City officials clear out makeshift migrant shelter housed in vacant Fordham storefront

A Bronx shop run by Ebou Sarr, who was found to be housing migrants in a vacant storefront.

Photo Steven Goodstein

City officials on Wednesday responded to a complaint regarding a vacant storefront at 305 East Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx’s Fordham neighborhood, where they found dozens of Senegalese migrants sheltering in cramped conditions.

City leaders said that Ebou Sarr — the same person who on Tuesday was found to be sheltering migrants in the basement of a Queens furniture store — was also responsible for this Bronx site, in addition to another discovered back in January at the abandoned Old Fordham Library. While staying at the Fordham store, the migrants reportedly paid Sarr a deposit, plus $300 a month in exchange for a bed and three meals a day. 

Sarr, also the owner of Caribbean Furniture on East Kingsbridge Road, did not provide a comment to the Bronx Times when contacted in person at the store, but said that local news outlets have been showing up at both the Bronx and Queens locations over the past two days.

He concurred that “it is against the law for migrants to live in either locations.”

Amid the city’s struggle to keep up with the needs of newly-arrived migrants, Sarr has suggested that he only stepped up to help because the city did not. 

He said in a TV news interview that he took matters into his own hands because he saw many migrants — several of which are Senegalese like him — on the streets with nowhere to go. 

“When they started coming to me [and] telling me their stories, I started helping them,” Sarr said. 

Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams said in a news interview Wednesday that “people exploit those who are in need” — while insisting that the system for handling migrants is working as is. 

“We have no child or family sleeping on the streets of the City of New York because of the humane process that we have put in place,” he said.

The NYPD on Thursday said that no criminal charges…