NYC plans to house migrants at Coney Island public school; Brooklyn officials complain they weren’t told




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Kerry Burke, Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News
Fri, May 12, 2023 at 8:32 PM EDT




Immigrants will be housed at a gym in a Brooklyn public elementary school, city officials said Friday as community members complained they’d not been consulted before the decision.

The immigrants — among hundreds arriving in the city every day — were expected to be moved to PS 188 in Coney Island starting as soon as Friday evening, said an official of Mayor Adams’ administration.

City officials say school programming “will not be impacted” and that there will be security on site.

At least 100 cots were visible through a window of the gym on Friday night as city Office of Emergency Management workers set up the facility to receive immigrants.

The city plans to only house adult migrants at the gym, which is part of a school that serves children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, the official said.

But the official couldn’t rule out that children will also end up at the school. The end of of a federal policy that lets authorities quickly expel migrants who enter the U.S. from Mexico means immigrants are arriving in the city at such a rapid pace, officials have a hard time tracking them.

“We have no idea who’s coming in anymore,” the official said.

A statement Friday from Brooklyn Community Board 13 complained that its staff had been “struggling all day” to get information about the city’s plans to use the PS 188 gym.

The board’s statement said it would like to know “how many people will be housed there, for what length of time, whether the individuals have been screened for communicable diseases, what measures are in place to provide services, etc.”

City Council member Ari Kagan (R-Brooklyn), whose district includes the school, said it was “totally unacceptable” that school administrators and others in the community were not notified about the housing plan.

He blamed the immigrant influx on “the complete failure of Biden administration open border policies.”

“We need to find proper places for them to stay. A school gymnasium can’t work,” Kagan told the Daily News. “There’s not even showers here. It’s no place for women and children. It’s not just wrong for the neighborhood, it’s wrong for the immigrants. It’s wrong for everybody.”

City Council Member Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn), a member of the council’s Public Safety Committee who represents a nearby council district, disputed that adults will be the only people housed at the gym, and said the area community should have been told of plans to house migrants there.

“I do not believe housing children and families in an active public school gymnasium is the solution,” Brannan said.

Legal Aid Society lawyers have maintained that housing children in congregate settings like gyms violates state law enacted to prevent sexual abuse of children.
The city has opened more than 130 emergency housing sites and eight “large-scale humanitarian relief centers,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mayor Adams.

Over the last week, the city has received 4,200 asylum seekers — compelling Adams to suspend parts of the city’s mandatory shelter law, including provisions that require the city to quickly house families with children and barring the housing of children in congregate settings like gyms.

Kagan said that Adams was right to suspend parts of the mandatory shelter law in the crisis.

“We can’t absorb them. There are thousands and thousands that are coming, and they’re coming every day,” he said. “We know nothing about them.

We can’t open the border, no questions asked. The city is the victim here.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/nyc-plans...003200913.html