better follow him. They have almost no belongings, just a few plastic bags of stuff. The kids run ahead.

Valerie Kipnis

The kids climb onto the bus, go to the back. Some of them lay down. They look exhausted, sleepy. The adults have no idea what's going on, where the bus is going or anything. They crowd near the entrance of the bus.

There's another bus driver already on board. The bus driver with the walkie talkie gets on as well. Neither of them speak Spanish. It falls to Jika to translate for them.

Valerie Kipnis

It's really unclear what's happening. I later learned that this is a new bus the city set up to shuttle people from the shelter to a subway station. But at this moment, in the first days of the shelter's operation, the driver seems a bit unsure about where he's going. He starts looking through his paperwork.

Yes, Coney Island. Coney Island is not near 45th Street in the center of Manhattan. It's in the opposite direction.

Valerie Kipnis

Jika's trying her best to explain to them in Spanish what he means. She's like, you're in a part of New York that is called Brooklyn, and where you're trying to go is Manhattan. It's two different counties. They're called boroughs here.

They ask Jika, how are we supposed to transfer or pay for a train? We just got to the city. We have no money. The family keeps asking to go to 45th Street, the same way they got here, and the driver keeps repeating he can't go off route, that he can only take them to Coney Island, nowhere near where they want to go.

The bus driver with the walkie talkie steps out, takes a call, and then comes back. Says maybe he could find someone at the subway station to help the family out. But it'll be a long trip, a bus ride to Coney Island, then, like, an hour on the subway back to 42nd Street.

Valerie Kipnis

"They'll just drop us off there and go on with their day," Roni says. "They did that to us already." Walkie talkie dude goes out again and comes back with a solution. He's found a dispatcher at Coney Island who speaks Spanish. He's going to open the gate, let them in, and direct them to the right train.

Valerie Kipnis

Jika turns and translates. You can see the adults start to relax a little. So maybe it'll work out? It's as if the entire system relies on the kindness of strangers, as if it works by coincidence, not design, coincidence that someone here speaks Spanish to translate, coincidence that the bus driver is kind and willing to find a Spanish speaker at the next point in their journey. Hopefully, that guy can help them get on the train to 42nd Street. And hopefully, at that station, someone can direct them to the hotel. For Roni, it all seemed like a very long way to get back to where they had just been.

Valerie Kipnis

"They sent us here to some sort of camp. If they had said that from the beginning, we would not have decided to come." Jika asks, "What if this was the only option? Would you stay here?"

Valerie Kipnis

Roni says, "No."

A city spokesperson told me that you can't choose a shelter. You get one assigned. And if you don't want to stay there, then you're on your own.

Valerie Kipnis

Jessica asks, "And if it was this or the streets?"

Valerie Kipnis

"We'd figure it out. Maybe walking around, we'll find help."

Valerie Kipnis

And with that, they left. We texted a bit when they got back to the Roosevelt, but then we stopped hearing from them. I think maybe they got a new SIM card. Jika went there a few days later but couldn't find them. I went back to Floyd Bennett Field to see if I could find them, but no luck.

Ira Glass

Valerie Kipnis is a producer on our show. She reported this with help from Jika Gonzalez.

Ira Glass

Act 2, 150 Days of Bummer. So the city's plan for all these new migrants is that they get out of the shelters and find their own places to live, which means making money so they can pay for that place to live. And there's the rub.

Most asylum seekers can't work legally when they first arrive, so they have to figure something out. One of our producers, Diane Wu, met somebody in that situation.

Diane Wu

I met Shakrood outside a city office on a rainy day, while he was making a last attempt to get shelter. He was taking a smoke break while he waited for the verdict inside. So much of this whole experience is about waiting. I asked him a kind of throwaway question I was asking everyone.

Diane Wu

"Subhanallah." It's a phrase in Arabic. I looked it up later. It means something like, "Wow, praise God and this incredible thing he made."

Diane Wu

Shakrood-- that's not his real name, by the way. We're choosing to protect his identity. He's from Mauritania. He's 23. He was a student there, studying bancassurance, which-- I had to look that up, too-- something to do with banks and insurance.

Shakrood's first language is Arabic. English is his third. And he started learning it in July of this year. July-- that was five months ago. Can you believe that?

Diane Wu

He found a YouTube channel and watched it basically non-stop for a week, then found an app to practice on. His teenage sister teased him about it, that that was no way to learn a language. But apparently, it was.

Shakrood is Black. And part of the reason he left Mauritania was to escape racial discrimination there. He arrived in New York in late August and was assigned to a shelter on 31st Street that got shut down in October because of the fire code. The city moved him to a new shelter, which also got shut down a few weeks later, which is how he ended up at this office today-- to apply for a new bed.

He told me he'd been sleeping on the streets for a couple of days, spending the nights in an African restaurant near Penn Station that was open late, and in the tiny mosque in the restaurant's basement. Shakrood finishes his cigarette and goes inside to check if there's a bed for him or not-- comes out with bad news.

Diane Wu

I found Shakrood again a week later, and I was surprised and relieved to hear that a day or two after we first met, he'd found a place to stay. The friendly owner of a smoke shop near his old shelter heard that Shakrood had been on the street in the cold and said he wanted to help him out. He had an empty space that he rented to Shakrood and two of his friends-- not a real apartment, more like a basement-- two rooms and a bathroom for $1,600 a month, around $500 a person.

Their first night in the new place-- the three of them had been so excited to finally have their own spot that they stayed up all night, talking about how to make it perfect. They decided to get a special tea set from Mauritania. All of this is basically what the city wants-- for people to find their way out of the shelters and out into the world.

But once you do that, there's rent to pay. And Shakrood can't legally work, because he's an asylum seeker. And asylum seekers have to wait 150 days after they file for asylum, before they can even apply for working permission. This specific waiting period was invented by the federal government in the '90s to discourage people from using asylum claims as a way to get work authorization.

Diane Wu

The mayor of New York, and other mayors, have been yelling at the federal government to change this. Like, we cannot help all these people get on their feet if you let them into the country but then don't let them work for six months. Because Shakrood can't get a job legally, he's had to look for one under the table.

He started right when he first got here in August. He didn't have any connections in New York, so his initial strategy was this. He just got up one day and started walking in and out of stores and restaurants, asking for work, all over the city.

Diane Wu

He went to so many places, that sometimes he'd accidentally go back to the same one without realizing it.

Diane Wu

There was one golden job that didn't seem to require work permission. But there was another reason Shakrood couldn't do it.

With alcohol. Shakrood had wandered into a bar, thinking it was a restaurant, and they were hiring somebody to help stock the alcohol. But Shakrood's Muslim, and for him, it's forbidden to drink or work with alcohol.

Diane Wu

Shakrood ran this grueling and fruitless job hunt for around 20 days, then gave up. It was the worst part of his time in New York, he told me-- worse than having nowhere to sleep. After that, he had a month where he was just kind of adrift, staying in the shelter, spending his days riding the subway with a friend, getting off at random stops.

He also had a brief diversion into dating, which he told me about kind of bashfully and proudly at the same time. He met a woman one day in Washington Square Park. She was an American.

Diane Wu

He chatted her up for 10 or 15 minutes, and then did get her number. They went on a couple dates-- one at the High Line, another park, and talked a bunch.

Diane Wu

He was straight with her. He told her he lived in a shelter, didn't have a job. She laughed and said--

Diane Wu

Shakrood told me he didn't feel sad or care much, just deleted her number. He hasn't tried to date anyone else since then. After that, he asked a guy in the shelter about how to get into doing food delivery, a really common job for new immigrants in New York, where you rent an e-bike or scooter and start making a few bucks per delivery.

The tricky thing about it is getting an Uber Eats or DoorDash account, because opening one requires a Social Security number, which Shakrood doesn't have. But there's a whole shadow market of accounts available. Shakrood met some kind of account dealer outside the TD Bank at 37th Street and Broadway one day, paid him $150 for an account that was supposed to be active for two weeks. He got kicked off after two days.

Later on, a friend helped him find an Uber Eats account. That's what he spends most days doing now, since mid-October-- riding his rented green bike around town.

Diane Wu

The best day he'd had, he'd made $150. But the day I talked to him, at 5 PM, he'd only made $19.75 all day, which doesn't get him much closer to making rent.

Diane Wu

To be safe. When we talked in late November, Shakrood kept bringing up the snow. He's worried about biking once the weather gets bad. That's what's on his mind right now, how to survive the winter and make it till he can get that work permit. 128 more days.

Ira Glass

Diane Wu is a producer on our show. Coming up-- a big dance number solves everybody's problems, just like in the movies. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life from Ira Glass. Today's program-- "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors," which is the thing that they say on the New York subway, and it also is kind of the mayor's message to any asylum seekers who still want to come to New York today. We have stories today about the unprecedented thing that New York City is trying to house and feed and settle so many immigrants all at once, with the city government picking up the tab. We have arrived at Act 3 of our show-- Act 3, Lullaby of Broadway.

So when we started putting this episode of our show together a few months ago, one thing that we noticed was that so many new immigrants to New York on social media were posting pictures of themselves in Times Square-- like, look, we made it. Sometimes these were after posts where you would see them covered in mud, trudging their way north to the United States.

And if you go to Times Square and look around, there, in the middle of the tourists and the families who came in from the suburbs to see The Lion King and the costumed Spider-Man and Elmos, are these newcomers.

Ira Glass

Kenny and his son, Nestor, got here from Venezuela a year ago, he said. Now, they were back, on the corner of 45th Street on the way into a McDonald's. They come to Times Square every now and then, look at the big screens, hang out.

Maybe 50 feet from them, a guy in a gray hoodie with a Colombian team logo on it was with his friends on a bench. They had beers. The guy in the hoodie, Mateo, has been here for a year, he told us. But that wasn't true for everybody in the group.

Ira Glass

Took four months, he said. I asked if he was going to take a photo here in Times Square, and he said, nah.

Ira Glass

On 46th Street, in front of the statue of songwriter George M. Cohan, a Venezuelan couple with five little kids came out to look at the lights, to just get everybody out of the house. On 7th Avenue, a 26-year-old sitting on a bench was here for a third time, and she explained the appeal. She liked seeing the huge video screens. They're pretty.

Ira Glass

She's been in the US for six months now. She was one of the people I talked to who did not have a difficult or dangerous journey here. She flew to Mexico, walked across the border, got picked up by border patrol and requested asylum. Then she flew from Texas to New York City.

She's now sharing an apartment in the Bronx with a friend. She's gotten used to the subway, doesn't get lost anymore. She's working at a Burger King, picking up English words and phrases.

Ira Glass

Leaning on the side of a newsstand, maybe a block from her, was a kid who I and my interpreter, Ramon, could not figure out at all. 16 years old, Ecuadorian, had been here for four months, living with his family, who seemed to be doing OK, parents working. He said he was going to high school and had a job at a supermarket, called Western Beef.

But he said he would come to Times Square three times a week, every single week, stay for hours. But for the life of us, Ramon and I could not understand why. When we first walked up, this kid-- his name is Junior-- was watching some street performers.

Ira Glass

This went nowhere. He likes to sit on the red bleachers sometimes on 47th. Do you meet people here and talk to them? No, he doesn't. Is this your favorite place in New York? Not really.

Ira Glass

And with that, we threw in the towel. Ramon and I walked around to the other side of the newsstand that Junior was leaning on, where there was an 11-year-old street performer with a handwritten sign with his name, Oscar. Ramon noticed that his last name, which was written on the sign, was the same as Junior's, and asked him if he was here alone.

Ira Glass

When we returned to Junior, he'd been watching us talk to Oscar, and he was laughing, I guess, like, yeah, busted.

Ira Glass

Bad night would be more like 50. Night before this, Saturday night, he did 200. Oscar just loves singing. Ever since he was little, back in Ecuador.

Ira Glass

This was his friend, Marcel, who came to see him. He goes to seventh grade with Marcel. Oscar says he would have been an eighth grade in Ecuador, but when he got here to New York City, they put him in seventh. It was kind of a bummer.

Anyway, Marcel came with his parents. Oscar says they put $10 in the box. Junior was like, eh, he thought maybe it was more $1 or $2. Oscar's saving up to buy an accordion. His favorite singer is Marc Anthony, so we asked for a Marc Anthony song.

Ira Glass

Oscar belts out a song in a shiny new black winter coat they must have bought him here in America. And watching him, I think about how many singers and musicians and songwriters have walked down this exact seven or eight blocks with the dream of making it here in New York City. He keeps an eye on the crowd as he belts out his song. People drop dollar bills.

He really does seem to love singing. Like so many of us who moved to this city, at some point, your dream also turns into a job. That is very New York.

Ira Glass

Act 4, The New Kids.

So there are 20,000 of these new migrant kids enrolled in New York City schools at the start of the school year. And which schools they arrived in was kind of random. That was true last year, too.

Ira Glass

This is a school counselor at a middle school. He asked that we not name it. The school is about 350 students, so on the small side, and pretty diverse.

And one day, this guidance counselor heard that some of the new migrant kids had been crying and hiding in the bathroom. And the counselor doesn't speak Spanish. The kids don't speak English.

They had these traumatic experiences coming to the United States. And he couldn't even talk to them about it. He felt like he was failing his students.

In the end, like so many people on today's show, he just had to kind of jury-rigg something himself to deal with the problem. He found a couple of Spanish-speaking grad students who were studying counseling, and had them come by. And they did a handful of counseling sessions with the new students.

In these counseling sessions, a kind of surprising thing happened. Some kids, yeah, wanted to talk about their journeys. But that was not the big thing they were interested in discussing.

The thing they really wanted to talk about was middle school. There are 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds. And they're just trying to figure out the same stuff any middle schooler might.

So one of our producers, Aviva DeKornfeld went to this middle school to spend a day talking to kids about what it is like to settle in a New York City middle school. She talked to three of them.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The first kid I met was Celynnys. She was in an English language class, 1 of about 20 kids sitting in neat little rows. Celynnys is the tiniest one in class. She sits in the back row with front-row posture. She's a total Hermione Granger; very organized, loves knowing the right answer to a teacher's question.

She came to the US knowing a little English already. But most of the other migrant students don't speak any English at all, so they're constantly asking Celynnys for help in class, which she has mixed feelings about.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It's like, Celynnys, do this for me. Celynnys, help me with that. I helped them all with homework because I don't like them just copying my work. I tell them to at least write it differently. And sometimes, I just get fed up with helping and tell them to leave me alone.

The reason all these kids keep asking Celynnys for help is because the school only has eight Spanish-speaking adults to help translate for 45 kids, none of whom speak even conversational English. So lots of kids just sit through class after class without a clue about what's going on. The school does have an ENL class, English as a New Language, though the teacher doesn't speak Spanish.

The thing Celynnys wanted to talk to me about was her grades. She's stressed about them. Back in Ecuador, Celynnys was the top student, best in her class five years in a row.

Here, she says she's doing pretty well except for in humanities and math. Humanities is hard because there's just so much talking in that class, all in English. It's hard to keep up. And math is difficult because the vocab is all weird, like the teacher will start talking about fractions.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It's hard to know if the word the teacher is saying-- in this case, fraction-- is a word in English that she just doesn't know yet or if it's a new word for everyone, even the English speakers. She's worried the teachers don't realize how much harder it is for the migrant kids trying to learn in a foreign language.

I talked to a school counselor about this. And he said the teachers definitely do realize that and take that into account. They're planning to grade the kids on a curve, weighing participation much more than they normally do, which sounds like a kindness in the short term, but not a real solution.

So much of successfully navigating middle school has nothing to do with what you learn in a classroom. Celynnys told me that there are all kinds of things she's having to figure out about being a middle schooler here like rules. There are so many more rules here.

Celynnys, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a fan of rules. But figuring out what's considered right and wrong, that's been a bit of a learning curve. Like the other day, she was playing with her friend, but then got sent to detention for being too rough.

Aviva DeKornfeld

She says that she and her friends always play roughly, and so they never get hurt. They understand it's a game. I ask her if her teachers understood that.

Aviva DeKornfeld

They understand that we're playing, but said that we still shouldn't play that way. I asked one of the Spanish-speaking teachers who knows Celynnys well about this incident. She said the principal showed her the security footage of the girls. And it was clear to her that they were playing, though she could see why it would look alarming to the principal.

I asked Celynnys if she often found herself breaking rules simply because she didn't understand them. And she said, well, sometimes she understands the rules fine, but just wants to play like she used to.

The second girl I talked to was Soffia. And by that I mean, she talked to me. She was very set on talking to me because she had a lot to say all at once, like how she liked science class because her teacher has a lizard.

Aviva DeKornfeld

And how she wants to be an actress or maybe a veterinarian.

Aviva DeKornfeld

And how her favorite word to say in English is water. She likes how it sounds.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I think school is going OK for her. It was a little hard to tell. She pinballed from subject to subject. Everything just seemed to fall under the category of things I'd like to share, even how hard it was to come to the US from Ecuador.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Soffia and her family didn't eat for two days. In the same breath, she'll tell me about how scared she was that her family might get robbed, and also how cool it is that New York City looks just like it did in the movie King Kong.

Other kids did this, too. It was this very weird dissonance talking to them because they're so excited to tell you about themselves, but they've also lived through real hardship. So they're clamoring over one another, all simultaneously trying to tell me about devastating experiences in these chirpy little voices. They just want to share whatever it is, heavy or light, like it all has equal weight.

The last girl I talked to was named Marianny. I wanted to meet her because a teacher mentioned she was putting together a dance for all the girls. Marianny's gawky, carries herself like a baby giraffe, except for when she's dancing, which she's often doing. She tells me that after school, she likes to listen to music and dance while she cleans her room. And recently, one afternoon, she had an idea.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I was dancing. And I was like, I want everyone to see my dance. She decided to choreograph something for the girls to perform during the winter dance. It seemed like a good bonding opportunity.

She'd come up with the idea shortly after a spat over some candy with some other girls. The kids often argue about food. Just the other day, the librarian had to intervene in an altercation involving a Cup-a-Noodles.

Marianny wanted to do something about all the fighting. So she came up with a solution straight out of Disney Channel. Let's make a dance to bring everyone together.

She invited the rest of the girls to participate. Nearly 20 of them wanted in, which is a big deal for Marianny because she used to hate school back in Venezuela. Got bullied terribly. But here, in some ways, she finds it's easier to make friends because all the migrant kids are stuck together.

Today is the first rehearsal. We all head downstairs where Marianny is going to teach everyone the dance. The room is a real dance studio with mirrors and a ballet bar.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Everyone's in their socks. Marianny gets right to it, walking them through the steps.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The dance is exactly what you'd imagine a middle school girl might choreograph in her bedroom. It was nice to see the kids in this setting where there was room for all their personalities. Soffia is running around, bouncing off the walls. Celynnys, the little Hermione Granger, wanted to know the exact count of all the moves. And since she had gone to a ballet academy back in Ecuador and had some experience with performing, insisted on making this announcement.

Aviva DeKornfeld

If during the performance the music stops for some reason, just keep dancing. Good advice, if a little premature. They've barely learned the choreography.

Marianny, for her part, honestly just seemed happy to be included, even though this whole thing was her idea in the first place. There were some disagreements about how to do the dance.

Aviva DeKornfeld

But mostly, things went fine. And during breaks, the girls rolled around on the floor, did cartwheels, precariously hung off the ballet bar. A few played a high-speed game of ring around the rosy. One of the older girls helped a few of the younger ones practice the steps. It was total chaos, the good kind.

But hanging over all of this is the fact that for a lot of migrant families in New York City, there's a deadline approaching. The city recently told families that they only have shelter for 60 days. Then they'll have to reapply, some as soon as the first week of January. A new shelter could mean a new school entirely. Whatever solidness the girls feel now might be gone by the new year.

Ira Glass

Aviva DeKornfeld is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Act 5, Harlem Shuffle.

So once migrants get into the shelters that New York is providing, lots of them have no idea what they're supposed to do next or who to talk to. In theory, they all have case managers. But often, they have no idea who those case managers are. And the case managers are overwhelmed, anyway, with lots of cases.

So there are all kinds of nonprofits trying to fill the gaps. One of them is run by Adama Bah, the woman who I was with till 2:00 in the morning at the Port Authority greeting a bus from Texas. Again, her group is called Afrikana. Emmanuel Dzotsi dropped by there to see how much of the city's slack they're able to take up and where they're struggling. Here he is.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Afrikana is in a nondescript building in Harlem at 145th and Lenox. Most of the windows are boarded up. There's no signage. The only reason I knew I was in the right place was because when I pulled up at 10:00 AM, there was a long line of people that trailed out the front door, around the building, and into a parking lot.

Inside, there's a small waiting area, a long table with three people doing intake, a series of makeshift cubicles. It looks basically like a tiny, chaotic DMV, the sort of place where if you stand around for too long, someone will pull you into a random task that they need help with. It could be translating, copying papers, or, in my case, holding someone's toddler for a second.

Hi. You want to do my job for me?

[BABY JABBERING]

Overseeing everything is Adama Bah. She started this place seven months ago after years of helping immigrants and asylum seekers out of her car. So many people needed her services, she needed an office. Now, she says they get roughly 500 people a day.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

She founded this place to serve a new generation of migrants from places like Guinea and Mauritania who've been making their way to the United States in the last couple of years. Those people started coming in large numbers this summer in part because of a Nicaraguan government's decision to change their visa system. So Africans could just fly to Nicaragua, and from there, walk and hitchhike to the United States. You no longer had to pass through the often-lethal Darien Gap connecting Colombia and Panama. Word spread on social media about it. And lots of people came.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Languages like Pulaar and Wolof, but also Arabic and French. And everybody providing those services is a volunteer, including Adama. She's not getting paid for any of this.

To make money, she has a part-time job. And it seems like she's just about making all of this work, which is wild because most of her time I was at Afrikana, I found myself thinking, what would happen if this place didn't exist?

I watched person after person come in to inquire about an important piece of mail they had forwarded to Afrikana, because with all of the moving they were doing from shelter to shelter, this was their permanent mailing address. I met a woman who'd had a baby just a week earlier who was limping around the office, stitches and all, because she just wanted to be around other people from her country. And in the middle of this, I saw Adama digging through crates looking for mail, calming disputes.

She seemed unable to get through a quick Zoom call at her desk without someone who'd been helped days earlier popping by to give her an update or needing more guidance. I watched her constantly, and I mean, constantly lose track of her phone because she'd given it to volunteers who'd learned long ago that if you need something from a shelter manager or an attorney or anyone useful, it'll happen just that much faster if they think Adama Bah is calling.

Trying to keep up with her, I kept looking for discrete ways to tell her that I could really use a minute to catch my breath. But there are no breaks, she says, not when she's helping all of these people.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Adama's biggest challenge today is 27 young men, aged 18 through 21 here in the US without their parents. Today, Adama wants to find them all housing. And she's trying to get them into what she says is the gold standard here.

Instead of regular migrant shelters, she wants to get them placed in the city's youth shelter system. That system serves all young New Yorkers aged 16 through 21 without homes, not just migrants. And in the youth shelter system, you could potentially get a spot for up to two years, not just 30 days. You also get vocational training, mental health services, and help finding schools, which are all services these kids would rarely get in the regular migrant shelters.

It's going to be hard for Adama to place all 27 boys, though, because a lot of the youth shelters are full. Most of the boys know that they could be in for a bit of a wait, so they spread out around the room lounging. Almost everyone is on their phones watching soccer and talking to people back home.

One guy, though, who isn't on his phone is a 19-year-old named Lamine. He's the one person who asks me straight up, who are you exactly? Do you work with immigration?

I speak French because I lived in Belgium for a few years as a kid. Never picked up the word for podcast, though. And as I struggle to remember if I can just say podcast, I can feel Lamine sizing me up, wondering if I can be helpful to him in any way. He figures out quickly that I probably can't. But he's still happy to talk with me.

He explains that he's from Guinea. Says both of his parents are dead. And a couple of years ago after a coup d'etat in his country, the one parental figure in his life, a military officer who'd more or less adopted him, went missing.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Luckily, Lamine says he knew someone who knew someone who could help get him out, which, I should add, always seems to be a thing for Lamine. He just has this knack for seeking out the right people for help. And there's an earnestness about him, I think, that wins them over.

That's how he found his first shelter in New York from a random stranger on the street. And it's how he heard about Afrikana. Lamine showed me his Facebook page. There's this video of him at the airport in Texas.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

It's kind of his I've made it to America video. He looks sheepish, almost embarrassed in it. But he is so incredibly happy.

He looks legitimately really young, younger somehow than the Lamine in front of me. What a difference three weeks makes. Now that he's in New York, he doesn't really talk to people back home. And he feels guilty about that.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Lamine doesn't want to think about his life in Guinea. But he doesn't want to talk about New York, either.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Right now, he's in a shelter, a big tent facility on Randall's Island next to Manhattan. But in just two weeks, he'll run up against the city's 30-day limit. That's actually why he's here at Afrikana. He's trying to figure out where to go next.

As the day goes on, the 27 young men are getting restless. So far, Adama has only managed to find places for just two of these guys at a shelter called Covenant House. She says it's one of the best in the city.

It's not until 7:30, almost 10 hours after I arrived at Afrikana, that one of the volunteers who's been helping out Adama all day hears back from a place she's been waiting on. This organization will take kids. But she tells the boys, there's a catch.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Only 16 people can go, she says. She reads out 16 names. Lamine is not on that list. He looks upset. He's going to have to come back in the morning and try all of this all over again. I tell him I'll catch up with him later. And I follow the 16 kids out the door.

Those young men have one last task sitting between them and this day finally being over. They have to make a roughly 30-minute walk to where they'll be staying. All right, let's go. I start walking with them, only to realize that we have a couple of stragglers.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

And then it dawns on me. Me and these youth were both given the address. But I'm the one with Google Maps pulled up. I'm not following these youth to their next living situation. I'm taking them there.

It's a little chaotic. A few of them charge ahead, moving like they know where they're going even though they don't, and acting kind of insultingly like they're not with me. I watch one of them try to jaywalk and almost go headfirst into oncoming traffic.

Amazingly, we get to our destination in one piece and on time. I ring the doorbell of the place. And one of the teenagers, the same one I yanked back from traffic earlier, taps me on the shoulder and asks me, you're going to wait with us, right? See how it is?

And then a woman opens the door and welcomes us. Hi.

She has some important information to share with everyone, but she doesn't speak French. So I translate.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Five days, that's it. I feel terrible communicating this to the boys. This is not going to be their new home. And every day, they have to clear out of here from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.

One of her boys mouths to me, [SPEAKING FRENCH], it's crazy. I don't know what to tell him. I kind of agree.

I thought that when I went to Afrikana, I'd be taking a look at a sort of safety net under the city's safety net, a place that was catching all these people the city maybe wasn't. But that safety net has holes in it. For all the work Adama and her volunteers put in, it feels like it all comes down to luck.

In the weeks that followed, I got texts and calls from a couple of the boys. They told me that they hadn't gotten placed in a long-term youth facility, that instead, they doubled down on staying in the city's regular migrant shelters.

Adama told me it used to be easier to place young people. I happened to be there in late October, right when it started to become almost impossible. The youth shelter system is full.

For weeks, I didn't hear anything from Lamine. But when I did get in touch with him, he told me he's staying at Covenant House, the big youth shelter Adama says is one of the best. He says he got the address off someone he met that day at Afrikana, and he took it from there. I got in here myself, he told me.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

You can hear it, right, the pride in his voice? And he should be proud.

He didn't get into one of Covenant House's two-year programs. But they did give him a spot for 60 days. He's going to school, learning English slowly. He's still sussing out how I can be useful, I think. Lately when we've talked, he's had a few questions for me about my own immigration story, how I came here.

Adama told me she has a lot of Lamines, people who figure it out on their own. That was her goal when she first opened Afrikana. She'd help folks, and they'd be gone because she'd have connected them to the right people. But she's serving hundreds of people a day because so many of them end up returning. And so many more keep arriving.

The night I came home from Afrikana after 10 hours with her, I'd been in bed about an hour when I got a call from Adama. There are buses on the way that she was meeting that night. Starting the whole thing all over again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ira Glass

Emmanuel Dzotsi produced today's episode of our show.

["NEW YORK, NEW YORK"]

(SINGING) Start spreading the news. I'm leaving today. I want to be a part of it, New York, New York.

People who put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Chris Benderev, James Bennett the Second, Phia Bennin, Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Chana Joffe-Walt, Tobin Low, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Ike Sriskandarajah, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

We had editing help today from Gwynne Hogan. We first heard about Adama Bah and Afrikana from a Chalkbeat article by Eliana Perozo.

We had many interpreters today. Wolof interpretation by Arame Ngom. Pulaar and French by Abou Dia. Charlotte Morlie also did French. Arabic, Hany Hawasly, who also helped us with fact checking. Spanish interpretation by David Mora, who also helped with field producing, Andrew Belisle, JoAnn DeLuna, and my interpreter in Times Square Ramon Mendez. Voiceovers in English in Act 5 from Karim Diane.

Special thanks today to Jamie Powlovich, Michelle Navarro, Jasmine Garsd, Jordan Salama, Bahar Ostadan, Cody-Rae Knue, Camille Mackler, Rachel Lissy, Kirstyn Brendlen, Kate Smart, Gabriella Munoz de Zubiria, Natalia Vellejo Ulloa, Eric Chen, and Dana Ballout.

Our website thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia, who was horrified to learn that the New Yorker is coming out with a thousand-page holiday edition of the magazine. Imagine, imagine the collective weight on the front stoop.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.

["NEW YORK, NEW YORK"]

(SINGING) If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere. New York. It's up to you, New York.