Parents and other local residents in a Brooklyn neighborhood are blasting city leaders for opening an all-male migrant shelter right next to a school for young children.
New York City officials in April opened a 400-bed migrant shelter for men in Gowanus, Brooklyn — to the dismay of local residents who spoke to the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a non-profit organization that focuses on women’s issues. Locals say they were not given proper notice before the shelter opened up, and expressed outrage that a massive all-male facility would open up roughly 1,000 feet away from a children’s K-12 school.
“We were not given any transparency,” Jeffrey Reed, the principal of City Life Academy, a private Christian school in Gowanus, Brooklyn, near the shelter, told IWF. “They knew there would be pushback, and they knew if they had gone through the correct channels or the proper channels, that probably never would’ve opened.”
New York City officials also allegedly did not follow health protocols for environmental testing and violated other building codes, allowing for an expedited process to open the facility, according to IWF.
“I didn’t know about the shelter until two months before that meeting [informing residents that the shelter would be opening],” said Irina Edelstein, a mother of three children who attend the nearby school and an immigrant herself. “And it had been in the works for almost a year.”
“I am not against immigration, and I think many of these people who are here legally, they will make a life for themselves; they will be positive, good contributors to this country,” Edelstein went on. “However, there is a difference between immigration and invasion.”
Controversy over the local migrant shelter comes as the ongoing illegal migrant crisis under the Biden-Harris administration hits New York City particularly hard.
More than 200,000 migrants have overwhelmed the Big Apple since the spring of 2022, according to city officials. The influx of asylum seekers forced Mayor Eric Adams to declare 5% budget cuts in September 2023 for government services and programs in order to pay for their housing and other services, and in August he warned that the city was reaching a “breaking point” from the sheer volume of migrants.
New York City spent $1.45 billion on migrants in fiscal year 2023, according to the city. The financial burden finally forced city officials to tighten their grip on shelter accommodations in March by limiting stays to roughly one month.
The sheer volume of illegal migrants arriving into the city has resulted in numerous high-profile crimes.
A homeless illegal migrant was arrested earlier this month in Brooklyn after allegedly raping a woman at knifepoint. The case attracted national attention when it was discovered that the same man had been previously arrested for alleged rape, but had been released by local law enforcement.
In other recent cases involving migrant crime in the city, a group allegedly went on a shoplifting spree and beat down a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer, another illegal migrant allegedly fired at two NYPD cops during a foot chase and another illegal migrant allegedly raped a 13-year-old girl at knifepoint.
Residents are now on edge about the safety of their community and of the children who attend school just steps away from the migrant shelter, according to IWF.
On one occasion Edelstein recounted to IWF, a migrant was spotted attempting to enter her vehicle while she was walking into school to pick up her children. The mother of three has also expressed concern over the number of migrants on nearby streets begging for money.
“Brooklyn sits thousands of miles away from the southern border, and yet, mothers like Irina have been blindsided by an unprecedented border crisis in their own backyards,” Andrea Mew, IWF features manager, said in a statement obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. “After Irina showed us the fallout of migrant shelters opening within a thousand feet of her children’s elementary school and explained the utter lack of transparency from city leaders, we knew it was of utmost importance to document the adverse impacts on her community.”
New York City Mayor’s Office of Migrant Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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