Controversial Creedmoor migrant shelter to close

The Creedmoor migrant shelter in Eastern Queens is expected to close in the coming weeks, officials say. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach 

By Ryan Schwach

The massive migrant shelter on the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center campus in Eastern Queens will close in the coming weeks, state officials announced last week.

The shelter, which currently serves as the last of the city’s major outdoor tent shelters, has been controversial since its opening and was used to house over 1,000 asylum seekers at a time in a neighborhood that was never very welcoming to them. The migrants currently being housed at the site are expected to be moved in March, and the sprawling tent structures on the site are expected to be demolished in April.

While the shelter’s impending closure comes as the city shutters Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers like Creedmoor across the five boroughs, it wasn’t entirely clear on Friday how Creedmoor’s closure came to be. Both the governor and the mayor took credit for the move, as did a group of local elected officials in the area, including State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, Assemblymember Ed Braunstein and City Councilmember Linda Lee.

On Thursday, Governor Kathy Hochul’s office told Stavisky, Braunstein and Lee – and later confirmed to the Eagle – that the state did not offer the city a renewed lease for the state-owned site.

"The State of New York stepped in to support the city's effort to shelter tens of thousands of migrants by offering state-owned land to shelter these individuals,” a spokesperson for the governor said. “Governor Hochul believes it's entirely appropriate that the Creedmoor HERRC is one of the first shelters to close and did not offer the city a renewed lease at this site.”

However, a mayoral spokesperson on Friday told the Eagle that the city no longer needed the Creedmoor shelter, and that while they chose not to renew the lease with the state, they could have had it extended if they had asked.

In a press release sent on Friday afternoon, the mayor took credit for the closure of Creedmoor as a result of the city’s handling of the migrant crisis, and made no reference to the lease with the state.

"Because of the decisions we have made and the policies we have implemented, including opening up our tent based humanitarian relief centers and advocating for changes to national border policies, our administration has effectively moved us to the opposite side of the mountain we were forced to climb,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement. “The fact that within a span of year we will soon be closing 52 sites and shuttering the last of the tent-based facilities show both our continued progress and our continued commitment to effectively care for those who are still within our system and the communities who have supported them during their journeys."

Officials said that the migrants currently housed at Creedmoor will be transferred to other sites across the city.

Lee told the Eagle on Friday that she had been speaking with state officials about shutting down the site for months.

“I’ve been talking to them about the fact that we really need to shut this down once the numbers go down, once we start seeing the migrant census numbers go down,” Lee told the Eagle on Friday. “We were hoping that this would have been one of the first HERRCs that was shut down.”

The Creedmoor shelter opened in the summer of 2023 at the height of the migrant crisis in New York City, and made a generally quiet Eastern Queens community a temporary home for over 1,000 single migrant men.

Lee and Braunstein had hoped Creedmoor would be included in the city’s first round of shelter closures earlier this year and blasted the city when it wasn’t included on the list. Braunstein on Friday told the Eagle it was “about time” the shelter closed.

“We're relieved that it's finally happening,” Braunstein said.

In a joint statement, Lee, Braunstein and Stavisky applauded the action.

“We are grateful to Governor Hochul for listening to our concerns and taking action,” they said. “The closure of this site marks a crucial step in addressing the needs and well-being of our residents, and we look forward to seeing this transition take place beginning in March.”

The decision to not renew the lease with the city comes just as Adams was accused by a former federal prosecutor of offering to support President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement actions in New York City in exchange for the dismissal of the bribery and corruption charges brought against him in the fall.

On Friday morning, Adams appeared alongside Trump’s border czar Tom Homan on the conservative morning show “Fox & Friends” to show his support for allowing ICE to make criminal arrests in the sanctuary city.

Though Adams’ comments and apparent partnership with the Trump administration saw backlash from longtime critics and one-time allies, Eastern Queens officials were hesitant to criticize the mayor’s stances on immigration enforcement in the city.

Elected officials in Eastern Queens, including Assemblymember Ed Braunstein, State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky and Councilmember Linda Lee had qualms with the shelter even before it opened.  Eagle file photo by Ryan Schwach

“I'm just happy to hear that with Creedmoor, and locally, this is going to be taken care of for the community,” Lee said. “Obviously anything beyond that, we're going to have to just wait and see how it all unfolds.”

In a statement to the Eagle, Borough President Donovan Richards said the closing of Creedmoor is a step in the right direction, but acknowledged what he called an “anti-immigrant regime” in the White House.

"It's a relief that the surge of new arrivals into our city these last few years has lessened to the point of being able to wind down housing operations at the Creedmoor site, and I commend our city and government partners for ensuring that operation was a smooth one with little impacts to the surrounding neighborhood," he said. "But make no mistake that with a deeply anti-immigrant regime now in federal office, Queens will continue to do whatever it can to support our immigrant brothers and sisters and defend our historically marginalized communities from any and all threats. That's what being a New Yorker means at the end of the day."

Controversial since the beginning

The Creedmoor shelter had been a source of controversy before it ever opened its doors.

When it was announced in 2023 that the site would be used as a migrant shelter, Lee, Braunstein, Stavisky and other local officials vehemently opposed it.

They argued that the shelter’s location was not appropriate, claiming that its relative isolation would harm both the migrants housed there and the surrounding community due to a lack of resources, infrastructure and transportation options.

“There's nothing here,” Braunstein said at the time. “There's no services that the asylum seekers who are going to be staying here will have…and quite frankly, I don't think that they're going to even want to be here.”

The shelter’s opening also prompted louder protests from locals with a more anti-migrant sentiment, who made unfounded accusations that the migrant population would lead to a rise in crime.

One local civic leader called the shelter a “powder-keg.”

About a year and a half since migrants first moved in, elected officials claim the shelter put a strain on some local resources, including a senior center located nearby.

“It just added…a bit of a chaotic structure in the community,” Lee said. “I think at the end of the day, anytime you have an influx of 1,000 plus people there overnight, it definitely changes a lot, especially if there's no set infrastructure that's in place.”

“I think folks had gotten used to it, but it was just a lot to take on,” she added.

But over the life of the Creedmoor shelter, there was no recorded increase in crime attributable to the newcomers, officials said.

When the shelter first opened in August 2023, the Eagle spoke to migrants who had just moved in. Many had found the accommodations in the shelter to be pleasant enough, they had expressed concerns over the asylum process in the U.S. and in the city.

“The food, the bed is super good,” Yoelvis Chirinos, a 30-year-old Venezuelan migrant told the Eagle outside the shelter at the time.

But Chirinos and his friends, a Colombian migrant named Fausto David, said that it had been hard for them to find work in the city as they awaited asylum approval.

“It's complicated,” said Chirinos.

The shelter’s isolation from areas with more robust job opportunities was an issue for migrants, including 40-year-old Senegalese man Fallou Ndoye.

When the Eagle spoke to Ndoye on that hot August day in 2023, he was about to get on a crowded Q43 bus to take him to a cleaning job somewhere else in Queens.

Yoelvis Chirinos, 30, and Fausto David, 34, two of the first migrants to be housed at the Creedmoor migrant site in the summer of 2023. Eagle file photo by Ryan Schwach

The work was spotty, he said – he was called when he was needed. And when he was needed, he faced a difficult commute.

“Getting [work] is not guaranteed every day,” he told the Eagle through an iPhone translation app. “It's complicated for us, the conditions here.”

However, the struggles did not deter him.

“I want to live here because I left my family back there, I want to bring [them] one day,” he said, “For now, it's OK, you have to endure.”