Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur who teamed with Elon Musk on President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has blasted New York City’s $220 million agreement to use the historic Roosevelt Hotel for $220 million as a processing center and shelter for illegal immigrants.
In a posting on X, Ramaswamy criticized the June 2023 pact between the city government and Pakistan International Airlines, which owns the hotel, which involves leasing the property for $210 per room per night for its 1,025 rooms.
“A taxpayer-funded hotel for illegal migrants is owned by the Pakistani government, which means NYC taxpayers are effectively paying a foreign government to house illegals in our own country,” said Ramaswamy on X, responding to a post on the topic by former investment banker turned author John Lefevre. “This is nuts.”
Musk replied to Ramaswamy’s tweet with a single word response: “Crazy.”
The Roosevelt Hotel opened in 1924 and was named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt. Located adjacent to Grand Central Station, it was one of the city’s most popular hotels – for decades, the hotel was the center of year-end national attention when bandleader Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians would broadcast their annual New Year’s Eve concert from the hotel’s Roosevelt Grill, and more recently it was a location for the popular “Mad Men” television series. It was shuttered during the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, it is unclear what role the new DOGE can have in disrupting the contract between the hotel and the city government. The contract runs through 2026 and the Pakistani government has contracted the brokerage JLL as the exclusive agent to market the property to developers and investors.
Photo by Billy Hathorn / Wikimedia Commons
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