(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) After suffering from a relentless swarm of illegal immigrants and realizing the deluge has overrun homeless shelters, New York City officials proposed to shelter illegals in a federal jail that once held mobsters, terrorists and Wall Street hacks before it was shut down after Jeffrey Epstein’s dubious death at the facility.
The proposal that New York City Democrat Mayor Eric Adams pitched earlier this month to Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration came as New York struggles to handle the estimated 100,000 illegals who have arrived in the city since 2022 after they crossed the southern U.S. border and were transported to the sanctuary city.
Since the city is legally obligated to find shelter for criminals who illegally crossed the border of another country, Adams reacted by stuffing them into homeless shelters and, when they were filled, hotels, recreational centers, school gyms and the parking lot outside of a psychiatric center.
The letter that was written by a senior counsel for the city’s law department said that illegals could also be potentially housed in the defunct Metropolitan Correctional Center, which was closed in 2021.
Metropolitan Correctional Center, whose prisoners have included Mafia don John Gotti, associates of Osama bin Laden and the Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was shut down after it came under public scrutiny because of horrible prisoners’ conditions and security lapses that were exposed after Epstein died in his cell under highly questionable circumstances.
The jail was filthy, infested with bugs and rodent, and plagued by water and sewage leaks so bad they had led to structural issues, lawyers complained at the time.
Right now, at least one advocacy group strongly opposes moving illegals to the prison.
“Mayor Adams likes to say that all options are on the table when it comes to housing asylum seekers, but certain places should most definitely be off the table,” Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said.
“The Metropolitan Correctional Center was a notoriously decrepit jail, and is not a suitable place to support people trying to build a new life in a new country.”
Since the influx of illegals cost the city $12 billion, according to Adams, it caused Hochul and Adams to start fighting and blaming each other over the current problem that both the state and city face.
