First Migrants Arrive at Floyd Bennett Field – and Immediately Leave

By Hamodia Staff

BROOKLYN — The first group of migrants set to be housed in a tent in Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field arrived Sunday — but immediately turned around left, the New York Post reports.

Dozens of families arrived shortly after noon Sunday, but after a quick look-see went back on the buses to try to return to their previous shelters.

“We weren’t told where we were going,” one of the migrants told the Post. “I work in The Bronx. My kids go to school in The Bronx. For us to live out here is ridiculous. We’re going back.”

The Adams administration had reached an agreement with the federal government to use the national parkland area in Southern Brookyln to house migrants — more than 100,00 of whom have arrived in New York over the past year, and all of whom the city is responsible to house under current law.

With shelters overwhelmed, the Adams administration had to look for alternative sites. It initially tried renting hotels in other counties, but local leadership there objected.

The Floyd Bennett Field plan has raised the ire of residents of nearby neighborhoods.

“There goes the neighborhood,” one Marine Park mother named Anne told Hamodia upon first learning of the plan to house the migrants at nearby Floyd Bennett Field. “Disgusting,” she said, of the prospect of the undocumented immigrants being housed near her home.

The plan has also come under fire on the pro-immigration Left, with some officials saying the area is inadequate and too remote from schools and shopping centers.

A migrant father bused to the field Sunday told the Post he has been living at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, where migrants are initially processed, and said he was heading back there.

An Adams administration spokesman told the Post that other migrants who arrived Sunday did remain.

“As we have said time and time again, more than 139,500 asylum seekers have moved through our intake system since the spring of 2022, all of whom have been offered vital services,” the spokesman said in a statement.