Students at a Brooklyn high school were kicked out of the classroom to make room for nearly 2,000 migrants who were evacuated from a controversial tent shelter due to a monster storm closing in on the Big Apple.
The city made the move amid concerns that a massive migrant tent at Floyd Bennett Field would collapse from torrential rains and gusting winds — packing them instead into the second-floor gym at James Madison High School five miles away.
The school’s neighbors were not keen on the last-minute decision.
“This is f—ed up,” said a local resident who identified himself only as Rob. “It’s a litmus test. They are using a storm, a legitimate situation, where they are testing this out. I guarantee you they’ll be here for the entire summer.
“There’s 1,900 people getting thrown into my neighborhood, half a block from where I live and we don’t know who they are,” he said.
“They’re not vetted. A lot of them have criminal records and backgrounds and we don’t even know.”
One irate mom even went off on the migrants as they pulled up inside a line of school buses in the pouring rain shortly before 6 p.m.
“How do you feel? Does it feel good?” the woman, who only identified herself as Michelle, screamed at the buses.
“How does it feel that you kicked all the kids out of school tomorrow? Does it feel good? I hope you feel good. I hope you will sleep very well tonight!”
Said a local dad, “How do you feel stealing American tax money?”
The school announced online earlier in the day that classes would be held remotely on Wednesday due to “the activation of James Madison High School as a temporary overnight respite center” for the migrants.
The decision to clear the migrants out of the field came as city officials feared for the safety of the tent city at the field with heavy rains and winds gusting up to 70 mph forecast for later on Tuesday and into Wednesday.
“To be clear, this relocation is a proactive measure being taken out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety and wellbeing of individuals working and living at the center,” City Hall spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak said.
“The families are already in the process of being temporarily relocated and will continue to be provided with essential services and support,” Mamelak added.
“The relocation will continue until any weather conditions that may arise have stabilized and the facility is once again fit for living.”
By midday, officials were already prepping the high school for the migrants’ arrival from the airfield about five miles away, with 10 marked NYPD vehicles and a half-dozen Emergency Management trucks parked outside.
“They told us we had to get everything out by 5 [p.m.],” gym teacher Robyn Levy said outside the school.
“They sent us the email at 6 in the morning. I don’t know when we’ll be able to back.”
“What I want to know is why here?” Levy said.
“Why not send them somewhere where students wouldn’t be disrupted, where students learning wouldn’t be disrupted?”
The migrant move began shortly before 5 p.m. as more than two dozen school buses lined up at the field for the short drive to the school.
It wasn’t the first time extreme weather has been an issue at the 2,000-bed tent facility, which took a pounding last month when heavy rain and gusting, 55-mph winds shook metal bolts and hinges loose from the ceiling.
The ferocious storm on Dec. 18 dropped up to 4 inches of rain in the region and had migrants inside the tents fearing for their lives, they told The Post at the time.
“The wind was so strong, it looked like the tents were going to give way and be blown apart,” Venezuelan migrant Reibi Rodrigues said.
“When we told security we were afraid of an imminent collapse, they told us the door was open and we could leave when we want.
“But where were we going to go?”
City Hall officials said they had an evacuation plan in place and ready to execute if needed, but said no flooding was reported at the former federal airfield during the December downpour.
They also said they were unaware of bolts and hinges falling from the top of the tents.
The first migrants moved to the abandoned Brooklyn airfield in November after Gov. Kathy Hochul negotiated with the White House for access to the site to erect a tent city.
Critics worried about the remote location, but city officials were desperate to find space for the thousands of migrants flooding into the Big Apple.
“I warned the administration that something like this would happen from day one and they refused to listen,” Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens) told The Post Tuesday.
“Floyd Bennett Field is entirely unsuitable for a tent complex, and how we are wasting tax-payer dollars to evacuate nearly 2,000 people when they should have been placed somewhere like the Park Slope Armory.
“This did not take a fortune teller to predict,” she said.
“It was common sense.”
Nearly 70,000 migrants remain in the city’s care from among the 162,000 who have arrived in the five boroughs from the US border since the spring of 2022.
The city also erected migrant tents at Randall’s Island in Manhattan and the former Creedmore Psychiatric Center in Queens, but said Tuesday that those sites are less exposed and not considered vulnerable to extreme weather.
Adams also said that while the tents at the other two sites are “anchored” to the ground, the ones at Floyd Bennett Field are only held down by “heavy stones.”
https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/metro/migrants-evacuated-from-floyd-bennett-field-due-to-high-winds/
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