New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced last year that a luxury, 4-star Midtown hotel—Row NYC—would become the second location to house migrants while construction on a humanitarian relief center takes place on Randall’s Island.
In addition to the legal, medical and social services offered to families, they are also given food on the taxpayers’ dime. City Hall is reportedly paying around $400-500 per room, per night.
But according to a hotel worker, the city is wasting a ton of money, as migrants are dumping a significant amount of food given to them, as they prefer to cook their own meals on hot plates in their rooms.
“It’s a crime to be throwing out so much food,” hotel employee Felipe Rodriguez told The New York Post.
'Tons' of food gets tossed by NYC hotel because migrants won't eat it https://t.co/ULEwXRDabs pic.twitter.com/mCV4ACbcf9
— New York Post (@nypost) January 11, 2023
Some workers at The Row hotel in Midtown, which is being used exclusively to house migrants, say they throw out bags and bags of free, uneaten food everyday. NYC says they can’t force migrants to eat the food, but refuses to say how much taxpayer money is paying for the food. pic.twitter.com/REFbHgX1IS
— Kristin Thorne (@KristinThorne) January 11, 2023
The hotel employee estimated about 40 percent of the food provided to migrants gets tossed.
Rodriguez also estimated the amount wasted at “almost a ton” a day.
“How do I know that? Because the sanitation guys go floor by floor every day picking up the trash,” he said. “Before, it used to be something like six, seven bags in the back landing of each floor. Now they’re picking up 15, 20 bags.
Rodriguez said some of the bags of food he throws away weigh 60 pounds.
“Anything [the migrants] don’t consume is in those bags, and they’re heavy. I weighed one of the bags full of sandwiches one time and it weighed 60 pounds.”
Rodriguez added: “There have been times when we couldn’t take all of the garbage out because the bins were full, and I’m talking about 25, 30 bins of garbage.”
“My problem is, why are we throwing away so much food? Someone from the city should have said, ‘Let’s order less food so we throw less food out.’ But nobody cares,” he said. […]
In addition to sandwiches and bagels, the migrants are served food including fruit, peanuts, chips, juice, soda and prepared dinners that “you heat in a microwave,” said Rodriguez.
“They don’t like the menu. They just don’t. They want rice and beans, plantains, tostones,” he said. (NY Post)
On numerous occasions, Rodriguez has also had to confiscate cooking equipment that poses a fire hazard.
“They usually put the hot plate on the rug so that nobody can see it and it stays away from the fire alarm,” he said. “If those polyester curtains by the windows touch that red coil, it’s over. It’s a possibility that scares the s–t out of everybody in the Row.
“If you are on the 27th floor, the 28th floor, and a fire breaks out, the elevators are gone. That means you have to use the stairs,” he said. “My biggest concern is the children. We have too many children in that hotel. We have pregnant women in the hotel … The tragedy would be devastating.”
In addition, Rodriguez said that the Row “forgot about the standards we had when we had regular guests.”
“If they got caught smoking in the hotel, it was a $500 charge. You could smoke outside, but you couldn’t stand in front so that people wouldn’t get secondhand smoke,” he said. “The protocols went down the toilet because migrants can smoke weed, they can smoke cigarettes. You can’t tell them nothing.” (NY Post)
Partying, fights, drug use, and sexual harassment have also been among the other issues Rodriguez has witnessed firsthand.
"The chaos that we see at the Row today is [caused] by migrants being drunk, drinking all day, smoking marijuana [and] consuming drugs," Rodriguez told Fox News's Laura Ingraham.
The hotel has not indicated how long the migrants will stay there. On its website, it simply states that it's "closed until further notice."
Rodriguez says control of the hotel is now in their hands.
"The ones that have all the power are the migrants," he said. "The hotel workers lost their power in the hotel."