As shelters fill, NYC mulls tents to house migrants

NEW YORK—New York City’s mayor says he plans to erect hangar-sized tents as temporary shelter for thousands of international migrants who have been bused into the Big Apple as part of a campaign by Republican governors to disrupt federal border policies.

The tents are among an array of options—from using cruise ships to summer camps—the city is considering as it struggles to find housing for an estimated 13,000 migrants who have wound up in New York after being bused north from border towns in Texas and Arizona.

“This is not an everyday homelessness crisis, but a humanitarian crisis that requires a different approach,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement Thursday.

New York City’s huge system of homeless shelters has been straining to accommodate the unexpected new flow of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

In Arizona and Texas, officials have loading people on buses for free trips to Washington and New York City. More recently, Florida, which has a Republican governor running for reelection, flew migrants— at public cost—to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Adams said the city had opened 23 emergency shelters—and was considering 38 more—to handle the people bused into the city since May. The city also recently opened a new, multimillion-dollar intake center to help the newcomers quickly get settled.

The first tent has been proposed for a remote corner of the Bronx, a parking lot at a popular city beach on Long Island Sound where public transportation is limited. Officials are looking into other areas.

A rendering of the likely design of the facility, released by the city, showed rows and rows of cots. Presumably, the tent would be heated, as autumn nights in the city can be quite cool, but the city released few details.

City officials said these facilities—which they call “humanitarian emergency response and relief centers— would only house migrants for up to four days while the city arranged other types of shelter.

Immigration advocates said the plan was not well thought out.

“We fear that what was meant to be a temporary solution will become an inadequate permanent one,” said Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.