The Luxury Office Development That Became a Horrific Migrant Shelter

At the Hall, residents told one another they could expect to make seventy-five dollars a day doing deliveries, but that expectation was often frustrated. If a phone was stolen, or a bike broke down, a resident might not make back what he paid out to rent the account, forcing him to start from square one. Occasionally, at the end of a night that an account was expiring, a migrant would take an order from a restaurant and simply not deliver it, keeping it for himself, or splitting it with his friends.

Eventually, the sidewalks outside the shelter were crowded with vehicles that the residents used for delivery work. On Labor Day, a fight broke out between Latin American and African residents at the Hall—reportedly over a bike. As the conflict was subsiding, a former N.Y.P.D. officer working as a fireguard took out a handgun and waved it wildly at residents and staff. (Video of the incident was later put online.) The police were called, and the ex-cop told them that a resident had swung a construction cone at him. The resident was arrested and charged with assault, menacing, disorderly conduct, harassment, and inciting a riot. “Why are they taking me away if he was the one who was going to shoot me?” the resident later said, according to The City, a local-news Web site. (The guard was later fired. Mulligan Security, who employed him, is still under contract with the city government.)

That Saturday, a moped was stolen outside the Hall. A group of Venezuelan residents got together to perform an all-night watch over their mopeds. Just before 3 A.M., a Lexus S.U.V. pulled up, and a man got out, shouting. The Venezuelan residents shouted back. The man retreated to his S.U.V., put his foot on the gas, and hit two of the migrants.

A week and a half later, I went to the Hall. Walking under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass, I noticed a group of young men and some mopeds huddled together—and a pair of crutches. One man was lying back on a mattress next to a large concrete piling. He was in his late twenties, and slight, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a tattoo of a diamond on his left cheek. A cast was on his left foot, and his purple and mangled toes poked out the top of it. The traffic overhead shook the ground beneath us. “I’m sleeping here now,” he said.

The man’s name was Yoandry Jesus Lozano Bracho. After being run over by the driver of the Lexus, he’d been taken to a hospital in Park Slope with a broken foot. (The other migrant who had been hit, Jhonaker Gil, suffered injuries to his arm and back.) Lozano Bracho said he was then transferred to a shelter in Queens, where there were doctors on-site. But everyone he knew in New York City was back in Brooklyn, as were two mopeds he had borrowed money to acquire. He didn’t work as a deliveryman himself—he rented the mopeds out to others. “I took out one loan to pay the other,” he explained. He’d left Queens on his crutches, got on a bus, transferred to the subway, asking people for directions as he went, and made it back to the Hall. But he wasn’t allowed back in. So he went down the block and lay down under the highway overpass. Some friends soon joined him, and they formed a little community outside. In addition to the mattress, which they shared at night, they had an armchair, some milk crates, blankets, and several mopeds. “They bring me things,” Lozano Bracho said, of his peers under the overpass. “That’s how I eat.” Just in a few minutes together, I saw other men bring Lozano Bracho five dollars, ask Lozano Bracho for five dollars, and quietly discuss matters with him out of my earshot. He accepts in-kind trades. One man who owes him money drives him on a moped three times a day to a public park, Lozano Bracho said, where he uses the bathroom.

After the accident, Lozano Bracho had been forced to sell his first two mopeds, but he’d since acquired a third, the income on which, he said, was just enough to cover his debt payments. To make money, he sold loose cigarettes and joints, which netted about fifty dollars a day. “But each meal in this city is ten or twelve dollars,” he said. Lozano Bracho showed me his foot, and how he unwrapped and rewrapped a bandage that kept a plaster brace in place. When I asked him how long he intended to live under the overpass, he replied, “As long as necessary.” He stared angrily at his foot. “How long will it take me to recover?” he said. He had a partner and two daughters in Venezuela. Their initials were tattooed on his right hand. “What can I send them now?” he said.

One of Lozano Bracho’s friends stopped to listen as we were talking, a baby-faced guy who declined to tell me his name. He’d just come back from doing deliveries. I asked him about the arrangement with the broker of the fake accounts: Did he feel like the price to rent the account was fair, or did he feel exploited by the broker? He looked at me, pityingly. “Brother, welcome to reality,” he said. “There’s nothing else to say. Whether it’s here, or Venezuela, or Argentina.” Just then, other residents of the encampment suddenly started urging everyone, including Lozano Bracho, to stand up. “It’s time, muchachos!” one yelled. Several brooms appeared. Together, the men swept the concrete. One of the residents told me they did this several times a day. Even under a highway, they tried to keep clean.

Lozano Bracho said he didn’t know the man in the Lexus who had run him over. Initial reports in the press had characterized the incident as having been motivated by racism, or anti-migrant bias. The man accused of running over Lozano Bracho is named Hamzeh Alwawi. He is a Jordanian immigrant who owns a fast-food restaurant called BurgerIM, six blocks from the Hall, in Clinton Hill. BurgerIM was an upstart burger franchise that floundered just before the start of the pandemic; its corporate ownership has since been accused of luring immigrant franchisees into a pyramid scheme. Alwawi now operates independently, but has kept the branding. He didn’t deny hitting migrants with his car, but he denied any bias. “I am Arabic, I am Muslim, and I am Black,” he said. “If you want to do racism, you have to do it on me.”

Alwawi said that, for weeks leading up to that night, he’d had problems with deliverymen who were working with fake delivery-app accounts. He knew the accounts were fake because the I.D. photographs on the restaurant’s app interface didn’t match the faces of the workers coming to pick up the orders. But, with food hot and customers waiting, he and his staff had kept handing over orders anyway. BurgerIM is open until midnight on week nights, and 2 A.M. on Fridays and Saturdays, making it one of the last places to close in the neighborhood. Increasingly, at the end of the night, delivery workers were stealing orders—picking them up, but not confirming that they’d done so on the app, and then disappearing into the city. When this happened, the food had to be remade, and the customers got upset. Alwawi had called the police, but to little effect. “This area was never like this,” he said.

The night he ran over Lozano Bracho, two large orders had come in at around 2 A.M. Fifteen minutes later, a deliveryman in a white baseball cap came in to pick up the food. The account he was working under said his name was Karla, and the I.D. photograph was of a woman. The man left the restaurant with the food in his hand, but didn’t confirm the orders. Alwawi was furious. He left an employee to remake the food and he went out to his car, the Lexus S.U.V., and set off in search of the delivery worker. “I said in my mind, ‘I don’t want this guy to enjoy this meal,’ ” Alwawi said. “I’m going to go snatch the bag from his hand and throw it.” He drove up and down the streets of Clinton Hill, past town houses, prewar apartment buildings, housing projects, and fancy wine shops that had shuttered for the night. After a few turns, Alwawi found himself approaching the Hall—a facility he said he had no idea had been there, mere blocks from him, all summer.

Outside the shelter, Alwawi said he saw the young man in the white hat standing in a crowd. Alwawi said he got out of his car merely to “talk,” and then found himself outnumbered. A group of men began pushing and hitting him, Alwawi said. Then, he said, he got back in his car and drove off. I asked if that’s when he hit the two men with his car. “I don’t know,” Alwawi said. He’d returned to his restaurant, and hid inside with his employee, as a group of men on mopeds assembled outside. He said they began to bang on the exterior of his car with the thick metal chains that they used to lock up their mopeds. Alwawi, who had called the police on his way back to the restaurant, was relieved when the police arrived a few minutes later—and then stunned when he was the one arrested. (When I relayed Alwawi’s version of events to Lozano Bracho, he exploded, saying, “Those are damned lies.”)

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has charged Alwawi with attempted murder, but he was confident that he would eventually be cleared. “Don’t think I’m talking like this because I don’t like them,” he said, of the migrants at the Hall. “But the place where you put them is not correct.”

Spokespeople for both the city government and RXR didn’t dispute that the conditions at the Hall had been grim. They reiterated that it was a “respite center,” with the barest accommodations, intended for the shortest stays. Migrants are often unaware of the different categories of emergency shelters, and which they have been assigned to, or why. Many of the young men assigned to the Hall lived there all summer, and didn’t anticipate being relocated.

Since this summer, another city contractor, DocGo, has faced criticism and formal inquiries for the conditions at some of its migrant shelters upstate. Like MedRite, DocGo had secured a large city contract to provide services at migrant shelters, after previously operating COVID-19 testing and vaccine sites. Mayor Adams has pushed back on criticism of these migrant-crisis contractors, arguing that no one else is available to do the work needed to house all the people who have arrived in the city. “We take any reported incidents in or around our sites seriously,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for Adams, said in a statement. “But it’s important to address the reality without sugarcoating it: New York City has been shouldering a national humanitarian crisis for over a year, almost entirely on its own. In that time, Mayor Adams has repeatedly warned of the serious issues that could arise, and we are now precisely watching that play out.” According to a report in The City, MedRite staffs about twenty of the more than two hundred emergency shelters opened by the city government since last year, while Arrow Security provides services in about a dozen. Residents of several other facilities operated by the two companies have complained of poor conditions, and conflict with guards. Mamelak declined to disclose exactly how many facilities the two companies operate in, or to answer many specific questions about the Hall, including its operating costs.