NEW YORK — Kaleine Gualoto was relieved when she arrived in New York and was greeted by a team of volunteers. She was grateful to be offered food, water and coffee, and taken to a hotel, where she and her family had a place to sleep.
But in the two months that have passed, disappointment has set in. How would she work without papers? How would she cook for her family without a kitchen? How would she look for work without child care?
Not knowing where else to turn, Gualoto, 24, retraced her steps to the place she first stepped foot in New York — Port Authority.
“This is the first time we came back here,” Gualoto said. “We’re looking for winter clothes. It’s too cold ... And we are looking for work. I walked all over Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. I can’t find a job.”
Gualoto is one of more than 30,000 migrants who have fled instability and violence in their homelands to make the dangerous trek to New York over the past few months. Every day, as many as 200 desperate people like her go back to Port Authority in search of answers.
They need clothing, legal help, mental and physical health treatment, schooling and shelter. With nowhere to go, no friends or family, living in a shelter with no work and no pathways for the future, they return to the place where they first received assistance.
As the buses slowed after the first wave of migrants, nonprofits shifted their attention from just receiving new arrivals, to also aiding those already here.
Volunteers at the bus terminal have set up a pop-up shop of sorts for migrants, with tables stacked high with donated food and clothing and people ready to connect them with outside services. Members of the National Guard have cordoned-off the area and help with intake and the flow of assistance seekers.
“This is where they have had some kindness; they have been given assistance; they were treated like people. So they come back here when they need help,” Ilze Theillman, who runs the volunteer organization Team TLC said.
At Port Authority, Gualoto was able to outfit her family with winter clothing she wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, and a warm meal with “maduros,” plantains from home. Her 3-year-old son, Ezequiel, happily snacked on an apple in a donated stroller.
“Our prospects are better in New York ... but until that comes to be, we’re a little bummed out. It’ll happen, in time,” she said. " ... I feel good here. The only thing you see is hard is how hard it is on the family. We’re OK, some days you can get work, something to eat for breakfast.”
More than 20,000 asylum-seekers are in the city’s shelter system, which remains at an all-time capacity.
Rosalinda Requena, 28, and her husband, Valmore Fereira, 30, slept on the streets for three days last week. They hoped to get into a shelter before Christmas and the frigid temperatures hit.
Requena anxiously spoke to volunteers at Port Authority on Wednesday. She clutched a small piece of paper with her name and the name of a shelter scribbled on it. Her belongings — nearly all donations — surrounded her, packed in bags and a suitcase.
“I hope this works out,” she said. “It’s so cold, cold and there’s no little on the street. Especially on Christmas, it’s going to be so cold.”
Fereira, her husband, walked over to the Team TLC tables to collect winter clothing for them. Requena lit up when he came back.
“Oh, look how cute that is!” Requena smiled as her husband tried on his new black winter jacket.
Requena and Fereira are from Venezuela and traveled to New York by bus three months ago. They first stayed in a shelter in Queens, but the conditions became unbearable, she said.
“They separated me in one room, and my husband on the other side,” Requena said. “And I had to live with all that crazy f—ing fighting all day. God, it was terrible. Marijuana, drugs ... At least here we will have a decent roof. There, [at the other shelter] the water they gave us to bathe, it smelled like poop, like s—. The water for every morning stunk.”
The couple has no friends or family in the U.S., except for a relative in Utah. Fereira has a bad ankle, broken in a horse accident, that bothers him in the cold. They have since found a room to stay in, but they don’t know how long it’ll last.
Some migrants have found the adjustment so difficult that they are aching to go home.
“We need help. This country is so bad. We need help,” Enrique Puglisevich, 47, said. “I regret coming here.”
Puglisevich, his wife and four children, ages 12, 10, 8 and 1 year old arrived from Peru last month. The family braved the cold for hours to get into immigration court last week and returned to the Port Authority for help finding housing, food and legal assistance.
“It’s really hard to live here,” Puglisevich said.
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