On Friday, police and city workers cracked down on the sleazy encampment, forcing about 100 undocumented immigrants to remove a small tent city they had illegally set up on the outskirts of the Randalls Island refuge.
NYPD and city park enforcement patrols swarmed the makeshift camp in mid-afternoon and forced migrant campers out of the area, ordering them to remove their tents and pack up their belongings.
“They were living here. Their time is over,” one city official overseeing the crackdown told The Washington Post. “They can’t stay here. We can’t allow that.”
By the early afternoon, a few migrants were seen packing up tents, taking down laundry from nearby trees and loading shopping carts with pots, pans and utensils for cooking.
City crews were later seen removing tons of trash left behind, including a large mattress, a scooter, folding chairs, wooden tables, food containers, liquor bottles and empty Bud Light cans.
During the raid, more than a dozen shopping carts, most of which were from a nearby Costco, were also seized.
However, one brazen man ran off with his wagon and managed to escape.
Just hours after the operation began, at least one tent had been reset, The Washington Post reported.
Ugly encampments have been popping up in the area for months, ever since migrants began being evicted from a nearby giant 2,000-bed tent shelter after city-mandated stays expired.
It was unclear whether any of the migrants evicted on Friday had reapplied for housing in other city-run shelters.
But homelessness department workers on the ground said most of the people targeted in the recent crackdown don’t want help getting into new shelters.
“We have a list of 25 people who will go to the shelter,” they said, adding, “No one else wanted to go.”
“They don’t want to reapply. We tell them to go away, but they keep coming back,” a parks department official said.
The illegal small encampments have been an ongoing source of tension, given that New York residents share the island’s park spaces and baseball fields.
The Randalls Island Parks Alliance, which has publicly opposed city officials building a shelter there, plans to host a “Yoga in the Park” series nearby on Saturday.
The huge tent shelter, run by the city’s health and hospitals department, has also been mired in controversy after a series of violent incidents, including the stabbing death of a migrant man during an altercation in January.
— Additional reporting by Larry Cerona
