Less than a month after opening it, New York City officials will close the tent city built to shelter an influx of migrants, Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday. The temporary facility, with room for up to 1,000 single men in a stadium parking lot on Randalls Island, had been a screening point for busloads of migrants who arrived from the southern border since the spring, the Wall Street Journal reports. As many as eight buses a day were arriving in Manhattan in September. Some were chartered by the Republican governors of Texas and Arizona, who said the burden of caring for migrants should be shared by communities whose leaders support President Biden’s border policies. They also sent buses to Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Around the time, the shelter complex opened, however, the number of buses arriving in New York and other cities fell significantly. Aid groups that work with migrants cite a drop in the number of Venezuelan nationals entering the U.S. illegally after the Biden administration announced an agreement to expel many of them to Mexico. The people housed on Randalls Island will be transferred next week to a hotel near the southwest corner of Central Park, Adams said. City officials declined to say how many people are currently in the facility, but during the last week of October, there were fewer than 50. The city spent $325,000 to build the 84,000-square-foot facility. The new change means the city will rely on three different hotels to provide medical screening, food, clothing, and temporary shelter to arriving migrants. One hotel is for families, one for single women, and one for single men. There are 17,500 migrants in the city’s care who are awaiting the resolution of their claims for asylum, a process that can take years due to backed-up immigration courts.
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