Steadying the stroller bearing her two-year-old daughter with one hand, Liliana gestured up at the fourth migrant shelter she’s lived in the District. Since her arrival in the city over a year ago, she’s sought both work and permanent housing, finding neither. In the meantime, she witnessed D.C. close one temporary migrant shelter after another, until she found herself living at the Harbor Light Center, the only still-operating migrant shelter in the city.
Liliana, whom Street Sense is identifying only by her first name due to her immigration status, is one of the nearly 13,000 migrants bussed to D.C. starting in April 2022. That year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending migrants who arrived at the southern border to sanctuary cities throughout the U.S.
Although this move was largely a political stunt meant to condemn Democrats and the Biden administration for their border and immigration policies, it left cities like D.C. to grapple with a drastic influx of people in need of social services, chief among them housing. In response, D.C. created the Office of Migrant Services (OMS), which provides temporary housing and case management to arriving migrants.
In 2022, OMS opened three temporary migrant shelters in hotels — a Days Inn, Quality Inn, and Hampton Inn — located along a two-mile stretch of New York Avenue in Northeast D.C. At maximum capacity, in April 2023, these hotels housed over 1,200 people, according to reporting by the Washington Post.
Now, OMS is at an inflection point as the need and political willingness to help migrants have waned. The office began scaling back its services in March 2024, and closed all three hotel shelters by the end of 2024. As the programs and infrastructure built to help and house migrants have shut down, the question of where migrants went, and if the majority of them found permanent housing, remains unanswered.
The Days Inn was the first shelter to close, as first reported by the Washington Post. It was followed by the Hampton Inn, which closed on July 15, and the Quality Inn, which closed on Oct. 11, according to D.C.’s Department of Human Services (DHS), under which OMS is housed. Neither of these closures have been previously reported, and DHS declined to provide Street Sense any data on how many families remained in either hotel at the time of their closure. The agency said it did not track where families went after the shelters closed.
“All families had exited to their permanent destination outside of OMS-assisted support before closure. A few remaining cases that needed extra time were moved to another OMS-run facility,” a DHS spokesperson wrote in an email to Street Sense.
It’s unclear how many families make up those remaining cases, but Liliana’s is one. She experienced the cascade of closures firsthand, but she did not exit to a “permanent destination.” “I was at the [Days Inn] for a while, then at the Hampton, then at the Quality Inn, then they moved us here,” she said, pointing in the direction of each shelter when she mentioned its name.
Liliana now lives at the Harbor Light Center, the only facility that remains open. It is operated by SAMU First Response.
“OMS is an imperfect system that tried to address a very specific need,” Abel Nuñez, director of Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), which offered support to migrants in the hotels, explained. “The hotels were a necessary thing at the moment, but eventually it became a burden.”
When Street Sense visited the hotels, it found they had all been recently renovated and were now open to the public. Managers at each of the hotels said the hotels were no longer operating as shelters, and DHS confirmed that all three hotels were closed. The closures were likely due to decreasing need as the arrival of new migrants drastically slowed beginning in 2023. In a PowerPoint presentation shared at a meeting of the Interagency Council on Homelessness in April 2024, OMS announced that starting in fiscal year 2025, it would only maintain two facilities. These facilities would be the Harbor Light Center and “overflow accommodations for up to 130 families at one hotel.” DHS did not provide any information as to why the overflow shelter does not exist.
When Street Sense asked DHS a second time about how many families lived in the hotels at the time of their closure, a spokesperson wrote: “The District has successfully scaled temporary shelter options to a single site due to successful exits of families from the program. We work closely to support all families to develop their personal plan. Through this work, families identify future housing options. The information on final destination is voluntary, and DHS does not track the families after they have been exited.”
However, when Street Sense visited the Harbor Light Center, reporters spoke with a number of migrants, who all said they knew at least one person who had previously lived in the hotels and was now at the facility. SAMU First Response confirmed the current population at the respite center is made up of new arrivals as well as people who had been living in the hotels.
According to OMS resettlement data obtained by Street Sense, 51 families resettled in September and October 2024. The data does not include the number of families that remained in OMS shelters at the end of each month, nor does it include the number of families that lived in the hotels upon closure. It was collected via a voluntary exit survey, and does not necessarily reflect where families actually settled.
Alexander Seville, who arrived in D.C. three months ago and is currently living in the Harbor Light Center, said he knows people who are staying at the respite center from the hotels, and that once someone leaves the shelters, assistance is limited.
“They take them out of the hotels, and that’s it, they don’t get anything. They are in the street,” he said. This summer, D.C. closed an encampment of over 30 people, most of whom were migrants and some of whom told Street Sense they had either stayed in the New York Avenue hotels for a period or tried unsuccessfully to access the OMS shelters.
Sierra Barnedo, who is a rapid rehousing program manager and manages the Latinx outreach program at SMYAL, has noticed a similar gap. In her opinion, it’s “unethical” and “absurd” that families in the OMS system don’t have access to the broader family shelter system in D.C.
“It has been said by District government that if you’re connected to OMS, you’re diverted away from Virginia Williams and family services,” she said. “And that to me is just like blatant racism because if I have a D.C. ID, children in D.C. schools, children born in the United States, have lived in D.C. over six months, why am I not a District resident?
When OMS was established, the law that determined eligibility for assistance from the office also amended the definition of “District resident” to exclude people who entered the United States after April 2022 and have ongoing immigration proceedings. Newly arrived migrants are thus not eligible for the city’s family shelter system or many other resources other homeless residents can access.
Barnedo questions the premise of defining OMS as separate from the continuum of care when so many families remain in the OMS system. In her estimate, about half the families who’ve exited OMS have been able to find permanent housing.
“You have families that are broken up because it’s almost impossible to find a resource together,” she said. “We have so many families that have been, for so long, kind of cheated out of family system services, because we don’t have District residents in limbo in hotels,” Barnedo said. “But, how can we expect hundreds of people to just self resolve?”
While OMS cannot refer migrants to the shelter system, it has offered them assistance in traveling elsewhere. Seville told Street Sense that when he first arrived in D.C., he was offered a bus ticket to another destination or back to where he came from. But it’s not clear how many families left the hotels using this option.
“I don’t know, honestly, they rent rooms, they go elsewhere, some to Maryland or Virginia,” Liliana said. Maryland, in particular Prince George’s County, was a popular destination for migrants moving out of the hotels, according to Nuñez.
For Liliana, the primary barrier to moving out of the shelters has been her inability to find work. Not only is finding a job a challenge, even obtaining work authorization can be difficult.
“One of the greatest challenges is that this is a population that did not have familial ties to the region,” Nuñez said. When migrants were bussed to D.C., many had no ties to the region nor a sense of where exactly they were going.
“Our system of integration is really based on family and friends. You come to a particular area, because someone gives you a couch,” Nuñez continued. “An immigrant, how do they get a job? It’s because whoever is hosting them has a job, right?
At the hotels, CARECEN, a social services organization that helps Latin American immigrants adjust to life in the United States, attempted to fill the role family plays for many of the migrants, providing financial literacy and other kinds of education intended to help acclimate them to life in D.C.
CARECEN also offered a program to train people on how to be health care providers, and once participants had attended enough classes and achieved certification, they would receive a stipend. The stipend wasn’t earmarked for housing, but Nuñez explained CARECEN encouraged families to use the stipend to pay the deposit on a permanent rental.
“I think we helped 13 families move out, and they use it as a down payment,” Nuñez said. He noted that the OMS shelters were always intended to be temporary housing and that the decision to close them was due to both the lack of funding for them but also the lack of need. The number of arriving migrants has dropped tremendously since Biden restricted immigration in the summer of 2024, and Trump has only further prevented it.
“The actual influx of people has passed, so now it’s about ensuring that they land as best they can,” Nuñez told Street Sense. “And focus on how to make sure that they can stay and thrive. So it’s no longer about reception.”
But many migrants still face barriers to permanent housing. So, some of them, like Liliana, will continue to live in shelter.
“Right now, I’m waiting for all this to happen so that I can rent a room for me and my daughter,” she said. “But the truth is, it is very difficult to live here. It’s uglier to live here.”
Editor’s Note: Some of the quotes in this article have been translated from Spanish. Graham Krewinghaus contributed reporting.
