‘Looking for Pedro’: Smugglers send migrants to specific locations in New York City

Mohamed was well along a zigzag journey from his native Mauritania in West Africa, not knowing precisely where he would wind up and not caring — just as long as it was somewhere in the United States.

But after he flew from Africa to Turkey and eventually to Nicaragua, another Mauritanian man told him that simply crossing the border was not enough. Without a specific destination, he might be detained by US immigration authorities for months on end.

A Mauritanian migrant who crossed the US southern border shows the address of a Manhattan shelter he kept in the compartment of a ring during his journey.Credit: Andres Kudacki/The New York Times

“You have to give them an address,” the man told Mohamed.

The fellow migrant offered him one. Mohamed wrote the address down on a strip of paper about the size of a business card, one that he would carry around like a bank note until he reached US territory. The card read: “30th Stret: 400.” And then: “East 30th St. 1st Avenue. Manhattan. Subway: 6 to 28th St.”

Before he fled his country in May, Mohamed knew little of his intended new home. He could place the US capital in Washington. He had heard of Miami, mostly as a tourist destination. And he knew that in New York City, there was a place called Times Square.

A former psychiatric hospital in Manhattan, now used as a men’s shelter, that several Mauritanian migrants said they were to told to provide as destination when asked by immigration officials.Credit: Andres Kudacki/The New York Times

Now, he suddenly had the coordinates for New York City’s main intake centre for homeless men.

Since the spring of 2022, New York City officials say more than 130,000 migrants have come through the city’s shelter system, with about half still there. The influx of migrants has overwhelmed the city’s capacity to care for them and, in turn, made New York and its Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, unlikely players in a national crisis.

The city has spent more than $US1.7 billion ($2.68 billion) on migrant-related costs through July, and Adams has pleaded with federal officials for more aid and a shift in immigration policy.

But more than politics is at play.

New York, home to the nation’s largest number of immigrants, has long attracted migrants who come here with connections to jobs, relatives or friends — avoiding the city’s shelter intake centres and public scrutiny.

A group of mostly Venezuelans and Haitians with US immigration appointments wait in Matamoros, Mexico.Credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas/The New York Times

But many migrants now cross the border without friends or family to take them in, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and co-author of a recent study about the rising costs of providing shelter and other services to recent arrivals.

That is especially true in New York, which has recently drawn thousands of migrants with no connection to the city. Immigrant experts — as well as many migrants interviewed by The New York Times — said an underlying reason is the city’s obligation to provide shelter to anyone who needs it.

In the last two months, the Times interviewed more than two dozen migrants who had chosen New York as their final US destination. Some were still in Mexico. The others were in shelters or motels in New York, Albany and Buffalo. The Times has identified the migrants by their first names only or allowed them to comment anonymously, out of concern that revealing their full names could jeopardise their status or cause them harm.

Some immigrants knew of New York’s generous shelter policy through family members, fellow migrants, social media and even their smugglers.

The smugglers are “using this almost as a marketing tactic, you know, to say head to New York City, because you’re going to get x, y, z,” said Manuel Castro, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York City.

The city has tried to discourage migrants from coming to New York by distributing flyers at the southern border warning they have “no guarantee” of shelter, and the city is trying in court to alter its right-to-shelter policy to exempt recent migrants.

“We all want to be humanitarian,” Castro said. “But if migrants are being sent to one specific destination, it’s going to overwhelm.”

Looking for Pedro

The Times interviewed four Mauritanians in Buffalo, including Mohamed, and two in Manhattan. The interviews in Buffalo were conducted through an Arabic translator; the ones in Manhattan were done in French. The migrants did not know one another before leaving the troubled West African nation, which, in 1981, became the last country in the world to abolish slavery.

Nicaragua extends a loose and inexpensive visa policy to Mauritanians and citizens of some other countries, allowing them to reach North America without using smugglers and delaying the hardship they would encounter once the air travel ended and the ground game began.

At the airport in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, they all knew in advance to ask for a man who is featured in a popular TikTok video thanking Mauritanians who come to the United States for trusting him. They knew of him only by his first name and had so thoroughly memorised his face that he seemed — as one of them put it — “like your uncle.”

“Are you looking for Pedro?” Mohamed was asked after he walked out of the airport.

“Yes,” he said, using one of just a handful of English words he knew.

Pedro took them to Honduras, where other smugglers took over in Honduras and then Guatemala. The hardest and most expensive part of the journey was Mexico, where violence, crooked police and the threat of deportation always loomed.

All six of the Mauritanians eventually crossed the border by Lukeville, Arizona, then flew to New York after being briefly detained in Tucson.

They spent between $US10,000 and $US15,000 for the entire trip — flights, smuggling fees and bribes included — with proceeds from the quick sale of cars, land and, in one case, four camels that one of the migrants stole from his estranged father.

A ring of hope

Not every migrant who ends up in the city’s care intended to do so. Nilson, 39, left Maracaibo, Venezuela, planning to stay with a cousin in Paterson, New Jersey. But when he got there, he discovered he was no longer welcome. The cousin gave him $US30 and texted him a flyer, in Spanish, with the directions to the “Centro de llegada” — the arrival centre — at the Roosevelt Hotel.

“Without this help,” he said in a recent interview in Spanish, “I would have been sleeping in the streets.”

Nilson is now in Albany, one of hundreds of migrants sent by the city to upstate motels, where the city pays for their room, board and other ancillary expenses. Only two of the migrants interviewed by the Times — Ousmane, 34, and Amidou, 42, both from Mauritania — are still at the East 30th Street shelter.

Amidou, got the East 30th Street address from Pedro, the smuggler in Nicaragua, writing it down on a thin strip of paper that he immediately secreted away. He carefully folded it up, rolled it into a ball and then stuffed it into the head of a barrel-shaped, silver ring.

The ring somehow also had room for another of Amidou’s guarded possessions: his voter registration card. Both fit neatly under a red stone in the centre of the ring.

Once he crossed the border, he removed the stone from the ring and pulled out the strip of paper to show the border authorities where he would be staying. They copied the paper and gave it back to him, and he spent three days in immigration detention in Arizona before flying to New York.

After landing at Kennedy Airport, he once again pulled out the strip of paper, this time from his wallet.

He handed it to a taxi driver, to make clear his destination. Above the East 30th Street address, Amidou had jotted down a message in Arabic. “New York,” it said, “gives free shelter.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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