Mayor Adams Improvises His Way Through an Impossible Crisis
Last weekend, several Brooklyn principals were told that their schools would immediately be sheltering hundreds of asylum seekers, by way of mayoral fiat. The schools commandeered into service were chosen because they had stand-alone gyms, apart from the main buildings, which would separate children from the adults who would temporarily be staying there, side by side in tight rows of green cots.
The schools themselves were not in affluent neighborhoods but rather served working-class families of color, who were now livid. Parents, many immigrants themselves, were concerned about safety and felt cheated that their children would be denied gym in schools that were hardly abundant with amenities. They began lining up as early as 3 in the morning on Tuesday in protest; some brought their children, others refused to send them to school at all. By the next day, after frantic meetings between administrators and parents, Mayor Eric Adams seemed to have reversed course, removing asylum seekers from a school gym in Coney Island and sending them to a vacant office in Midtown. The administration maintained that this turnaround had nothing to do with the rallies.
“Migrants flow in and out of these sites as other more suitable space becomes available, and they have and will continue to be used as a last resort,” a spokesperson from City Hall said. “As the mayor has continued to say, everything is on the table when it comes to placement of asylum seekers.”
The situation around migrants — at least 40,000 of whom are currently in New York’s care, making up roughly half of the city’s shelter population — has left the mayor in an almost untenable political position. Any stinting on compassion becomes both a gift to the DeSantis right and a source of agitation to the Ocasio-Cortez left, and any semblance of overreaching acquiescence enrages the centrists who helped the mayor get elected.
Source: The New York Times
