Mayor Eric Adams “slept like a baby” in the city’s newest migrant shelter during one of the coldest recorded nights of the year – despite outside “agitators” who stirred up asylum seekers to oppose City Hall’s relocation efforts.
“I slept like a baby, it was warm. I had my nice, little blanket. That’s my favorite blanket. I’m like Linus, you know on Charlie Brown,” Adams said on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York” Monday morning, describing his Friday night slumber in Red Hook’s Brooklyn Cruise Terminal relief center.
“I have my favorite blanket that I just hug up on and I had pleasant dreams, got up the next day, had breakfast and sat down and spoke with asylum seekers.”
Adams spent the night at the new 1,000-cot migrant mega-shelter on the coldest night of the year to prove conditions were hospitable for the single men relocated from the Midtown-based Watson Hotel last week.
Advocates and migrants protested City Hall’s decision to fill the hotel with children and families last week, after Adams declared there’s “no room at the inn” thanks to the continued influx of individuals arriving in the Big Apple from the southern border.
Migrants opted to sleep on the streets, protesting the move to Red Hook before the NYPD cleared the roughly 30 holdouts last week.
“There was a group of people who were agitating the situation, trying to get the migrants not to leave so that we can make room for children and families. It’s the right thing to do. Children and families should be in those hotels. Single adult males should be in facilities that are [dormitory-style] which other New Yorkers are in other parts of the shelter system,” he added.
“It is just so unfortunate that there are those who have their own agenda, instead of the agenda of watching and seeing and participating in our city moving through these crises,” Adams said during a separate interview with NY1 Monday morning.
An estimated 43,900-plus migrants arrived in the Big Apple since the spring and over 28,400 are currently living in 83 hotels and five larger shelters called “Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers.”
Adams noted the influx is massive when compared to the city’s total shelter population when he first took office, which stood at just over 45,000 in Jan. 2022.
A recent report showed the daily average shelter population spiked from roughly 43,000 in Jan. 2022, to nearly 21% to 54,838 during the same period between Oct. 2022 and Jan. 2023.
“Think about that for a moment and that was throughout the years, in one year we had an additional 43,000 [people]. So, when you hear people say that we have not been humane, that is just wrong. And they really came and agitated the situation at the hotel,” Adams added.
He said the city will also offer English classes and other recreational activities for the migrants living at the Brooklyn facility.
