A New York City high school was closed to students Tuesday so that nearly 2,000 migrants could be sheltered there.
Students at Brooklyn's James Madison High School will be forced to learn remotely after migrants moved in following the evacuation of a massive tent shelter at nearby Floyd Bennett Field.
With an intense storm moving toward the city, city officials were concerned the tent would collapse from torrential rains and gusting winds, the New York Post reported.
Residents in Midwood, the neighborhood in which the school is located, were angry about the migrant invasion.
Teachers, parents, and students were told some 500 families would be transferred to the high school auditorium to sleep overnight, and that Wednesday classes would be remote, CBS News reported.
Some parents were skeptical about the city's plans.
"This is [expletive] up," one man told the Post. "It's a litmus test. They are using a storm, a legitimate situation, where they are testing this out. I guarantee you they'll be here for the entire summer.
"There's 1,900 people getting thrown into my neighborhood, half a block from where I live, and we don't know who they are.
"They're not vetted. A lot of them have criminal records and backgrounds, and we don't even know."
One woman yelled at the migrants as they exited school buses in the pouring rain shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday.
"How do you feel? Does it feel good?" the woman screamed at the buses. "How does it feel that you kicked all the kids out of school tomorrow? Does it feel good? I hope you feel good. I hope you will sleep very well tonight!"
Zachary Iscol, the city's emergency management commissioner, said the main reason for the migrants' evacuation was the wind, although the agency also was "concerned about flooding in and around Jamaica Bay," The New York Times reported.
Iscol added that because the Floyd Bennett airplane runway is a historic site, constructing tents using stakes in the ground was not allowed.
Some area residents criticized the city but expressed concern for the migrants.
"This is ridiculous," Bob Brunotte told the New York Daily News. "They're shuffling them around putting them in Floyd Bennett Field, a known flood plane, then wake them up at 4 a.m. pull them out of the school and put them back in the tents.
"This is a shame. They deserve better."
Migrants began being housed at Floyd Bennett Field in November after Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul negotiated with the White House for access to the site to erect a tent city.
"I warned the administration that something like this would happen from day one and they refused to listen," Councilwoman Joann Ariola, R-Queens, told the Post.
"Floyd Bennett Field is entirely unsuitable for a tent complex, and how we are wasting tax-payer dollars to evacuate nearly 2,000 people when they should have been placed somewhere like the Park Slope Armory.
"This did not take a fortune teller to predict. It was common sense."
Of roughly 162,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City from the southern border since the spring of 2022, nearly 70,000 remain in the city's care.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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