New York City officials announced on Tuesday that they will close a giant tent complex in Brooklyn that houses some 2,000 migrants, a pre-emptive step meant to fend off concerns that the shelter could be targeted by the Trump administration.
Because the shelter, on Floyd Bennett Field, was built on federal land, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams increasingly feared that President-elect Donald J. Trump would revoke the shelter’s lease once he takes office in January — or assert the administration’s right to launch immigration raids on federal land.
The Floyd Bennett Field shelter is among 25 shelters that will now shut down by March because of a steady decline in the number of migrants arriving over the past five months. Those include hotels across the city, two college dormitories in Upper Manhattan and a warehouse-turned-shelter at Kennedy Airport, as well as 10 hotels the city was paying to house migrants upstate.
The slate of closures was yet another signal of how the city’s migrant crisis, which prompted the city to spend more than $6 billion over two years to house migrants, has continued to wind down. Mr. Adams, a Democrat who has been cautious about antagonizing Mr. Trump, did not name the president-elect as a reason for the closure of the Floyd Bennett Field shelter, the only one in New York City on federal land.
City officials said that the lease would end by March, but that families would be moved out of the shelter by Jan. 15, just a few days before Mr. Trump is sworn into office.
“We’re going to continue looking for more sites to consolidate and close, and more opportunities to save taxpayer money, as we continue to successfully manage this response,” Mr. Adams said in a statement.
Some of the shelter closings had already been announced or reported in the news media, such as another tent complex on Randall’s Island, which will close by February. Migrants living in those shelters will be transferred to others in the system, which is housing 54,900 migrants, down from a peak of 69,000 in January.
The tent complex on Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s third-largest family shelter, has housed migrant families with children since November 2023. The city entered into a lease with the Biden administration to erect the tent dormitory, where families sleep in cots, as city officials scrambled to find beds for migrants at the height of the influx last year.
But after Mr. Trump’s victory last month, City Hall officials grew concerned that the president-elect would cancel the lease the moment he took office, following opposition from local Republicans who said it amounted to wasteful spending of taxpayer money. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, had committed state money to reimburse the city for the shelter’s operations and would continue to finance an equivalent number of beds for migrants in other shelters, city officials said.
City officials, as well as immigration lawyers, also worried that the shelter could become an easy target for federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents looking to detain undocumented immigrants. Under current city guidelines, ICE officers require hard-to-obtain judicial warrants to enter city shelters, but the shelter’s location on federal land raised concerns that federal agents could easily gain access.
The tent shelter had been the subject of a bipartisan lawsuit that argued that its construction skirted laws meant to protect national parkland. Immigration activists also opposed housing migrants there, saying that the tent setup was inhumane and that its location, miles away from more populated areas of the city, made it harder for migrants to reach jobs and schools.
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