National Guard members are being deployed to New York City’s homeless shelters to help assist the overwhelmed facilities that are also housing migrants.
The reservists will help with routine operations at the shelters, including food distribution, capacity management and supplementing the stretched-thin staff, a city Department of Social Services official told The Post.
Their responsibilities “do not include staffing support for security, social services or case management services,” the spokesperson said.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many troops have been deployed or how many shelters they will support.
Sources told The Post that National Guard members will be trained in some capacity on homelessness services.
The city shelter deployment came after Gov. Kathy Hochul mobilized 100 National Guard troops for deployment earlier this month to “provide logistical and operational support” to the city’s controversial migrant tent city on Randall’s Island.
The Randall’s Island relief center has a capacity for roughly 500 migrants but has been largely vacant even while nearly 16,000 others have packed the city’s overloaded shelter system.
The city Department of Homeless Services’ hit a new occupancy record this month, with 62,174 people living in shelters as asylum-seeking migrants continue to arrive from the southern border.
The surge in migrants to the Big Apple forced Mayor Adams to declare a state of emergency and predicted it would cost $1 billion to house and provide social services for the nearly 20,000 new arrivals.