By: C.Zawadi Morris
Around 70 Clinton Hill residents gathered at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Hall Street Tuesday evening to express anger and concern, following the double homicide shooting of two migrants outside of the emergency migrant shelter complex and a nearby park late Sunday night.
The atmosphere was emotional and tense. Police officers stood close by, watching along the southeast corner of Hall Street, while a diverse group of residents held signs that read “Too Big to Be Safe,” and shouting “End the Lease! End the Lease!”
Their biggest complaints were that the shelter populations were too large and concentrated and should be spread out more evenly around the city. They also suggested that the lease agreements made between the city with real estate developer RXR for the Hall Street shelter was an inflated monetary exchange, with little consideration of the negative impact it would have on the migrants and local residents.
“The owners of RXR received $45 million to lease the building for 18 months,” said Renee Collymore, the Democratic liaison for the 57th Assembly District, who organized the rally.
“Is the building even worth $45 million?” she asked.
The gun deaths were the boiling point of frustration for the residents who pleaded for immediate action from lawmakers for what they had been saying for months was a ticking time bomb: an overcrowded shelter in their small community that has fostered loitering, vagrancy and crime.
“Our neighborhood has gone through a series of hurtful events,” shouted Collymore from the microphone. “There’s no way migrants should be having sexual intercourse outside in the streets. This is a bad representation of the neighborhood of Clinton Hill!”
“We’ve done everything we can do to help the migrants,” she continued. “We’ve given them food; we’ve given them clothes; we’ve given them money … But how much more can we do? This is not on us! This is on local government to take care of the migrants.”
The Hall Street shelter, which sits adjacent to a second migrant shelter located at 29 Ryerson Street, has 3,200 residents. Together, the two shelters account for close to 4,000 migrants in one city block.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has stated publicly on several occasions that there is no more physical space in New York City to accommodate additional asylum seekers. He has appealed to federal and state officials for support, including Governor Kathy Hochul, to explore the possibility of relocating migrants to upstate New York communities. But the proposal has been met with mixed responses and has not been implemented.
Still, for local residents at the rally, they said something needs to happen immediately. They traded the microphone to express their frustration:
“Dear Mayor Adams … I live on Hall Street a half-block from that giant prison complex that they call a shelter,” said Tim Walker, a Clinton Hill resident for 12 years. “It has been an escalating disaster for more than a year now. You know this, mayor, because we’ve been telling you. Just last month, I wrote to you and your team on behalf of my block after a highly publicized stabbing. ‘It is only a matter of time,’ I said, ‘before someone is actually killed.’ None of you even bothered to respond. As far as I’m concerned, we do not have a migrant crisis; we have a leadership crisis, and it is at City Hall!”
Photo: C.Zawadi Morris
Carlos Aguila, a Clinton Hill resident for more than 20 years, said it wasn’t the migrants’ fault and that the community was just too small to sustain 3,000+ migrants: “No one is anti-immigrant here whatsoever. It’s unfair to them, because there just ain’t enough jobs and businesses to offer them opportunities so they can acclimate to our society.”
Aliya McKee Martinez, a resident from Hall Street said, “I’ve been crying a lot the last few days, because a loss of life is tragic, and I’m just distraught about it. Shame on you Mayor Adams! Two lives have been lost. How many more before you right-size this shelter? It’s too big to be safe, and we demand immediate action!”
“This is the last straw,” shouted Collymore. “We are demanding that Council Member Crystal Hudson use her legislative power to write a bill to reverse the Sanctuary City Laws!”
In February, a bill was proposed to repeal some of the sanctuary city policies established during former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, which restrict local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The proposal aimed to allow law enforcement to work more closely with ICE, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, particularly concerning individuals suspected of serious crimes.
Mayor Adams has expressed support for loosening these restrictions, advocating for a return to earlier standards where cooperation was more extensive. However, the proposal faced strong opposition from the City Council’s progressive wing, who are unlikely to support such changes.
In his weekly press briefing on Tuesday, the mayor restated that he would not downsize the complex and move migrants to other areas.
