Newcomers in this country should be treated with welcoming dignity and respect, as Mayor Adams and New York City did with the Roosevelt Hotel, which has just closed as the main arrival center for migrants. Citywide, we hosted 237,000 people from 160 countries speaking 60 different languages.
With as many as 4,000 asylum-seekers coming to New York each week, the Roosevelt, which lodged 3,000 migrants at a time, mostly families, was the introduction to New York for these folks. A job very well done, with more than 200,000 vaccines delivered along with the meals and the shelter and 50,000 kids learning in our public schools
Now empty once again, the old hotel did its duty when called into action.
Compare this with how immigrants are handled in the Sunshine State, deep in the Everglades in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has rapidly built a facility at the direction of President Trump. The two men visited the new “Alligator Alcatraz” on Tuesday.
There, DeSantis gushed over how easy it would be to fly people out from the decommissioned airport and he, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shared some laughs over how escapees might be killed by the snakes and alligators in the surrounding swamplands. This as the Florida GOP sold merchandise celebrating the lockup, which features chain-link enclosures the president said could hold some 10,000 people.
In case everything else the administration has done in its “immigration enforcement” clampdown over the last several months hasn’t made it abundantly clear, let’s say it explicitly: the people who are going to be sent to this tropical camp are not hardened criminals. The government already has a mechanism to detain those that have committed violent crimes or other serious offenses, and that’s the criminal justice system, not that something like this facility of cages in outdoor tents should be used to hold anyone, regardless of conviction.
Targeting criminals does not seem to be a particular preoccupation of Trump’s given that the administration just released a thrice-convicted felon who was set to be deported just so he could testify in a case the Justice Department has ginned up against Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to a Salvadoran mega-prison months ago. The administration for weeks ignored a court order to bring back only to return him to prosecute him on specious old allegations. Meanwhile, the immigration focus has pulled federal agents away from crucial functions like combating child sexual abuse.
So, no, the administration is not especially worried about letting criminals roam free. The people who’ll be sent to this remote chain-link camp will be farm workers, day laborers, teachers and others, apparently including lawful visitors and even legal permanent residents who engage in speech that the administration does not like.
The government is already having trouble keeping up proper living standards in its existing detention facilities as ICE strives to meet Stephen Miller‘s deranged arrest quotas, and we shudder to think of conditions at this site.
Trump and Miller want you to believe that this is the only way of treating immigrants, including those who came to this country seeking protections and a better life. That’s not true. Just look at the humane way that New York City handled the people callously bussed in by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or made their way to the city on their own as a result of our hard-earned reputation as the premier global city of immigrants.
New York City’s emergency migrant shelter program was not perfect and Uncle Sam and Albany left us to foot the costs mostly alone, but it was an effort to extend a helping hand as opposed to a clenched fist to those in need, as New York and America has done for generations of people in the past.
