The owner of the historic Oheka Castle in Huntington, Long Island, has called on New York City Mayor Eric Adams to finally send the city’s overwhelming number of migrants to his struggling hotel in upstate New York. He has yet to hear back.
Hotel owner Gary Melius told the New York Post that he contacted the Adams’ administration weeks ago offering up his 115-room Quality Inn in Massena near the Canadian border, but he has so far been met with crickets even though the city’s influx of migrants have been forced to sleep on cardboard on the sidewalk outside Manhattan’s migrant processing center.
“I keep trying. We could take 180 people. I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Melius. “My place is ideal.”
According to Melius, the Quality Inn typically has an occupancy rate of just 40 percent on an average day.
“The hotel is in the center of town,” he said. “You don’t need any transit once you get here. I have a kitchen. I have a restaurant. I have a catering hall.”
“This would be very good for me, it would be very good for the city and very good for the migrants. It’s a win-win,” he added.
Hotel owners who house migrants typically get paid an agreed-upon rate from the government; rooms at the Quality Inn run for about $120 a night. The famous Oheka Castle on Long Island, which Melius will not be offering up, runs between $400 to $1,200 a night.
Melius does not consider himself an open-borders person.
“We’re leaving our door open,” he said. “People should come in the right way.”
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A city hall rep on Sunday told the Post that the Adams administration has been made aware of Melius’s proposal and will be reviewing it.
“As we’ve said multiple times, with more than 95,000 asylum seekers coming through our intake system since last spring, all options remain on the table. We continue to call on our state and federal partners to provide the necessary support,” the spokesperson said.
The migrant crisis in New York City has reached a point of such unprecedented heights that New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan announced recently that illegal immigration has been ushering a new wave of tuberculosis and polio to the city.
In a citywide letter to physicians and healthcare administrators last month, Vasan said that the more than 50,000 illegal immigrants that have come to New York City since last year caused a spike in contagious diseases like tuberculosis and polio.
“Many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB,” he wrote, as reported by the New York Post.
Tuberculosis can be cured with antibiotics and generally takes six to nine months to fully recover. According to the Post, the city’s TB rate is now more than double the national rate with 6.1 cases per 100,000.
“Close to nine out of 10 (88%) of these TB cases are people born outside the United States,” it noted. “Every neighborhood in the city has had at least one case.”
“Commissioner Vasan’s letter called on New York to pull out all the stops providing migrants health care, food and legal services,” the Post continued. “Immigrants who lawfully apply for a visa must undergo health screenings and show they are vaccinated, and refugees are screened for TB before entering the United States.”
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. A high-quality, ad-free stream can also be purchased on Google Play or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.