As New York City struggles to house more than 50,000 illegal immigrants who have flooded the city, officials are reportedly weighing the option to place many of them in tents in Central Park.
Anne Williams-Isom, NYC’s deputy mayor for Health and Human Services, was asked at a press conference Wednesday about housing illegal immigrants in city parks and responded by saying that “everything is on the table” as the city reviews around 3,000 possible locations to place them, Bloomberg reported. According to the Gothamist, sources familiar with the city’s deliberations said one of those locations is Central Park, where an estimated 42 million tourists visit each year.
“We are constantly looking at sites to see how we can accommodate people, but we need support and we think that the system is at a breaking point,” Williams-Isom said.
Since April of last year, more than 90,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in New York City. As of last month, about 55,000 were still being housed on the city’s dime, causing New York’s homeless shelters to hit capacity. Combined with the large homeless population, the city is now sheltering a record 105,800 people.
Democratic Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly raised the alarm over the situation as officials consider extreme measures to accommodate the influx. More than 100 illegal immigrants have been sleeping on the street outside of the Roosevelt Hotel since last weekend. The hotel serves as a humanitarian relief center, housing illegal immigrants and providing them with food and access to vaccines, but the hotel has hit its capacity.
“From this moment on, it’s downhill,” Adams said at a press conference Monday. “There is no more room.”
At the press conference, Adams warned that the illegal immigration crisis “is going to come to a neighborhood near you” as he called for more proactive measures from the federal government.
“We need to control the border,” he added. “We need to call a state of emergency, and we need to properly fund this national crisis.”
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Adams suggested that he was opposed to erecting tents for illegal immigrants, saying the city needs to “localize this madness” and “figure out a way of how we don’t have what’s in other municipalities, where you have tent cities all over the city.”
The city estimates that it will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024. Adams continues to push the Biden administration to do more to help the city deal with the crisis. City officials want the White House to grant illegal immigrants expedited work authorizations and the federal government to send newly arrived illegal immigrants to multiple cities across the country in hopes of curbing the influx in New York.
Mairead Elordi contributed to this report.