Fears of ‘operational and moral failure’ at New York’s migrant tent city

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “We’ve surpassed well over 15,000 asylum seekers,” New York City Council member Shahana Hanif told The Independent. This was just another sort of example of the administration’s incompetence and like lack of alignment with immigrant justice principles.” Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement that rights groups have repeatedly asked the city to be involved with the shelter plans, “but keep getting rebuffed.” “That’s how we ended up here with a contractor who built the southern border wall, and one proposed site that has already flooded,” he said. But the temporary tent facilities will instead will be operated by the New York City Emergency Management and the Health + Hospitals Corp. Ms Hanif, who chairs the council’s Committee on Immigration, fears the tent shelters are “circumventing” the right-to-shelter mandate. open image in gallery A family from Venezuela boards buses to New York from El Paso, Texas on 3 October Mr Awawdeh with the New York Immigration Coalition accused the administration of trying to “subvert” the state’s right-to-shelter mandate with a “poorly conceived plan to hide asylum seekers in relief camps in remote areas of New York that are prone to flooding.” “Despite the availability of underutilized buildings that are more accessible to mass transit and the social service needs of asylum seekers, the city continues to remain stubbornly committed to the development of relief camps across the five boroughs,” he said in a statement.