The Biden administration is refusing to sign off on using Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field to house migrants, leaving Gov. Kathy Hochul red-faced after she made a personal pitch to the feds Sunday.
New York’s top Democratic official made sure she was on the morning call with such Biden bigs as Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau — and her office even prepared an announcement on the deal to send out pronto afterward, sources familiar with the situation told The Post.
The embattled gov hoped to be able to finally crow about a deal with the feds to use the desperately needed space at the 1,000-acre former military airfield to help ease the crush of migrants flooding into the Big Apple, sources said.
But the Democratic White House administration stunned Hochul by rebuffing her, saying there are still “operational and legal” issues at play over housing asylum-seekers at the site, sources said.
“Getting the federal government to change its position and tell an agency, the Department of the Interior, that they now have to accept migrants has been a complicated journey,” Hochul later told reporters at an unrelated press conference after marching in Manhattan’s Dominican Day Parade.
“It has been a long journey, something I’ve been literally [working on] for two months, three months, and intensely for the last few weeks,” she said. “Today was a call to talk about logistics, any kind of legal barriers, any other obstacles. But I did not take away from that a hard ‘no.’ So I think it’s just gonna be an evolving process.”
A source said that as far as the state is concerned, the plan for Floyd Bennett, now overseen by the US National Park Service, “is still very much in play.
“We are ready to do our part in advancing activation of these sites,” the source said.
Among the specific issues holding up the proposal are how many migrants would be housed there and who would foot the bill.
The Brooklyn site would have been the fifth state-funded migrant shelter site in the state, which includes a facility on Randall’s Island capable of housing up to 2,000 people — and is costing New York $20 million every month, Hochul’s office revealed Saturday.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams also has said the Big Apple’s migrant crunch is expected to now cost it a mind-boggling $12 billion over the next three years.
“We are past our breaking point,” Adams said during a City Hall briefing last week.
About 100,000 men, women and children crossing the US southern border and seeking asylum have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, with more than 57,000 currently staying in 198 emergency shelters in the five boroughs.
The unprecedented influx has spilled out onto the streets of Manhattan, where scores of migrants were forced two weeks ago to sleep outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which was set up as a processing center.
Last week, city officials added the once-hip Collective Paper Factory hotel in Long Island City in Queens to the list of migrant sites to help with the onslaught, sparking outrage from local residents.
“Last night, I saw a family of five [or] six children, a mother and a father sitting on their cars with some friends just having some beers, and I was walking my dog on the street and a little kid was going ‘Woof! Woof!’ to my dog,” an irate neighborhood resident told The Post.
“What are the regulations for them coming in here? Are there background checks? I don’t know.”
Some immigrant Dominican parade-goers were more sympathetic Sunday to the migrants’ plight.
“I’m down here to show solidarity with the City Council and minority groups in New York. We support basic human rights. Health, housing, representation,” said a nurse who only gave her first name, Luna, and marched with the New York State Nurses Association.
The woman, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic 14 years ago, said of the city’s newly arrived migrants, “They don’t have shelter. They don’t have jobs. They are fighting for their lives.”
Still, “Me and my family, when we came here, we had to spend a long time waiting for legal papers to come through,” she said. “I think people should come here, but they should come the right way.”
Hochul has also gotten pushback from upstate officials who have balked at having hundreds of migrants bused from New York City into their communities and put up at local hotels and motels.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, a Democrat who previously welcomed the migration, just announced that he was refusing to accept any more migrants from the Big Apple for now after two sexual assault incidents occurred at Buffalo-area hotels that are housing asylum-seekers.
“Erie County opened its arms to try to welcome these new Americans,” Polocarz said. “Unfortunately, we believe we can’t make the program, as it is presently run, sustainable without significant changes.”
