Winning sometimes happens bit by bit, and other times it arrives in large, significant strides. This occasion falls into the latter category, primarily due to the historical importance of the involved building: On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that New York City’s iconic Roosevelt is no longer being utilized as free accommodation for illegal immigrants.

Under the Biden Administration, the Roosevelt Hotel served as a Tren de Aragua base of operations and was used to shelter Laken Riley’s killer.

Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and @Sec_Noem, this criminal command post has been dismantled. pic.twitter.com/T360WDofOC

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 30, 2025

This is certainly welcome news. However, the Department of Homeland Security does not address the timeline it will take to restore this historic hotel to a condition suitable for hosting paying guests again, if it ever returns to its former state.

The New York Times, predictably, lent its usual slant to the story, deeming the former illegal alien residents “migrants.” 

The luggage room, once reserved for tourists, now contained just a few suitcases left behind by migrant families who had passed through the hotel. The shelves of the gift shop were empty, except for the diapers distributed by city workers to new mothers.

Upstairs, the grand ballroom was desolate. Gone were the migrants who had slept on cots as they waited for rooms, on the same carpet where New York politicians once campaigned. A map of the United States was all that remained, with small arrows pointing to New York, and a handwritten note in Spanish: “You are here.”

To the New York Times: These aren’t “migrants.” This term is dishonest; it makes it sound like these people are just on their way somewhere, rather like wild geese winging their way north in the spring. They aren’t. They entered the country illegally, they remain in the country illegally, and they are in New York illegally. They are illegal aliens. And now they have one less place to squat for free. The question is, what kind of shape is the Roosevelt Hotel in now, and what is to become of it?

Those were the last traces of New York’s migrant crisis inside the Roosevelt before the hotel stopped operating last week as the city’s best-known migrant shelter — 767 days after it opened as a city-run shelter in May 2023.

What needs to be done is to have the “remaining families” sent not to other shelters but to repatriate them. They should be sent back to their homes. They are, once more, in the United States illegally.