New York to close giant family shelter to protect migrants from Trump

NEW York City officials announced on Tuesday (Dec 10) that they will close a giant tent complex in Brooklyn that houses some 2,000 migrants, a pre-emptive step meant to fend off concerns that the shelter could be targeted by the Trump administration.

Because the shelter, on Floyd Bennett Field, was built on federal land, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams increasingly feared that President-elect Donald Trump would revoke the shelter’s lease once he takes office in January – or assert the administration’s right to launch immigration raids on federal land.

The Floyd Bennett Field shelter is among 25 shelters that will now shut down by March because of a steady decline in the number of migrants arriving over the past five months. Those include hotels across the city, two college dormitories in Upper Manhattan and a warehouse-turned-shelter at Kennedy Airport, as well as 10 hotels the city was paying to house migrants upstate.

The slate of closures was yet another signal of how the city’s migrant crisis, which prompted the city to spend more than US$6 billion over two years to house migrants, has continued to wind down. Adams, a Democrat who has been cautious about antagonising Trump, did not name the president-elect as a reason for the closure of the Floyd Bennett Field shelter, the only one in New York City on federal land.

City officials said the lease would end by March but that families would be moved out of the shelter by Jan 15, just a few days before Trump is sworn into office.

“We’re going to continue looking for more sites to consolidate and close, and more opportunities to save taxpayer money, as we continue to successfully manage this response,” Adams said in a statement.

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Some of the shelter closings had already been announced or reported in the news media, such as another tent complex on Randall’s Island, which will close by February. Migrants living in those shelters will be transferred to others in the system, which is housing 54,900 migrants, down from a peak of 69,000 in January.

The tent complex on Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s third-largest family shelter, has housed migrant families with children since November 2023. NYTIMES