The Adams administration resorted Friday to busing migrants to upstate Rockland County, just hours after it was forced to repurpose a Manhattan gym into a temporary shelter and saying the city has hit its “limit.”
City Hall acknowledged it had leased space in two hotels — in Orangeburg and Lake Orange — to house single adults who recently arrived in the five boroughs. Officials described the program as “voluntary” and as a way to reduce the strain on the Big Apple’s social service apparatus.
Rockland County officials were outraged by the move, with Republican County Executive Ed Day claiming authorities in Orangeburg weren’t notified that 340 adult male migrants were coming until Friday morning and slamming Mayor Eric Adams as “duplicitous.”
“I find it remarkable that the mayor of New York, who declared New York City a sanctuary city, now admits he’s bit off more than he can chew,” Day told The Post. “Rockland County is not prepared to handle this.”
“This is not a partisan issue,” said Congressman Mike Lawler (R-Rockland). “There is a real strain on food banks, shelters, and our non-profits … already and these additional arrivals may send them under.”
“This new, voluntary program will provide asylum seekers with temporary housing, access to services, and connections to local communities as they build a stable life in New York state,” Adams said in a statement. “New York City continues to step up and handle this crisis, and this new program is an extension of our compassionate response.”
Word of the upstate hotels came shortly after The Post revealed the NYPD’s old Police Academy on East 20th Street has been enlisted into the expanding roster of buildings providing temporary housing.
Officials with the Office of Emergency Management were spotted Thursday setting up rows of green cots inside the first-floor gym of the Gramercy Park facility to prepare for an influx of up to 500 migrants.
It was unclear how long the migrants would stay there — or if the arrangement complies with court orders that the city provide shelter to anyone in need.
“[Y]esterday alone, we received hundreds of additional asylum seekers and we reached our limit of new shelters we could open. We currently have no other options but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms,” City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy said earlier Friday.
For Giovanny, a 32-year-old from Venezuela, the gym was the latest stop on a deadly year-long sojourn that’s taken him thousands of miles from his old homeland and seen his wife deported.
One man he crossed the border with drowned as they swam across at Matamoros, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
He spent three days in detention before eventually making his way to San Antonio, where a local charity, he said, bought him the plane ticket to Gotham.
“I’m here to work to send money home to my two daughters, my mom, my sister and my niece. I know I can make it here,” he told a Post reporter.
Officials have turned to the gyms as more buses carrying migrants from the southern border arrive at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, including one that arrived at the Midtown transit hub around 9 p.m. Thursday.
The roughly four dozen people onboard spent about four hours at the facility before getting moved to the Police Academy gym and a location in Brooklyn.
Another bus, with 50 people — mostly families with children — arrived shortly after sunrise Friday.
City officials have warned they expect the tempo to pick up when Title 42 expires.
Nearly 61,000 migrants have arrived so far and more than 37,000 of them are living in city-operated or city-funded shelter facilities that’ll cost the city an estimated $4.2 billion in 2023 and 2024 alone, Adams has said.
The Department of Homeless Services is operating 122 emergency shelters — typically out of hotels — across the city; the Health and Hospitals Corporation has opened another eight barracks-style facilities to provide beds and social services for migrants.
The number of emergency shelters has jumped by 10 in the last week alone, city statistics show.
Hizzoner has pressed politicians in Washington, DC, to expedite the process of approving work permits for the recent arrivals — and blasted President Biden for not providing billions in aid to help cover the bills.
“This is in the lap of the president of the United States! The president of the United States can give us the ability to allow people to work. This is in the lap of the executive branch of the United States of America,” Adams told reporters last month.
