NYC to close Randall's Island migrant camp in February 2025, mayor's office says

All the tent dorms housing homeless foreign migrants on Randall's Island will be shuttered early next year, Mayor Eric Adams’ office announced Wednesday, citing a reduced influx.

The largest tent dorm, with 750 cots, has already closed, and the remaining population will gradually be thinned until the site closes completely by the end of February, according to a news release from the office.

At its peak, the Randall's Island complex housed 3,000 migrants in accommodations that displaced athletic fields otherwise available to New Yorkers.

“Following the site’s closure in February, the city will invest in restoring the remaining impacted athletic fields and parkland,” the release said.

The closure is possible because the number of migrants seeking shelter has gone down for 14 successive weeks and is now at its lowest point in over a year, according to the release, which credited a time limit on previously limitless shelter stays and the Biden administration’s tougher enforcement that began earlier this year at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the release, Adams cautioned that the city was "not out of the woods yet," but said it had "turned the corner on this crisis."

Since April 2022, over 218,000 migrants have arrived in New York City, 158,000 of whom sought room and board at city-funded homeless shelters, hotels, and tent cities, as well as other complexes the city opened to house the influx.

Earlier this year, the city cut a deal with advocates that loosened a decades-old mandate to provide room and board to anyone in need.

But that policy led to encampments on Randall's Island and elsewhere of migrants with nowhere else to stay.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.