Migrant kids mixed with single men in NYC shelter sparks safety concerns
In yet another disturbing twist to the migrant crisis in New York City, families with young children are sleeping alongside adult single men at a makeshift shelter inside the NYPD’s old Manhattan police academy gym — a move asylum seekers and officials have both slammed as unsafe, The Post has learned.
The former police academy building, located on East 20th Street, was suddenly transformed into a shelter last week after the Adams administration declared the city had hit its “limit” amid the recent surge of migrants flowing into the Big Apple.
While hordes of adult men were among the first to take up residence on the rows upon rows of green cots, migrants told The Post on Monday there are now more than a dozen young children staying there too.
Several elementary and middle school-aged migrant kids were spotted by The Post coming-and-going from the Gramercy Park facility with their relatives on Monday.
Gutierrez Yorman, a 14-year-old from Venezuela, said children are sleeping alongside non-family members inside the first-floor gym.
“I am with my family and there are strangers too,” the teenager said, adding that he has been at the NYPD facility for one day and doesn’t know when he and his relatives will be relocated.
Alan Cardena, a migrant from Panama who is staying at the shelter with his mom, estimated there were about five teens and a dozen children under 7 years of age currently staying at the shelter.
He stressed that having kids sleeping alongside complete strangers wasn’t 100% safe — especially for “little girls.”
“We have inside single men. We don’t know if it’s safe,” Cardena, 29, said. “We sleep on the basketball court. So it’s just one floor for everybody.”
Department of Social Services Commissioner, Molly Park, acknowledged the presence of migrant kids at the shelter on Monday, testifying during a City Council budget hearing that the agency was working to relocate the families to “alternative placements.”
“We anticipate that we will be moving those families in the next 24 to 48 hours,” Park said.
“The intent is that this is a short term overflow facility, so the initial people who were placed there have already been moved out and we’re working closely with the NYCEM team that is operating the site on a day-to-day basis to make sure there is a flow of individuals.”
Legal Aid lawyers slammed the housing of migrant kids in the facility, insisting the shelter was “only appropriate for single adult men.”
“The City cannot shelter families with children in congregate settings,” they said in a joint statement with the Coalition for the Homeless.
“Private sleeping quarters are required for families’ safety, for mothers to privately nurse newborns, to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases, and to prevent sexual assault.
“The city assured us that these families would receive appropriate shelter placements today.”
“We currently have no other options but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms, said Fabien Levy, City Hall spokesman. “We’ve been asking for support for a year, and now with Title 42 being lifted this week and with hundreds of asylum seekers already arriving in New York City every day, we desperately need federal and state support more than ever to quickly manage this crisis.”
City Councilman and Minority Leader Keith Powers (D-Manhattan) said that although the Big Apple is grappling with the ongoing challenge of housing asylum seekers, the city has to be “extremely careful about housing children with families alongside single individuals.”
“Children with families have both legal protection and specific requirements where they should be housed all together rather than housed with a larger population because there’s a host of issues,” Powers said.
“We are in the middle of an absolute crisis when it comes to housing asylum seekers, but we still have to meet our legal requirements,” he continued, adding “we are headed to a very dire situation when it comes to space and services for these people.”
It comes after Mayor Adams’ Chief of Staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, sent a desperate plea to all city agencies on Sunday — begging them to assess the space they currently have to see if there’s any vacancies to house incoming migrants, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post.
“With more asylum-seekers arriving daily, this influx has pushed our shelter system to a breaking point and we need to create emergency temporary sites,” the chief of staff’s memo said.
“We ask that city agencies conduct an internal review of any properties or spaces in your portfolio that may be available to be repurposed to house asylum-seekers as temporary shelter spaces. If there is current programming please include programming that is.”
Currently, there are 126 emergency shelters operating as emergency shelters across the city, as well as another eight barracks-style facilities, according to City Hall’s latest figures.
Nearly 61,000 migrants have flooded into the city since last spring and more than 37,000 of them are currently living in the city-operated or city-funded shelter facilities.
Additional reporting by Nolan Hicks
