NYC opens Randall's Island tent dorms for adults in migrant crisis

More tent dorms are opening in New York City — the latest Sunday, on Randall's Island — to shelter some of the tens of thousands of homeless immigrants arriving during the ongoing migrant crisis.

Up to 3,000 adults are expected to sleep, eat and shower in tents pitched on the island, located in the East River between Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.

“Our goal here is to be able to, for asylum-seekers coming into New York City, give you the resources that you need to be able to take the next step on your journey as fast as possible,” said Dr. Ted Long, a city official helping oversee the crisis response, after giving the news media a tour of the facility Sunday.

New York State is funding the operation, which the city calls a Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center.

City officials said that starting Sunday, they were bringing in the first group, about 150 men, from what the city calls "respite centers." The centers are bare-bones facilities, like gyms and office buildings, used to house migrants for short-term stays. They typically provide little more than a cot for sleeping.

The Randall's Island site will host adult men and women but no children. Long said the facility could become full “fairly soon.” 

“Very few” of the immigrants who have arrived in the city have formally filed for asylum, which allows someone to stay in the U.S. legally pending a hearing before a judge, said Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom in May. U.S. law grants migrants one year from the time of crossing the border to apply, or the right is generally forfeited. Most migrants are unlikely to be granted asylum, but an unknown number are likely to stay in the country illegally regardless, Newsday reported in June.

The latest temporary shelter includes an intake tent, a 24/7 cafeteria, bathrooms and shower trailers. There are also four large white tents on site filled with rows of green cots. A fifth tent is under construction and set to open next week. 

Upon arriving at the facility, migrants are issued an ID badge, screened for infectious diseases and paired with caseworkers to establish goals and how to achieve them, Long said.

Last week, hundreds of immigrants arrived to live in tents pitched in the parking lot of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, near the Queens-Nassau border. The Creedmoor facility already has 600 adults living in tents, quickly approaching its 1,000-capacity, city officials said Sunday.

Christina Farrell, first deputy commissioner of the city’s Emergency Management Department, said it’s only a matter of days before Creedmoor is filled, and the Randall's Island site offers “a little breathing room for the next few days.”

“We really want to offer quality sites like this where people can, you know, take a breath, work with the caseworkers and figure out what the next steps are,” she said.

The tents at Randall's Island and Creedmoor are just two of nearly 200 sites the city has opened since spring 2022 to house an influx each week of thousands of immigrants. Among other places the city has turned to beyond conventional homeless shelters — renting out hotel rooms, churches, cruise ships, former jails, school gyms and park recreation centers.

“As the number of asylum-seekers in our care continues to grow by hundreds every day, stretching our system to its breaking point and beyond, it has become more and more of a herculean effort to find enough beds every night,” Mayor Eric Adams said earlier this month in a news release announcing that Randall's Island would be used once again.

The city is under a unique-in-the-nation mandate dating back to the 1980s to provide shelter to anyone in need.

Earlier this month, hundreds of adult immigrants slept outside on the street, blocks from Grand Central — outside the site of an intake center — because, Adams said, there were no suitable facilities to immediately shelter them.

The cost to the New York City budget to pay for the migrant crisis is projected to be $12 billion by 2025, Adams has said.

In October, when there were about 23,000 migrants who had arrived in the city, the Adams administration had also sheltered some immigrants on Randall's Island but shuttered the operation after just weeks, following criticism from some City Council members and immigrant rights activists.

But the influx of immigrants has ballooned since then, to over 101,000, about 60% of whom are homeless and living in city shelter facilities.

Most are from Latin America and Africa; some have been bussed to the city under programs by U.S. border state officials to protest the Biden administration’s border policies.

“What we've done in that interim period is we've exhausted all other options,” Long said Sunday, referring to the period from October to now. “Because we've exhausted existing sites, we're building or constructing new sites in parks and parking lots.”

Adams has pleaded, mostly unsuccessfully, for federal subsidies and space to place the immigrants elsewhere. He has sought, also mostly unsuccessfully, to relocate them beyond the five boroughs, including on Long Island.

City officials on Sunday again called for more state and federal support.

“While New York City might be a city of immigrants, we are not a city of unlimited resources,” said Manuel Castro, commissioner of the mayor's office of immigrant affairs.