New York City shutters sprawling migrant tent camp on remote former airfield

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City has shuttered a sprawling tent complex that housed hundreds of migrant families on a remote former airport in Brooklyn, as it shrinks the emergency shelter system built up in response to a surge from the southern border that has been steadily receding in recent months.

The last of the roughly 2,000 people living on a windswept tarmac at Floyd Bennett Field, once the city’s first airport, departed the gated encampment over the weekend, and crews were seen this week dismantling the hulking structure.

Advocates had warned that the facility, which is built on leased federal land, could be vulnerable to immigration raids as President-elect Donald Trump takes office Monday.

Jehinzo Gonzalez, a 47-year-old from Venezuela, said he, his wife and three sons were transferred to another nearby city-run shelter just a week before Christmas.

“It’s a more dignified place for the family. We have three rooms for the five of us. Comfortable beds, a private bathroom,” he said in Spanish, marveling at the contrast between the hard cots they slept on in their single room in the airport tent camp since arriving in the country in October.

New York City has seen more than 250,000 migrants arrive since the spring of 2022, but the numbers of new arrivals have declined for 27 straight weeks and is now at its lowest point in more than a year, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said.

Roughly 50,000 migrants are currently being housed across roughly 200 temporary sites, down from nearly 70,000 migrants last January.

But the steady drum of shelter closings and forced relocations have also forced many migrant families to upend their routines for work, schooling and other daily needs just as they are trying to establish a foothold in the city.

Venezuelan migrant Gabriel Montillas said he now spends hours each day in transit, chaperoning his three young children to school in Brooklyn and rushing to make appointments after his family was recently moved from the now-closed Floyd Bennett Field encampment to a hotel in Queens.

On Tuesday, he had just enough time after dropping off the kids to travel across Brooklyn to submit immigration paperwork at a government office.

“If it were summer or something without such cold weather, it’d be different,” Montillas said in Spanish as bone-rattling wind whipped around the city Tuesday. “But at least for now it’s too strong, very strong; it’s difficult.”

Groups advocating for migrants also say more needs to be done to transition migrants to more permanent housing.

Among the priorities should be ending controversial policies limiting the amount of time they’re allowed to remain in a shelter to investing in better case management and legal assistance so migrants can secure immigration status and work permits, said Will Watts, a deputy executive director at the Coalition for the Homeless.

Newly arrived migrants should also be brought into the city’s traditional shelter system for the homeless so that they are no longer segregated and vulnerable to immigration enforcement, said Steph Rudolph, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society.

Trump has promised a nationwide immigration crackdown, including mass deportations, when he officially takes office Monday.

“Now that the numbers are going down, the rationale for a separate system is no longer there,” Rudolph said Wednesday. “It makes sense to bring everyone under the same system.”

Gonzalez said he worries about his family’s future even as they were relieved to transfer out of the Floyd Bennett Field shelter.

“They should respect the laws,” he said of the incoming Trump administration, noting that he and his wife have already applied for asylum, have their working papers in order and are employed part-time at a local grocery. “We are doing everything as dictated by the laws of the country. We hope to God that everything goes well.”

More shelter closures are slated in the coming weeks as Adams’ administration continues to shrink the shelter system. Another huge tent complex built on Randall’s Island, an island park off Manhattan, has been steadily emptied of residents ahead of its scheduled closure next month.

The administration on Friday also announced the closure of 10 other shelters, including one built in a complex of warehouses off a highway in Brooklyn that housed more than 3,300 single men at its peak.

All told, the moves will reduce the city’s migrant housing capacity by roughly 7,800 beds — after accounting for a new, brick-and-mortar shelter being built in the Bronx to house more than 2,200 migrant men being transferred from the tent shelters earmarked for closure, according to the mayor’s office.

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Associated Press writer Cedar Attanasio in New York contributed to this story.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.