Migrants’ budding tent encampment under the BQE in Brooklyn dismantled by city officials

A makeshift encampment for some 15 newly arrived migrants living under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn is no more.

City sanitation workers and the NYPD were on the scene on Friday morning, dismantling the collection of tents in a parking lot off of Hall Street and Park Avenue in Clinton Hill.

They threw away personal belongings, including food, water, clothes, important documents, and bottles the new arrivals – all men – could exchange for cash, the migrants told Gothamist.

“I don’t know what to do because they left me naked in the street without clothes, without anything,” said Jose Alvarado, 41, shortly after the tents were cleared.

The removal comes on the heels of a new campaign by Mayor Eric Adams and his administration to discourage migrants at the southern border from seeking refuge in New York City. At once, the city announced a new policy requiring some migrants to reapply for shelter after 60 days, with the aim of freeing up space for more new arrivals.

The city’s shelter population has topped 103,000, including more than 53,000 migrants who have arrived since the spring of last year.

After sanitation workers and police dismantled the encampment, a black van transported about a dozen men off the site; a city homeless services worker on the scene told the men they were being taken to the Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street.

Later, though, the transported men refused placement in city shelters — this after being taken to an intake center, according to City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak.