Amid New York City’s migrant influx, a judge has banned the city from using a former Catholic school as a migrant shelter.
Staten Island judge Wayne Ozzi ordered the city on Tuesday to stop housing migrants at St. John Villa Academy, calling laws that allow New York City to accommodate thousands of asylum-seekers “anachronistic relic[s].” Ozzi’s decision “threatens to disrupt efforts to manage this national humanitarian crisis,” Mayor Eric Adams’ office said in response.
Ozzi blasted New York’s 1981 “Right to Shelter” mandate, which requires the city to provide housing to anyone who seeks it. The mandate makes the city a magnet for asylum-seekers, some New York government employees say, and is “intended to address a problem as different from today’s dilemma as night and day,” per Ozzi.
“The consent decree was entered into to address a specific problem existing at the time — to provide housing for unfortunate New Yorkers who needed shelter,” Ozzi wrote in his Tuesday injunction. “No one can argue that there was at that time a situation of the magnitude existing today — a virtual flood of migrant asylum seekers whose numbers would fill two Yankee Stadiums and equal one-fifth of the population of Staten Island.”
More than 10,000 migrants arrive and seek shelter in New York City every month, and over 100,000 migrants have entered the city since spring 2022. Adams’ office said that with 210 shelters already open, including 17 large humanitarian relief centers, “any site we are now finding are the only options left.”
“While not a single family with children has been forced to sleep on the streets in New York City, this ruling jeopardizes our ability to continue providing shelter at that scale,” a representative for the mayor said. “We are taking steps to immediately appeal this ruling, which we believe is incorrect in key respects and which threatens to disrupt efforts to manage this national humanitarian crisis. Instances like this underscore the urgent need for a broader state and national solution, as we’ve emphasized repeatedly.”