When New York Mayor Eric Adams said that a huge 2,000-bed migrant shelter would be built in the South Bronx, Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres spoke out against the plan. He said that Adams was using the area as a “immigrant dump”
In response to Torres’s claim, the mayor’s office said that even though the new shelter had just opened, 46 other homes for migrants across the city were going to be closed by June, which would mean 10,000 fewer beds in total. She said that the Hall Street shelter in Brooklyn, which was one of the biggest ones that was closing, had 3,500 people living there.
Last week, the office announced the new shelter while also saying that the ongoing migrant problem in New York City is getting better.
Also, New York is going to close dozens of other shelters and the huge tent city on Randalls Island in the next few months. As a “sanctuary city” for migrants, New York has a rule called “right to shelter” that says the city has to take in anyone who needs shelter and has nowhere else to go. But in the past few months, Adams has changed how he talks about foreigners in the city and has said that several migrant shelters will be closing. Adams said last week that the closings are part of the city’s plan to find “more opportunities to save taxpayer money and turn the page on this unprecedented humanitarian crisis.”
“Thanks to the administration’s successful asylum seeker management strategies and federal border policy changes the city advocated for that have continued to drive down the number of people in the city’s care for 27 straight weeks and reduce costs by nearly $2.8 billion over three fiscal years,” the mayor’s office wrote.
The New York Post said that the city will have to pay between $250,000 and $340,000 to fix up and get ready a 275,000-square-foot old office building in the Bronx so that it can house the thousands of men who will be living in the new migrant shelter.
The shelter is located at 825 E. 141st St., which was rebuilt in 2017. It is close to “the Hub,” a notorious part of the Bronx known for having a lot of open drug use and activity, including heroin and fentanyl use. Nonprofit SoBro Local Development Corp. owns the building. Their goal is to “enhance the quality of life in the South Bronx by strengthening businesses and creating and implementing innovative economic, housing, educational, and career development programs for youth and adults.”
Many people in the Bronx did not like what Adams said. It is known that many of the city’s migrant shelters are hotspots for violence, crime, and gang activity. For example, the international criminal group Tren de Aragua does business in many of these shelters. According to the New York Post, Serene Bilal, a 21-year-old from the Bronx, said, “Wrong move! You need to work with the people who are already here. Things are going wrong for us. Why the Bronx? Why pick on the Bronx?
Bilal told the news source, “It’s going to be dangerous.” “We have no idea who these people are.” Ten people are not in question. There are thousands of them. “That’s a great deal.”
Torres, who is said to be thinking about running for governor of New York, also said that putting the new shelter in the Bronx was a bad idea.
“Instead of decisively dismantling open-air drug markets in the Hub, the City is treating the South Bronx as a dumping ground for an endless stream of shelters,” Torres told Fox News.
“The Bronx is treated differently from the rest of the city,” he told us. “We are treated as the second-class borough of New York City.”
A spokesperson for Adams, Liz Garcia, replied to Torres’s complaints by pointing out that the city is getting a lot fewer shelters and people are paying a lot less in taxes.
“I know that every elected official has specific people to speak to but we’re really looking at it from a holistic lens,” he said. “This is part of a bigger plan to cut down on the number of beds in the city by 10,000 across all 64 sites for migrants, not just in the Bronx.” And we’re closing shelters that are in places with too many people.
She said that the city’s migrant shelter system was never meant to last forever, and the new shelter in the Bronx is just a short-term fix.
Someone asked Garcia when the Bronx shelter would close, and he said, “We don’t have a specific date for when it will close.” Since it’s a loan, it won’t last forever.
It will depend on the next immigration count that the city does, she said.
The number of migrants in our poll has been going down for more than six months now. “That has to stop, because otherwise there’s no point in having it,” she said. “That means it will close soon at some point.” We just need to find places to house people while we help them move on.
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