New York (Washington Insider Magazine) Earlier this week a group of asylum seekers refused to be transferred to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
Mayor Eric Adams slept Friday night in the shelter set up for newly arrived immigrants at the Brooklyn cruise terminal, where some had refused to be transferred.
Adams spent the night there along with State Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs and activist Shams DaBaron.
“I would never ask another person to do something I wouldn’t do, so we wanted to show asylum seekers the warmth of New York City on one of the coldest nights of the year. The three of us sleep next to the hundreds of migrants to experience what they are going through,” the mayor said in a statement.
Brooklyn Cruise Terminal
Adams stressed that those who are in the Brooklyn cruise terminal have access to the same care and humanitarian services that migrants receive in other shelters.
After sharing with the migrants, the mayor said: “What we saw is what we have seen since the beginning of this crisis, people who are grateful to the greatest city in the world for giving them the opportunity to work towards the American Dream.”
“Due to the willingness of these men to move to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, families with children have already begun moving to the Watson Hotel. More than 44,000 asylum seekers have moved through our intake system in the last 10 months, and we have provided them with warm shelter, food, education, healthcare, legal support and a host of other services,” he insisted.
And it is that at the beginning of the week, about fifty immigrants, mostly young Venezuelans, protested to avoid being transferred from the Watson Hotel to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
The newly arrived immigrant crisis has echoed throughout the city. A recent Quinnipiac poll indicated that the vast majority of respondents (63%) want the thousands of asylum seekers who arrived in the city since last year and filled the shelters to wait for their procedures in other areas of New York state. Only 31% thought there is room for them in NYC.
The poll also found that voters approve, by a margin of 65% to 26%, a proposal by Adams himself to send some of the immigrants to areas in upstate New York where there are dwindling populations.
It has been estimated that it will cost the City $1 billion to continue to house and serve the thousands of immigrants. They are mostly South Americans who keep coming.
This article is authored by EI Diario.
