Ex-employee blows whistle on shocking conditions at ‘swanky’ NYC hotel now housing migrants

Not that it should come as any big surprise but migrants being housed at a once-luxurious New York City hotel don’t make for the finest of guests and a former employee turned whistleblower served up the lurid scoop on the horrific situation of a veritable “free for all” of sex, booze, drugs, violence and child abandonment at one of the locations being used to house the new arrivals.

The ex-worker, Carlos Arellano, appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday and described the conditions at the RowNYC, a 1,300-room hotel on Eighth Avenue Avenue in Midtown that was once a tourist location until it was converted into a migrant shelter last year and is one of the largest housing areas for the illegal aliens that have ended up in the Big Apple, one of the nation’s proud sanctuary cities.

Arellano, who worked as a site administrator at the property for seven months, talked to host Rachel Campos-Duffy about the ongoing problems with the migrants and the squalor that they live in, trashing rooms which are seen in pictures strewn with garbage and making trouble in the streets outside.

“Just a lot of people who are very there, they don’t appreciate what they have. And they come here with the mindset of the way they live back at their home country, and they think there’s no rules or no laws to be followed here,” he said.

(Video: Fox News)

At one point during the segment, he recalled the heartbreaking story of finding a drunken ten-year-old girl in her room with her parents nowhere in the vicinity, a situation that he said wasn’t an isolated incident.

“Every day, we find about ten kids alone in their hotel rooms, either drinking or doing drugs. Weapons will be in the room. But we’re not allowed to go in there. We’re not allowed to take anything from them. It’s basically a free-for-all in this hotel,” Arellano said.

He said that hotel employees aren’t even sure that the kids parents are their actual mother and father due to all of the “fake” documents.

“We find fake passports, fake Social Security cards, all kinds of fake documents in this hotel every day,” he said.

Arellano also said that there are no consequences for migrants who are involved in dangerous activity at the hotel.

“If they are kicked out of the hotel, they get sent to a processing center at Port Authority where they get given a second hotel,” he claimed. “So, say a husband decides to beat his wife up. He will get kicked out, and they will just process him into a single men’s hotel. So if you break the law, it’s not ‘We’re going to report it to the proper authorities.’ It’s ‘Let’s give you a second or third hotel room, and you still stay in the city.'”

Additional shocking details are being reported by the New York Post including a description of the formerly swanky RowNYC as a “madhouse” after the sun goes down.

“Come around 9 or 10 p.m., it’s crazy,” said one unnamed man who is identified as a migrant father.

“People [are] drinking aguardiente and smoking weed outside all night since we can’t bring that in,” he said. “The police have come and pushed them out some nights so now they gather at the corners.”

“I’ve seen 12-, 13-year-olds drinking and smoking outside — a lot of the Venezuelan kids with the men,” he said. “These kids… they don’t have structure or good role models. My kids are not allowed to follow that and hang out there. They know better.”

The misbehaving migrants aren’t making friends with business owners in the vicinity of the hotel.

“It doesn’t look good,” Gustavo Rosario, who is the manager of Iron Bar across the street told the outlet. “Now we open the window and if they are smoking marijuana, all the smoke [starts] coming inside. People get uncomfortable.”

“A lot of former coworkers have reached out and are happy that I did the interview. And they’re saying this place deserves to be shut down, that they fear for their life every day, as well as I do,” Arellano told Campos-Duffy.

New York City is reportedly paying $500-a-night to house the migrants.

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Chris Donaldson

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