Fed-up New Yorkers blast massive migrant shelter as lease with feds nears an end: ‘It’s affecting everyone’

Dozens of fed-up New Yorkers rallied outside a massive migrant shelter in Brooklyn on Sunday — demanding that City Hall balk at renewing the controversial lease for the troubled 2,000-bed facility on federal parkland.

Led by a caravan of more than 30 vehicles, the crowd massed outside Floyd Bennett Field in Marine Park in the latest in a series of demonstrations against the asylum-seeker encampment at the onetime federal airfield — with elected officials, veterans and regular citizens all taking shots at the site.

“We have these migrants coming in, door knocking, stealing packages, you know, soliciting everywhere in front of our supermarkets, playing at the heartstrings of people,” state Assemblywoman Jaime Williams (R-Brooklyn) told The Post.

“And this is not what our community is about,” Williams said. “Floyd Bennett field is not a place to house migrants. It’s a flood zone [with] no infrastructure whatsoever. So when you have them in that type of setting, there is nothing left to do. They’re going to be on the street because they don’t have any jobs.”

The rally comes as the city’s lease for the site with the National Park Service is due to expire on Sept. 14.

Area residents staged a similar caravan and rally in June amid repeated neighborhood complaints and concerns about unruly migrants causing mischief in the community.

“I don’t mind if they come in the legal way,” longtime neighborhood resident Antonia Natal said Sunday. “That’s what our country’s about. That’s what our country is built on, many migrants — legal. And I’m supportive of that.

“I feel we need to do that with the whole city — no illegals, no shelters,” Natal added. “We can’t. It’s going to damage the economy here, the housing market here, everything.”

Navy vet Martin Vezzuto was more direct.

“What’s going on right now, in my words, is all bulls–t,” he said.

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who has led several rallies against shelters throughout the five boroughs, has repeatedly harped on the cost to taxpayers to house the horde of migrants.

“They’re still coming in every day,” Sliwa said Sunday. “They’re still checking in at the [city intake center at] the Roosevelt Hotel. And they have complete immunity. You arrest an illegal alien, they get cut loose.”

Floyd Bennett Field is one of scores of locations throughout the five boroughs converted into shelters to accommodate thousands of migrants who have flooded the Big Apple since 2022.

Gov. Kathy Hochul helped broker a deal with the Biden administration to use the facility in late August last year as the Big Apple scrambled to find spots to house the wave of asylum seekers.

The vast majority of asylum seekers crossed the US border with Mexico and were shipped north to “sanctuary cities” like New York. The huge influx of people has overburdened the city’s capacity to house them.

The Post reported in January that the former airfield had become a hotbed of unrest and violence since the site was converted into a migrant shelter. The shelter saw a domestic assault in December and has been the site of a string of assault arrests – and even a gun bust, according to police.

In January, migrants, including children had to be briefly evacuated from the site in the middle of the night as dangerous winds closed in on the city, raising concerns of toppled tents or fatal flooding.

Despite the local outrage, City Hall said the ad-hoc shelter in the Brooklyn park is needed to help accommodate new arrivals as more than 214,000 migrants have arrived in the Big Apple over the past two years.

“With over 210 emergency sites currently operating and hundreds of new arrivals continuing to arrive in New York City every week, we have been out of good options for a while now,” a spokesperson for City Hall said in a statement.

“The site at Floyd Bennett Field has been one tool in our very limited toolbox for sheltering hundreds of migrant families with children every night. We continue to advocate for additional support from the federal partners and ask our elected partners to join us.”