New York City confirmed this Friday that among the places it reviews it continues to accommodate incoming immigrants, more than 100,000 in the last few months– There’s the federal penitentiary in Manhattan, which has been closed since 2021 due to poor conditions, including rat and insect infestations and water leaks.
“All options are on the table”Deputy Mayor for Communications Fabien Levy said today when meeting with the press to talk about immigrants outside the Roosevelt Hotel, one of many that have been converted into housing and where the city has established its main processing center for new arrivals.
Levy explained that “nothing has been finalized” regarding the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) and recalled that it is a federal agency.
The prison’s notorious inmates include drug lord JoaquÃn “El Chapo” Guzmán, mobster John Gotti and financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of child molestation.
Epstein’s suicide in his cell in 2019 was a spotlight on a number of negligences that the Justice Department had pointed out and facilitated, as well as his attorneys’ repeated criticism of prison conditions, which ultimately led to his death. close.
The MCC is detailed in an Aug. 9 letter from the city’s legal department to Gov. Kathy Hochul about possible housing options for immigrants amid a humanitarian and financial crisis that Mayor Eric Adams said was caused by the arrival of so many people the city didn’t have the necessary capacity to create space.
The city did not say in the letter whether it had contacted the Federal Bureau of Prisons regarding the use of the MCC as an immigrant shelter.
In this context, the federal prison authority limited itself to pointing out that the MCC is “at least temporarily closed” and that the long-term plans for the prison are “not yet finalized”, according to media reports.
Adams reported last Wednesday that through August 13 101,200 asylum seekers have come to town from it 59,000 are in his careThis includes housing, food and other social support and education for children.
This influx since last year has forced the city to be founded 202 emergency call centers as emergency sheltersthe most recent is a four-tent center with a capacity for 1,000 men that opened Monday in the parking lot of a Queens County mental hospital.
According to Levy, this center will exceed 50% of its capacity today.
The city is about to open another center on Randall’s Island in Manhattan for 2,000 men.
New York receives between 300 and 500 people every daysome directly from the Texas border, but also from other states.
At the end of the conference, an angry merchant began shouting that he no longer received customers in his jewelry store, which is located in the same building as the Roosevelt Hotel, because immigrants were temporarily living there.
“The hotel had five star customers. That’s counterproductive, I won’t win any more customers.” I’m afraid to show my jewelry in the showcasesaid the man, who would not give his name.