A few days after a violent confrontation in which the police struck and used a stun gun on a Venezuelan migrant at a city-run shelter in Queens, that man’s family and three other families staying at the shelter received unexpected news with little explanation: They had to move out.
Two of the families said in interviews that they were told to pack their belongings and were then placed in taxicabs and Ubers that dropped them off at other shelters. The abrupt relocations and lack of clarity — shelter staff told them only that they were being moved for “security reasons” — left the families scrambling for answers in their new environs.
“We weren’t even given a warning,” said Alexander Monsalve, 40, who was put into a car with his wife and two daughters around 9 p.m. on Tuesday that dropped them off about 30 miles away, at a hotel on Staten Island that had been turned into a migrant shelter. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
The relocation of the families appeared to be the latest fallout from the altercation last week at the Queens shelter, where police officers responding to calls about a dispute sought to restrain a migrant who was holding his 1-year-old son. Officers used a stun gun on the man, separated him from his child and punched him repeatedly while trying to subdue him.
City officials are investigating the matter. Mayor Eric Adams has stood by the officers’ conduct, saying the migrant, Yanny Cordero, was intoxicated and acting violently. Mr. Cordero, who was arrested and later released, has vehemently denied the accusations.
Most of the relocations came after The New York Times published a video of the police altercation. The families moved included Mr. Cordero’s and that of the man who recorded the video.
The city has provided vague and shifting explanations, leading to a swirl of speculation among the migrants who were moved and to disruption for some of them who had recently found jobs and enrolled their children in schools in Queens.
The changes opened a small window into the inconveniences that relocations can cause for the 65,000 migrants the city is housing in a hodgepodge of shelters, hotels and tent dormitories.
Many migrants are allowed to stay a set amount of time in a given city shelter before they have to move out, a rule meant to push them out of the shelter system but that allows them to reapply and be reassigned to another shelter. Single adults are allowed 30 days, while families have up to 60 days.
In response to questions from The Times, city officials first suggested that the relocations from the Queens shelter were routine.
“With the city’s shelter population nearly tripling in less than two years, we occasionally need to relocate families to ensure suitable placements,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, which runs the Queens shelter, said in a statement on Wednesday.
But in a follow-up statement on Thursday, city officials said that three of the four families were relocated after credible concerns were raised to shelter staff. Officials said the step was taken in response to a report from another shelter resident of an exchange that had made that resident concerned for their safety. The officials did not provide additional details, citing privacy concerns, and said the transfers complied with state regulations.
“These transfers were made because of serious concerns about potential health and safety issues for other shelter residents,” the spokeswoman said.
The fourth family — Mr. Cordero, his wife and their three children — was transferred to a Brooklyn shelter because of the traumatic nature of the episode, officials said.
In interviews, the families said they were as surprised by their relocations as they were by the contention that they were the cause of safety concerns at the shelter, a former Marriott Hotel on Archer Avenue in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens that is now housing 250 migrant families.
“We don’t understand why we were transferred — no motive or explanation,” said Nadia Prieto, 20, from Venezuela, who was moved to a hotel-turned-shelter in the Bronx with her husband and two children. “No one ever complained to us. At no moment did we have problems with staff.”
On their way out of the Queens shelter, Ms. Prieto and her husband, Andry Barreto, said they were told by a shelter supervisor that they were being transferred for “security reasons.” They stuffed their bags and baby strollers into an Uber ordered by the shelter, not entirely sure where it was headed.
The absence of a clear explanation led the couple — the godparents of Mr. Cordero’s children — to speculate without evidence that they had been moved as retaliation. They wondered if it was because they had spoken to the news media, or because it was Mr. Barreto who had recorded the video of the police hitting Mr. Cordero as they arrested him.
City Hall pushed back forcefully on any insinuations of retaliation.
“Shelter residents speak to press all the time,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said. “Speaking to press is not a crime. It is certainly not a safety concern and it’s certainly not a reason someone would be asked to leave the system, no less relocated.”
Mr. Monsalve, who was relocated to Staten Island, said he was out working on Tuesday afternoon when security guards suddenly showed up at his room and told his wife that the family had to vacate the Queens shelter, where they had been staying for three months.
They packed their belongings in a couple of hours. When Mr. Monsalve asked why they were being moved, a shelter employee told him that the order had come “from above” and that they were being moved for “security reasons,” he said.
He, too, wondered without proof if they were being moved because a shelter employee had seen his wife talking to a Telemundo reporter about the police altercation earlier this week.
Or perhaps, he thought, it was because of a run-in he had with a security guard at the Queens shelter, who he said had yelled at one of his daughters after she held up the elevator one day.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Monsalve, who had found work as a construction worker and selling balloons in Queens, said he mostly felt dismayed for his daughters, ages 9 and 13, who had been settling in and making friends at their school in Queens.
On Thursday, their parents were already working to register them at a new school on Staten Island — a place they had never even heard of before.
“Now we start again,” he said in Spanish. “As they say, ‘All change is for the greater good.’”
Dana Rubinstein and Liset Cruz contributed reporting.
