EXCLUSIVE: SHOCKING details from New York’s largest migrant hotel: drunk children, violence, guns, and drugs

Carlos Arrellano, a whistleblower who worked at the largest migrant hotel in New York, is coming forward to blow the whistle after witnessing what he calls “the worst situation” he’s ever seen.

“I’ve been doing this for five years, and in my five years, this has been the worst experience by far,” Arrellano explains. “The city of New York does not know what they’re doing and it’s only going to get worse from here.”

Working as a site administrator at the ROW NYC Hotel for the past seven months, Arrellano shares that this 28 floor hotel is now home to almost 5,000 illegal immigrants. A block away from Times Square, rooms were previously rented out for $500 a night, however, it has now been completely overtaken by migrants who Arrellano states have “trashed the hotel” and caused “chaos” in the area.

“This hotel is overcapacity,” Arrellano states, “it’s the biggest hotel out there that’s housing migrants.”

One of the reasons the hotel is crumbling is due to the migrants treating their rooms like “trash,” per Arrellano. He details how migrants will take showers without shower curtains, causing water damage throughout the hotel. Migrants will cook on hot plates causing fires in their rooms. Arrellano also shares that the lobby ceiling has even collapsed.

“This hotel is pretty much collapsing,” he begins, “the electrical infrastructure is fried, we have everything from power outages to fires – the lobby ceiling, we’ve had that fall, and it’s been flat out said by every agency in that hotel that they’re just waiting for it to collapse."

Arrellano shares that the reason the city hasn’t tried to move the migrants is due to the large number of people living in the hotel, as well as the migrants not wanting to leave the prime location. “They don’t want to leave the hotel, they love the location,” Arrellano stated, “a lot of the migrants told me they could see the ball drop from their window.”

Mayor Eric Adams has stated that 50 percent of the hotels in New York City are currently filled with illegal immigrants. Adams has shared that he’s reached out to other hotels in the city, but they’ve stated that they don’t want to shelter migrants.

“The migrants being in these hotels have destroyed them,” Arrellano explains. “There's a lot of alcohol in these rooms, housekeeping is there all week and they’ll clean it and by the end of the night there’s kids getting drunk together, people hooking up.”

On top of the trashed hotel rooms, Arrellano shared internal incident reports detailing violence, weapons, and drug and alcohol abuse at the hotel. One of the most shocking internal incident reports Arrellano shared detailed a 10-year-old girl who had gotten drunk after her parents left the premises.

“It was a drunk 10-year-old who was caught with a 14 and a 12 year old and all three of them were intoxicated,” he began, “and when we looked them up in the system the parents had checked out two days ago. He went on to explain that many of the migrants will leave their kids unattended at the hotel for up to a week at a time.

He goes on to detail migrants walking around the hotel with guns, shares that he himself has been assaulted, and that contracted city employees have had to be walked to their cars after violent threats from the migrants.

When arriving in the city, Arrellano shares that migrants are given hotel rooms that come with free benefits, such as Uber services, healthcare, free car seats and cribs for children, laundry services, housekeeping, metro cards for the subway, and three meals a day.

“Everything ranging from doctors visits to medication is paid for for the migrants,” Arrellano explains. “Car seats, cribs for newborns, there’s I want to say at least two to three babies a week being born at this hotel.”

Arrellano shares that many of the migrants, although initially wanting to head to a different location, end up wanting to make New York their home after receiving a plethora of benefits and free housing.

“Around 200 through 300 metrocards a day are given for free,” Arrellano explains, “ID services, IDNYC, they have ID’s from the city of New York – a lot of people in this hotel are working with that ID, aside from that they’re receiving food stamps – a lot of services are provided to them just for having this ID.”

The program Arrellano is referring to is New York’s IDNYC, a program the city shares is a “free, municipal identification card for New York City residents, ages 10 and up, provides access to a wide variety of services and programs offered by the City.” New York’s official government website states that “immigration status does not matter," and anyone can apply for the identification service. This ID can be used as identification for employment, health services, affordable housing, and can also be used “to open a bank account at select financial institutions,” per the nyc.gov website.

Over the past year, 65,000 illegal immigrants have made their way into New York and the state recently declared a state of emergency, as the migrant crisis continues to worsen. Mayor Eric Adams is even asking a judge to suspend the city’s decades old “right to shelter” requirement. A requirement that previously required the city to provide shelter for anyone who asks for it. Anger has erupted among New Yorkers after Adams announced that he is also considering sheltering adult migrants in school gymnasiums, where children are actively in attendance.