Adams: We Can’t Enforce Randall’s Island Migrant Curfew Yet, Need to ‘Know How to Close the Place’

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox 5 New York’s “Good Day New York,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said that the city isn’t implementing a curfew on the Randall’s Island migrant shelter for another two weeks because “you want to train the guards, you want to know how to close the place.”

Co-host Rosanna Scotto asked, “Randall’s Island, the shelter there is a problem, you’ve acknowledged that. You’re going to put a curfew in place March 20. Why wait until then? Why aren’t all the shelters having curfews, and — but why wait until March 20?”

Adams responded, “Because you want to do proper notifications, you want to do proper setup, the procedures in place, you want to train the guards, you want to know how to close the place. Once it start — once you put the curfew in place, you don’t want to announce something, then, overnight, you cannot execute the plan properly. I went to Randall’s Island and I saw the overwhelming number of migrants and asylum seekers who are there. They want to take their next step on their journey. Let’s let them work. Let’s do a decompression strategy throughout the entire country. There are things that we are doing here in the city like no other city has done, and New Yorkers should be commended for doing that. But this is not sustainable and [it’s] unfair to New Yorkers. I’m not going to just define the problem, I have to fix the problem, because that’s what I was elected to do. And no matter how hard this job may seem to people, every day I wake up and I’m committed to it, just as I was committed as a police officer to protect and serve the city.”

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