Floyd Bennett Field migrants face relief and worry about their futures

December 24, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Families rush back to a migrant shelter housed at Floyd Bennett Field before an announced weather-related evacuation, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Photo: Mary Altaffer

Share this:

MARINE PARK — AS THE MIGRANT SHELTER AT FLOYD BENNETT FIELD in southeastern Brooklyn is scheduled to close Jan. 15, many of the people housed there are leaving, amid both confusion and relief, The City reports. All residents of the Brooklyn tent shelter complex, which is not weather-resistant, are slated to depart by Jan. 15, with some very happy to do so. Some of the migrants have been reassigned to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, a two-hour bus ride from the former airfield that is already in a transit desert. Others have been assigned space to a complex of buildings on Hall Street in Clinton Hill, a former industrial site that neighbors the Brooklyn Navy Yard. That facility has been housing up to three thousand people. Still other people are being reassigned to hotels around the city. However, they have stated their worries about deportations, especially as President-elect Donald Trump has promised a strict overhaul on immigration.

Earlier this month, Brooklyn Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-11), the city’s only Republican member of Congress, praised the announced closure of Floyd Bennett Field. Rep. Malliotakis, who has long fought the use of federal land to house migrants, credited the re-election of Donald Trump to a second Presidential term.