New Yorkers who say they’re fed up with escalating violence and quality of life issues have called on the city to shut down a shelter for illegal immigrants in a residential area of Queens.
On June 9, dozens of residents rallied outside the building, a former Courtyard Marriott hotel in East Elmhurst converted to house illegal immigrants, to protest what they claim to be a growing threat to their standard of living.
Elizabeth Del Mundo, 33, whose family owns a business in the area, told The Epoch Times that the 90th Street shelter is only one of several in the area that have had a negative impact on the community.
“A lot of families just don’t feel safe anymore, and instead of making things safer like [officials] keep promising, it’s only been getting worse,” Mrs. Del Mundo said. “It’s so expensive to live here, and we just keep being told to pay more and more in taxes, and for what? To get harassed? It’s insane.
“We who have lived here aren’t important to the city anymore. Only the migrants matter.”
In a separate post, Mr. Monserrate wrote: “Our Community has had enough. We demand a safer and cleaner community and laws that make sense. We have 15 homeless [shelters] between Queens Blvd. and LGA Enough is Enough.”
The shelter previously housed Bernardo Castro Mata, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant from Venezuela charged with the attempted murder of two New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. Officer Christopher Abreu, 26, was shot in the leg, while his partner, Richard Yarusso, 26, took a hit to his bulletproof vest.
Mr. Mata, who illegally entered the United States last July in Texas, was a member of the street gang Tren de Aragua, which arms its members with mopeds to conduct quick “grab and go” style robberies. The gang has committed at least 80 motorized robberies across the city this year, many in Queens, along with hundreds of other crimes, an NYPD source told The Epoch Times.
The area surrounding the shelter has been inundated with other criminal activity, including reports of sexual assault, rape, and immigrant woman being forced into prostitution, according to an NYPD source.
“This isn’t a case where the neighborhood is dealing with a group of homeless people in need of a lift. There is a definite and brazen criminal element at play happening out in the open,” said the source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “No one wants to say it, but it is obvious that there is an increase in crime [that] can be attributed directly to the migrants in this shelter and others like it.”
New York City has been flooded with thousands of illegal immigrants from the U.S. border over the past two years, with officials desperately trying to find space for them, often filling up homeless shelters and contracting hotels.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has defended the city’s efforts to house the influx of illegal immigrants, frequently calling on the federal government to authorize work permits for them.
“As the city has consistently argued, the Right to Shelter—put into place over 40 years ago when the city’s shelter system had fewer than 2,500 people in its care—compared to the 120,000 people, approximately 65,000 of which are migrants, currently in the city’s care—was never meant to apply to a national humanitarian crisis like the one New York City faces today,” he stated in March.
Offices for the Queens borough president and New York City mayor did not immediately return requests for comment.
In response, President Joe Biden announced a June 4 executive order that would shut down asylum requests at the southern border once the average number of daily encounters exceeds 2,500, with the border remaining shut until that daily average stays below 1,500 for at least a week.
