Migrants are Begging in Brooklyn Neighborhoods That Voted for Trump, Sparking Hostility and Help

Nextdoor and Facebook groups are buzzing with anecdotes and photos from Marine Park depicting encounters with families who live at the Floyd Bennett Field shelter complex. Other neighbors are stepping up with aid.

December 22, 2023 Gwynne Hogan, THE CITY

Security camera footage shows migrants soliciting homes in Brooklyn for financial help. Credit: Courtesy of David Fitzgerald

‘That Place Should Not Exist’

The shelter, now housing around 1,700 migrant parents and children, consists of four massive tents on an abandoned federal airfield, a 20-minute walk to the nearest bus stop across a blustery field. Buses on Flatbush Avenue take residents to schools and other destinations in the area — including suburban-style neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in the Rockaways in Queens.

Migrants are also finding friends in nearby communities, where ad hoc groups of neighbors are rallying around the new arrivals and coordinating through WhatsApp as well as with teachers and parents at schools that have taken on new students. Nearly daily, cars pull into parking lots adjacent to the shelter, offering donated hauls of warm clothing, winter boots and strollers.

“Right now, what most people have been asking for is pants and shoes. That’s the top need,” said Ariana Hellerman, 42, with the Queens group Rockaway Women for Progress, who started chatting up families who were riding the Q35 bus and began bringing supplies soon after.

Hellerman said she was disturbed by some of the reactions of her neighbors, but not surprised.

“The word on the street in Rockaway is they’re gonna break into our houses,” she said. “There’s just these fear tactics, because they’re people of color they’re going to try to steal from us.”

Carrie Gleason, 45, a parent of a fifth grader at P.S. 315 in Midwood, Brooklyn, where some of the Floyd Bennett children are enrolled, said the parents have sprung into acting to help the newcomers.

“Yesterday I bought cough medicine because all the kids have coughs that won’t go away,” she said. “The kids are sick and the school is saying, ‘Bring the kids no matter what, because it’s healthier for them to be at the school nurse than in a tent.’”

Heavy winds and rains rattled the tent shelters earlier this week, keeping terrified families up all night. With families already on edge, the storm reignited concerns for many about the difficult-to-access shelter and prompted many to beg staff to be relocated.

Gleason said that while Brooklynites across the political spectrum have starkly different attitudes towards migrants, both sides think the shelter is a bad idea.

“There’s the people who hate immigrants that are protesting and then there’s the people who are welcoming of everybody in our community, and also agree, that place should not exist,” Gleason said. “It’s an absolutely inhumane situation.”

Nobody Thinks It’s Ideal

Mayor Eric Adams warned for months that without meaningful relief from the federal government New Yorkers should expect the arrival of migrants to permeate every corner of the city. “This is going to come to a neighborhood near you,” Adams warned at a town hall meeting in September, where he added, “this issue will destroy New York City.” A recent Quinnepiac poll found that 62% of New York voters agreed with the mayor’s assessment.

Of more than 66,000 migrants living in city shelters at the end of November, more than 51,000 were parents and children, most of whom are living in hotel rooms across hundreds of emergency shelters. But as the city said it had run out of hotel rooms, officials began plotting a new type of shelter for families, large tents subdivided using thin plastic and metal barriers.

Homeless advocates laid out a litany of concerns. City officials agreed they didn’t want to place families with children there either, but after months of begging for help from the state and federal government, for other locations outside of New York City, or greater efforts to resettle families across the state, or country, Floyd Bennett Field was all they’d been offered.

“Nobody from the city thinks having families with children living out at Floyd Bennett Field is ideal,” Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said, in a video posted to X following Monday’s storm.

“This is what was given to us by the state by the federal government,” he added. “The team has done incredible work to make it work out here.”

‘Anywhere Else’

While the airfields were the site of several demonstrations before the tent shelters opened, activists said they put the protests on hold once families started moving in.

“The optics are horrible,” said Curtis Sliwa, the Republican who lost to Adams in the 2021 mayoral race. Sliwa has rallied with neighbors against migrant shelters at locations across the city, but said he cautioned people against rallying at Floyd Bennett once people were living there. “These are women and children who need to be cared for,” he said.

But that detente may be coming to an end. Sliwa visited Marine Park Tuesday, touring the area to talk to residents and businesses about the reports of panhandling.

Even some of those organizing against the shelter have wrestled with the dire human reality of the situation. Lee, the administrator of the divisive Facebook group, said she saw a small boy wearing a coat sized for a child twice his age, and her first impulse was to take the family back to her house to find him a coat that fit. But she’d stopped herself.

“Are we enabling this behavior? Are our businesses gonna go? Are our houses gonna depreciate in value? What’s going to be the consequences of doing that?” she wondered.

Lee, who is Puerto Rican and speaks Spanish, said she’d had another conversation with a family about the food at the shelter that had given her pause: “Maybe they aren’t getting enough food in the tents?” she said she had wondered.

Gleason said every family she’s talked to are desperate to leave Floyd Bennett Field, looking for rooms to rent and trying to find jobs, no matter how many jackets volunteers drop off.

“Nobody wants to be there at all,” Gleason said. “They’re desperate to be anywhere else.”

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