At least 2,000 more asylum seekers will have somewhere to live in New York City in the coming weeks.
On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that Floyd Bennett Field, a former airfield in Brooklyn, will become a shelter for asylum seekers who’ve been arriving in New York City in droves for months.
The field is opening under a “tentative contract” with the Biden administration, she said in a release. Once the details of that contract are finalized, she’ll work with New York City Mayor Eric Adams to set up a Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Center there, with capacity for more than 2,000 asylum seekers.
Two state-funded asylum seeker shelters recently opened in the New York City area — one at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, which opened last week, and one on Randall’s Island, which opened Sunday and can hold around 3,000 people at full capacity, according to the New York Post.
$25M for rental homes?NY to spend $25M in state funds to rent homes for thousands of asylum seekers
Hochul said earlier this month that New York had begun seeking to rent homes for up to 1,250 asylum-seeking families for up to a year. She and state lawmakers budgeted $25 million for that program in May but progress had been slow: only 17 eligible families had accepted the offer at that time.
Shelter is just a first step in addressing the crush of migrants arriving in New York, Hochul said Monday. The goal is work authorization, and fast.
“Ultimately the path out of this crisis is granting work authorization immediately, so these individuals can move out of shelter and into independent living arrangements,” she said. “This site will be critical in the interim for the City of New York to provide humanitarian aid, as we work collectively to get people on the path to asylum seeker status and legal work.”
Work authorization needed soonNY’s asylum seekers face 6-month wait for work permits. Will feds shorten it?
Last week, U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a Yonkers…
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