Across the Border and Into the Parks

Op-Ed

Mayor Eric Adams recently said that the endless flow of migrants will "destroy" New York City. I saw that firsthand last week when I toured migrant housing facilities and met with officials and tried to get to the bottom of their plans to house illegal migrants in the Gateway National Recreation Area, part of the National Park System.

The day began with city officials denying me entry to the Roosevelt Hotel. The hotel--whose namesake, Teddy Roosevelt, championed the national parks--closed during the pandemic only to reopen as the central processing facility for migrants arriving in New York. It houses more than 1,000 migrant families, has National Guard members stationed at the doors, and is so overcrowded that migrants have resorted to sleeping on chairs inside or on the streets outside. This is a far cry from the treatment congressional Democrats received the previous week, when they were welcomed for a tour and press conference at the Roosevelt.

Later in the day, I visited the Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes coastal areas in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey. It's a lifeline to the outdoors in a concrete jungle. It features the city's largest community garden, kayaking, fishing, a sports complex, campgrounds and even a unit of the Sea Cadets Corps, the U.S. Navy's youth-development program. More than nine million people visit annually, and park staff reported that Floyd Bennett Field hosts more than one million visitors a year.

The proposed plan to house migrants in the recreation area has already affected youth programs at the site. Park Service representatives said parents have pulled their kids out of the Sea Cadets program at Floyd Bennett Field.

To make matters worse, Park Service officials told me the administration is short-cutting the National Environmental Policy Act to build migrant camps. NEPA has stood in the way of critical infrastructure projects, forest management to prevent wildfires and domestic energy production. But the Biden administration is attempting to skirt the red tape and silently declare a national emergency for a disaster it created. These actions show that President Biden would rather do anything than secure the border.

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