NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- A “tent city” for newly arrived asylum seekers will be moved from flood-prone Orchard Beach in the Bronx to Randall’s Island, officials said late Monday after flooding over the weekend.
The Randall’s Island site is less prone to flooding and closer to public transportation, Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.
The Randall’s Island relief center will provide temporary respite to 500 asylum seekers at a time and is expected to open within days. The number is half of the 1,000 migrants who were expected at the Orchard Beach tent camp, where construction was already well underway in recent days.
Initially, NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol said the city would set up tiger dams—flexible tubes that prevent tidal flooding—at Orchard Beach.
But by Monday night, Adams said work had begun to relocate the tents to the parking lot at Icahn Stadium on Randall's Island.
“As we now work to open the city's first Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center, safety for those seeking asylum remains our top priority,” the mayor said in his statement.
“Following this weekend's storms, New York City Emergency Management determined that, while we would be able to put in place the necessary ponding mitigation measures, relocating the Orchard Beach humanitarian relief center to Randall's Island is the most efficient and effective path forward, and work is underway to make this move,” Adams continued.
The mayor said the city will continue to “build out our options and explore additional sites as we handle this humanitarian crisis created by human hands.”
New York City has been among the largely Democratic cities where Republican governors like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have sent migrants by the thousands this summer and autumn ahead of the midterm elections.
The GOP governors have said that cities far from the border need to share the burden of hosting asylum seekers, but the move has been criticized as a cruel political stunt with migrants used as pawns.
The city has taken in more than 16,000 migrants bused from the southern border since May. The mayor’s office said the city has provided shelter, health care, education and a host of other services to the newcomers even as the influx puts strains on the shelter system.
Adams said Monday that it’s time to have a “unified” response to the humanitarian crisis.
“Far right is doing what’s wrong, far left is doing nothing at all,” the mayor said. “It’s time for us to address this in a unified way, and that’s what this administration is doing.”
The mayor had been feeling the heat from opponents, including protesters in the Bronx on Monday who slammed the city for “putting immigrants in a flood zone.”
Flooding over the wet weekend in the parking lot where the Orchard Beach tent facility was put up was documented by South Bronx Mutual Aid, a community organizer assisting the migrants.
Just last week, the president of the City Island Civic Association, Bill Stanton, told 1010 WINS’ Newsline with Brigitte Quinn that Orchard Beach was known to be a flood-prone area.
“I’ve experienced huge flooding in that parking lot,” Stanton said. “Anybody that lives in the surrounding area very well knows it.”
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