With seemingly no end in sight to the self-inflicted migrant crisis, government authorities are now desperately searching high and low to find room for the more than one hundred thousand-strong migrant population that has New York ready to burst at the seams.
In one move that has lawmakers from both major parties up in arms, the Biden administration is deliberately stepping over environmental regulations in order to set up a migrant camp of 7,500 adult men at a national park site in the Big Apple.
As The Washington Times reports, the National Park Service has now signed an agreement to lease Floyd Bennett Field, a former airport that is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area in Brooklyn and managed by the National Park Service, as the site of a migrant tent city. Officials have candidly admitted that they will not go through the typical environmental protocols mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act as they upend the family-friendly area currently home to a kids’ petting zoo, hay rides, and ball fields.
And not only do government officials lack a plan to provide sufficient policing for a population of 7,500 potentially dangerous adult men who crossed the border illegally (often with help from cartels); the camp doesn’t even have the infrastructure to ensure that many people have access to basic needs such as water.
To make matters worse, the location is a flood plain that was inundated as recently as last weekend, calling into question the site’s suitability for use as a migrant camp.
Assemblywoman Jamie R. Williams, a Democrat who represents the area, pushed back at the move, arguing that local leaders and citizens were excluded from the decision-making process — even though they’re the ones who will be most affected.
“There’s no jobs there. There is no food there. There is nothing there,” said Williams. “These decisions cannot be made at such a level where the local electeds read about it, hear about it, on the news.”
Williams was speaking at a Wednesday hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee. Republicans on the committee called the Biden administration out for hypocrisy, arguing that it has often cited environmental factors in its decision-making in the past, but now is willing to bypass environmental regulations to accommodate more illegal aliens. For example, the White House used the pretext of environmental concerns to cease construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall, arguing Trump had waived too many environmental laws to get the barrier built.
Representative Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chairman of the committee, said, “Yet now that the president is facing public backlash from a border crisis unlike any this nation has ever seen, the administration is suddenly reversing course, ignoring every environmental protection in the book.”
The Times further reported:
The airfield was first used for commercial traffic and then as a naval air station, and now is part of the park site, serving as a treasured green space and athletic complex for Brooklyn.
The park service signed a lease two weeks ago granting the city one year’s use, with the option for a second year. The lease envisions 2,000 to 7,500 adult male migrants living in the tent city.
… Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat … has said using the field is a poor substitute for President Biden delivering more fundamental solutions, including financial assistance to local communities working to welcome the migrants and changes to derail the flow at the border.
“I think that the lease never should have been signed, never should have been offered, never should have been asked for. It is a national federal park,” said Councilwoman Joann Ariola, a Republican, during Wednesday’s committee hearing.
And committee member Representative Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, expressed concern that, amid Biden’s virtual open-border policy, the use of Floyd Bennett Field to hold migrants will become a model employed at parkland across the country.
“My concern is that New York City, a wealthy part of our country, if it’s having trouble with this housing crisis, what about all the other communities around the country, border states and other states, how are they going to be able to cope?” asked Lamborn. National Park Service officials were invited to testify at the hearing but did not attend.
The migrant crisis in New York City has turned even Democrats into immigration hawks. For example, in a major about-face, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has now thrown her support behind Mayor Adams’ call to suspend the “right to shelter” law, arguing that it is contributing to the depletion of the Big Apple’s resources, which are already “at capacity.”
“The original premise behind the right to shelter was for — started as for homeless men on the streets. People were experiencing AIDS, then it was expanded to families,” the governor said during an appearance on CNN. “But never was it envisioned that this would be an unlimited universal right or obligation on the City to have to house literally [the] entire world.”
It’s a shame Democrats such as Hochul and Adams didn’t foresee the realities of their migration idealism before they supported policies that have brought their communities to the brink of collapse.
