Donald Trump made it the center of a right-wing conspiracy. It just closed—and left the truth behind.

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On the last day the Roosevelt Hotel was open, everyone inside was sweating. Not because of nerves, but because of the early July heat: The once glamorous Manhattan hotel—and once infamous migrant shelter—never had a central HVAC system. There were no more immigrants being let in, and none were left in the rooms upstairs. That afternoon, it was only a small gathering of the press and municipal employees, and the only guest whose arrival was allowed and anticipated was Eric Adams, who was running late.

The New York mayor had announced in February that the hotel, which had been serving as a shelter for migrant families and intake center for new arrivals since May 2023, would be shuttered this summer. So all throughout June, its numbers had dwindled, the residents of its 1,000 rooms disgorged. Families streamed out the one side door not rigged with an emergency alarm, juggling suitcases, boxes, and strollers. Out came minifridges and folding tables and stacks of files in manila folders, shuffling past metal guardrails and security guards and piled into cabs. All new arrivals, who have continued to show up in New York City, although in much smaller numbers, were turned away. On June 24, one woman from South America showed up pushing a stroller and trailing a toddler in 100-degree heat. She had come to seek asylum, she said in Spanish. “No aquí,” said the security guard, handing her a piece of paper announcing that the facility was closed and redirecting her, in total confusion, to a different building downtown.

Finally inside the Roosevelt, Adams took to the podium and began a farewell speech, celebrating the facility’s closure as much as what had happened while it was open. His remarks were characteristically defiant. “Present day may not be kind, but history will be kind,” he said. “We have closed 62 other locations,” he cheered, noting that arrivals had dropped to just 100 a week, a result of President Donald Trump’s punishing new immigration policy, though he didn’t mention that part. Adams, who has worked closely with Trump on immigration issues, had once said that the wave of immigrants who filled up beds and cots in places like the Roosevelt “will destroy New York City.” Standing behind him were a few city staffers who had worked tirelessly to get the Roosevelt running, and he commended them, messing up the name of one person and the title of another.

What happened at the Roosevelt Hotel depends almost entirely on whom you ask. It came to be known by the immigrants who passed through there as “Little Ellis Island”: a staggering 155,000 people from 160 countries passed through the hotel’s doors over the course of two years, or the majority of the 237,000 migrants who came to the city during the so-called migrant crisis. It came to be known by conservatives nationwide as a “headquarters” of international gangs like Tren de Aragua, a hotbed of violent crime, both organized and disorganized, and illegal immigration. It came to be known by the mayor as a bargaining chip, as he struck a deal with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement that saw his federal corruption case dropped at the same time he announced the facility’s closure. And for many, despite a herculean act of public sector administration and civic service that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people seeking legally protected asylum being housed, fed, clothed, and vaccinated, it did not come to be known at all.

The hotel’s final day was met with zero fanfare. By early July, the only evidence of what had taken place there were a few leftover stains on an upholstered chair that were resistant to steam cleaning and some flat Mylar balloons that had floated to the ceiling and gotten tangled in one of the lobby’s chandeliers.

The “crisis” began in 2022, with asylum-seekers from all over the world coming to the United States, fleeing persecution in various failed or failing states. In New York City, it was turbocharged by an act of political opportunism: That summer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, began busing new arrivals to sanctuary cities.

The first buses arrived in New York in August 2022. For the next 10 months, the numbers increased steadily, from one bus a day to two buses to 13. Sometimes, Abbott even sent planes. New York City public health employees implored the Texas governor’s office to give them at least a heads-up about when these buses would arrive, so that they could more smoothly accommodate the new arrivals. The governor refused. “Ghost buses,” as the employees began to call them, would show up in the middle of the night without warning, depositing migrants at the city’s Port Authority, requiring the Roosevelt to run 24 hours a day.

Abbott sought to manufacture a political crisis out of the issue, and he succeeded, with punishing disregard for the well-being of the people in question. Often, those people, upon crossing into Texas, were told they had two options—they could sleep on the street or they could board a bus. Some were not even aware of where the bus was going. Many did not want to go to New York City, some had scarcely even heard of New York City, and some had immigration court appointments in Texas just a few days later. Many would disembark in total confusion and dismay. “I encountered one woman crying on the street who didn’t even know she was in New York City,” said Dr. Ted Long, senior vice president of ambulatory care and population health for NYC Health + Hospitals, who ran the Roosevelt’s health facility. But not all arrived under duress. Some were met by family members carrying balloons, which routinely found their way to the roof of the Roosevelt lobby, as people fell asleep awaiting intake and let go of the string.

According to Long, the arrivals would reach the city in various states of fatigue. Sometimes, the cruelty enacted upon those migrants began before they even boarded the transports. One child, whose anti-epilepsy medication was seized and who was denied medical care in Texas, made it all the way to the Roosevelt and promptly had a life-threatening seizure. Many women arrived very pregnant, on the verge of labor, without ever having seen a doctor. Gov. Abbott’s office told me that migrants underwent temperature checks and health screenings from NGOs before boarding the buses, but NYC Health + Hospitals staff said buses would arrive with people actively sick with communicable diseases like chickenpox and measles. Abbott’s ghost buses sent 40,000 people to New York at final count.

And as New York City scrambled to address the influx, Trump blasted Democrats on the issue. The party managed little pushback. Adams, rather than championing his city’s response, sided with Trump, attacking then-President Joe Biden. And while the city put together a robust response to the crisis, Adams had no desire to take credit for it, even when it was forced upon him by law. Instead, he tried to suspend New York’s right-to-shelter guarantee, a 1981 standard that dictates that the city is obligated to temporarily house anyone experiencing homelessness, and was promptly sued. In March, New York City reached a legal settlement with the Coalition for the Homeless and the Legal Aid Society regarding the right-to-shelter requirements the Adams administration had been trying to roll back for the city’s newest arrivals. That settlement meant that single adult migrants would be allowed a room for only 30 days, with families being allowed a room for 60 days.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

As all of this played out, at the Roosevelt, an intake desk was set up in the lobby, and new arrivals were checked in and immediately run through a gauntlet of testing, screenings, and social services. They were given health workups and tested for various illnesses; those who tested positive were sent to quarantine on the second floor. Next, they were vaccinated against measles and more. Then came a depression screening; those dealing with acute trauma were sent to meet with social workers. Elsewhere in the building was work authorization application assistance; the application process was streamlined to just one hour for those who intended to stay in New York. About 150 of the rooms were reserved for short-term stays—often, the staff spent time trying to reach the family members who were living in other cities. Many people stayed just a night, relocated to other facilities across New York City or off to families in other cities, or even returned to Texas so they didn’t miss immigration hearings. The remaining 850 rooms, for slightly longer stays, were occupied entirely by families, many of whom had a relative with acute health problems.

Meanwhile, the Roosevelt’s ballroom, a glorious spot as recently as the 1940s, was filled with cots to accommodate overflow. Its luggage room was overfull with spectacular quantities of luggage. Out of the old newsstand, which still smelled faintly of cigars, a million diapers were given out to young mothers, along with 10 million wet wipes and 700,000 bottles of baby food and formula. From May 2023 to May 2024, about 2,800 people arrived each week.

This all happened at the hotel by design of its owners. Abbott wasn’t the only person to see an opportunity. Many of the city’s long-suffering hotels, still reeling from COVID, saw a payday. As Bloomberg reported, the Financial District Holiday Inn, in bankruptcy in late 2022, rented out all 492 rooms, at a 73 percent markup beyond its $110-a-night room rate, as a shelter facility. Inflated prices became commonplace: The city paid over $311 a night at the two-star Holiday Inn Express on Kings Highway in Brooklyn to house migrants.

The Roosevelt Hotel had been purchased in 2000 by Pakistan International Airlines, owned primarily by the Pakistani government, and had been closed indefinitely in December 2020, after the pandemic demolished the city’s tourism. Already, the hotel was on its last legs. It sat empty until the city struck a deal to use it as what became the nerve of the recent arrival network, a shelter complex spanning more than 100 sites. The city paid $202 per room in a three-year deal, netting the government of Pakistan $220 million, according to the New York Times.

“Getting it up and running took three weeks,” said Adam Shrier, director of communications at NYC Health + Hospitals. “There was plaster falling off the ceiling when we first got in.”

While city staff scrambled to take in the asylum-seekers, everyone else, it seemed—Adams, right-wing influencers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and more—contrived to get them kicked out.

Conservative media also saw an opportunity. The New York Post published a drumbeat of articles vilifying the Roosevelt as a lurid den of gang violence and crime, working its readership into a lather over the site as a satellite location of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. One article said, “A pop-up barnyard would be less inappropriate for the neighborhood.” Another Post piece focused on “a 12-year-old pintsized gangbanger accused of being the ringleader of a Central Park robbery crew” who lived at the Roosevelt with his family. The paper published and republished tales about a shoplifting incident, a domestic dispute, and a violent confrontation between the New York Police Department and some residents, repeatedly. “Was there some petty crime? Sure, people were desperate,” Shrier told me. The Post made those incidents out to be a wave of criminality. During the last week of the Roosevelt’s operations, a Post photographer tried to sneak into the facility but was denied.

Conservative YouTube channels followed suit. Nick Shirley, a twentysomething right-wing YouTube and TikTok star best known for a video celebrating the conditions inside El Salvador’s CECOT prison, produced numerous video dispatches about the Roosevelt, racking up viral hits about the supposed life of luxury being enjoyed by people seeking asylum inside, and the violent criminal element.

In late June 2024, the Biden administration effectively shut off access to asylum by executive order. In July 2024, the last of the Abbott buses arrived. The number of new arrivals plunged dramatically, and then Trump won the presidency, pledging mass deportation.

If there had been chaos outside the Roosevelt before, with Trump in office, it took on a much different form. Numerous security guards told me that for months they witnessed ICE agents collecting outside the facility; they were instructed not to interfere if ICE tried to enter into the building.

Indeed, after Adams struck his deal in February with the Trump administration to drop federal corruption charges brought against him, his office began working closely with border czar Tom Homan to stage massive raids on city shelter facilities. The Roosevelt Hotel was high on the list. Celebrity television star Dr. Phil, Homan, and Kaz Daughtry, a New York deputy mayor, were scheduled to attend a raid on the hotel for the cameras on March 11, according to reporting in the New York Times, in a large display featuring hundreds of officers. But the plan was scotched at the last minute.

Since then, ICE has trained its efforts on the courthouse at Federal Plaza, where agents are now routinely snatching up immigrants before or after their hearings, while letting Adams spearhead the pressure campaign to wind down the shelter system.

By the end, a new group had seen an opportunity: developers. After a turnabout in fortunes in the city, New York real-estate titans are now slobbering over the chance to tear down the Roosevelt and convert it into a luxury skyscraper.

“You’ve already got One Vanderbilt and the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters. Two more giant buildings are planned on Park and another one on Madison,” one unnamed developer told the New York Post in June. “The [Roosevelt Hotel’s] block is in the hottest commercial-development corridor in the country.”

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In July, one week after the Roosevelt shelter closed, Arab News reported that Pakistan is seeking a valuation of at least $1 billion for the Roosevelt site, which is now being heralded as one of the country’s most valuable foreign assets. The International Monetary Fund recently gave the country a $7 billion loan, contingent on it privatizing key holdings, including the Roosevelt and Pakistan International Airlines, by this month. Now that the migrants have all been evicted, the country is looking to secure a joint partnership agreement that will likely see the construction of high-end office space and potentially more. The site could feature a new tower of at least 1.3 million square feet. It was not ICE, or Adams, or conservative media outrage that got the migrants kicked out of the Roosevelt in the end. It was an expiring lease, the developer class, and the world’s foremost international financial organization.

“It was like Ellis Island, man. What happened here will never happen again,” said one of the security guards I spoke to in late June.

As I left the Roosevelt on its final day—I was one of the last five people left inside—I bumped straight into Shirley, the right-wing YouTube star. He was filming yet another video about the hotel, holding his iPhone aloft, recording a female co-worker talking about the life of luxury that had supposedly been led by international gang members inside. I waited until he was done filming, then told him I was familiar with his work.

“We sorta exposed this place,” he told me.