Migrant children housed in old NYPD academy gym in apparent shelter rule violation: ‘It’s not safe’
Several migrant families with children were housed in an old NYPD training facility over the weekend in apparent violation of longstanding rules prohibiting the city from sheltering kids in congregate settings, the Daily News has learned.
The gym in the old Police Academy facility on E. 20th St. in Manhattan was retrofitted last week to accommodate adult male asylum seekers as the city’s shelter and emergency housing systems remain overcrowded due to the continued influx of migrants.
But Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, told The News he saw a migrant carrying a child entering the facility late Sunday.
Goldfein, whose group serves as the city’s de facto watchdog on local shelter rules, said he alerted officials in Mayor Adams’ administration shortly after his discovery — and was then informed that “multiple” migrant families with kids were being housed in the gym.
“It’s not clear to us if this was done on purpose or by mistake,” Goldfein said, adding he was told the city planned to move the families to “more appropriate” lodging on Monday.
Asked about The News’ report during a Council hearing later Monday, Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park said it could take up to 48 hours before the children are transferred out of the gym, where city workers have set up long, tight rows of bunk beds for migrants to sleep on.
Wasow Park, whose agency oversees the city shelter system, said the gym is not supposed to be a long-term accommodation for anyone, but rather a place where migrants can stay while the city finds space in shelters or hotels. “It is intended as essentially overflow space so that when we have spikes in the numbers that is a place where people can be,” she testified.
Adams spokesman Fabien Levy would not say how many children were admitted at the Police Academy gym over the weekend.
He argued the administration has no choice but to house asylum seekers in spaces like gyms, though, because of a seemingly endless stream of new arrivals — which he blamed in part on “activists.”
“A network of activists are organizing large-scale arrivals of asylum seekers to New York City via plane, bus, and other modes of transportation — taking advantage of city and state laws and luring them here with false promises,” Levy said. “As a result, we have reached the limit of new shelters we could open. We currently have no other options but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms.”
Levy declined to name the activist groups.
Decades-old state rules hold that children can only be housed in family-style shelters with separate rooms that allow for privacy.
There are “very good reasons” for those rules, Goldfein said.
“As we saw during [Hurricane] Sandy, when you have children sleeping in congregate settings, children were exposed to sexual violence. That’s the whole reason why the state does not allow that to happen in the regular shelter system,” Goldfein said, recalling that Legal Aid represented a client whose child was sexually assaulted in one of the congregate emergency shelters the city operated following the 2012 storm.
“Every time when there has been a situation with children in congregate shelters, that has been a disaster for those families, and the city should be doing everything they can to avoid that happening,” Goldfein added. “It’s not safe.”
Former Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who runs Win, the city’s largest family homeless shelter provider, echoed Goldfein’s sentiment.
“All homeless families — especially migrants seeking asylum — have been traumatized, and forcing these children and their parents to sleep in congregate settings only serves to compound that trauma,” Quinn said. “Let me be clear: this is an unsafe practice and it is an unsound policy. Every homeless family with children deserves a safe, private space to call their own.”
The sheltering of kids at the NYPD facility comes as Adams’ administration is struggling to accommodate the tens of thousands of mostly Latin American migrants who have arrived in the city since last spring.
The local shelter system’s population is at an all-time high of nearly 80,000, data from the Department of Homeless Services show. The city is housing thousands of migrants in hotels, too, shelling out millions of dollars per day in doing so.
With nearly no room left for housing asylum seekers, Adams’ administration has taken drastic measures recently as hundreds more continue to arrive every week.
On Friday, the mayor announced his administration will house hundreds of willing migrants in two hotels the city’s renting in upstate Orange and Rockland counties. That announcement was met with fierce pushback from Republican leaders upstate who claim they don’t have any room, either.
The city’s also bracing for this week’s expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that has prevented many migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. Once that rule lifts, the Adams administration says the pace of migrant arrivals is likely to only increase.
In a joint written statement on the Police Academy facility situation, Legal Aid and the Coalition for the Homeless said the severity of the crisis cannot be an excuse for the city to skirt legal obligations.
The groups also noted that Adams’ administration recently secured $1 billion in state funding for the crisis that they argued should “ensure that anyone, including asylum seekers, have appropriate shelter.”
“With additional funding now coming from Albany, we urge city officials to use these resources to secure needed hotel rooms for recently arrived asylum seekers, and to loosen restrictions on housing vouchers to transition New Yorkers already residing in shelters to permanent housing, bolstering shelter capacity to help meet the demand,” their statement said.
With Michael Gartland
