New York City officials are drawing up plans to shutter a giant Brooklyn migrant shelter amid concerns that the facility will attract the unwanted attention of the incoming Trump administration.
The shelter, a tent complex housing some 2,000 asylum seekers on a former airplane runway at Floyd Bennett Field in Jamaica Bay, also carries another distinction: It was built on land that the federal government leases to New York City.
That has led to urgent concerns in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, according to City Hall officials involved in the discussions. City officials fear that President-elect Donald J. Trump could cancel the lease the moment he takes power in January, or dispatch immigration officers to the shelter to round up noncitizens.
The city is scrambling to determine where to potentially relocate the 500 families in the tent complex if officials close it before the inauguration of Mr. Trump, a Republican who has vowed to detain and deport undocumented immigrants en masse.
The internal scramble underscored the extent to which Democratic cities like New York are preparing for a second Trump presidency. The potential closure of the shelter is among the first concrete steps that City Hall is planning to take in advance of the expected immigration crackdown. City officials are also concerned about safeguarding crucial federal funding for housing, health care and education amid concerns that Mr. Trump might seek to curtail financial support for cities.
Mr. Adams, a conservative Democrat, signed the Floyd Bennett Field lease with the Biden administration last year, as city officials were rushing to find space to accommodate an influx of migrants arriving from the southern border.
The state government is currently funding the operations of the shelter, one of the city’s largest, at a rate of about $250 million a year. City officials are waiting for the state to guarantee that it will continue paying to house a similar number of migrant families elsewhere before announcing the shelter’s closure, according to two officials briefed on the matter.
The plans for the shelter’s closure have not been finalized and remain fluid, but the existing agreement allows both the city or the federal government to exit the lease with relatively short notice.
A spokeswoman for City Hall, which has been cautious about openly discussing its preparations ahead of a Trump presidency, did not comment directly on the potential closure of the shelter.
“We continue to look closely at all of our shelters and will make all determinations based on what’s best for our city and those in our care,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in a statement.
A spokesman for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The city is still housing more than 57,000 migrants in 210 shelters, hotels and temporary tent facilities across the city, following a two-year influx of asylum seekers that has recently shown signs of subsiding. But the temporary shelter at Floyd Bennett Field, which opened in November 2023, is the only migrant shelter in New York on federal land.
The shelter became a divisive flashpoint even before Mr. Trump’s election. Republicans and some local Democratic officials opposed its opening, as did some immigration activists who argued that housing migrants in far-flung tents was inhumane.
But Mr. Trump’s victory gave way to another concern: that the shelter’s location on federal land could make it an easy and accessible target for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers seeking to detain noncitizens.
In order for ICE officers to enter city shelters, the agency typically requires judicial warrants for the arrest of specific people. But lawyers said that the concentration of people with tenuous legal status on federal property could make them more susceptible to immigration arrests.
“There’s a concern that any large congregation of noncitizens just makes that group more at risk, just sort of a bit like sitting ducks, unfortunately,” said Kathryn Kliff, a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society.
Ms. Kliff said that the Legal Aid Society had communicated those concerns to city officials, but had not been told how the city planned to proceed.
The shelter opened amid criticism that it was far away from the city center and in a floodplain. It exclusively houses families with children, most of them from Latin America. The tent complex includes a cafeteria, trailers with public bathrooms and showers, and dormitories with small cubicles separated by thin partitions where families sleep in cots. Many migrants at the shelter are in the process of applying for asylum or have been granted temporary legal status, lawyers said.
Mr. Trump’s election renewed a push among Republican lawmakers for the termination of the lease, which allows the city or the federal government to cancel it with a 90-day warning.
But finding space for 500 families with children at other migrant shelters in the city could be a daunting undertaking, a discussion that is still ongoing at City Hall.
The city has recently closed four migrant shelters as the number of people entering the shelter system has declined in recent months. A tent complex built on Randall’s Island is scheduled to close by February.
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