More than 200 raucous demonstrators rallied outside a former Staten Island nursing home Sunday, chanting, “Close the border!” to protest its possible conversion to an emergency shelter for migrants.
“Don’t call them immigrants. Call them ‘illegals,’ ” Ray Thaisz, 66, said outside the currently shuttered former Island Shores Senior Residences in Midland Beach. “I don’t mind people coming here, but they’re coming here illegally, and then we have to support them.”
Another local, retired nurse Claire O’Toole, said she just didn’t want the asylum seekers housed in her neighborhood.
“I have four grandchildren,” said O’Toole, 64. “I don’t want this by my house. Why would I want that worry? They want to put 800 men here, but we have no idea who they are, period. Are they rapists? Are they murderers? Are they vaccinated? Do they speak English?”
Guardian Angels founder and former failed mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa organized the protest and was among about a dozen demonstrators later arrested by cops for blocking traffic.
It was Sliwa’s second migrant-related bust in less than a week.
In a flyer announcing the demonstration, Sliwa wrote, “Arrests at the location are expected.”
“When I finish, we are gonna block this street,” the Guardian Angels chief told the crowd. “You line up behind me … and the others who know what civil disobedience is. Let’s await the instructions of the cops.
“We occupy this facility and dare them to arrest [us],” he told the crowd. “We don’t want illegal aliens.”
Sliwa was also among the demonstrators arrested last week protesting a new 1,000-bed migrant tent shelter on the grounds of the former Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.
The possibility of converting the former Midland Beach nursing home first surfaced last year, when the 288-bed facility was on the verge of being sold, according to a report this month by the Staten Island Advance.
The sale meant that 53 senior citizens would have to be relocated from the assisted living facility — and local pols raised fears that the site was being eyed for conversion to a migrant shelter.
“This site was an important cornerstone in our senior care system and we have been advocating to the owner of the site to sell to an entity with a similar end-use as a senior retirement facility,” Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella and other elected officials wrote to Mayor Eric Adams, the outlet said.
“With several potential buyers interested in providing some type of long-term care to Staten Islanders, this migrant shelter sets back Staten Islanders’ senior health care options,” the letter said.
Adams has been forced to scramble for space as some 100,000 asylum seekers from the US border have flooded the five boroughs since last spring — with nearly 60,000 currently under city care.
On Sunday, city officials bused in the first 150 of now-3,000 expected migrants to be housed at a massive tent city erected on soccer fields on Randall’s Island.
The state-funded site is expected to cost taxpayers $20 million a month, officials said this month.