New York City considers housing 95,000 asylum seekers in tents in Central Park
The numbers bussed north to New York from the Mexican border have doubled since the start of last year, as Peter Smith reports
New York City is considering temporarily housing 95,000 asylum seekers in giant tents in the city's iconic Central Park.
Some of the migrants were said to have been bussed in from Conservative states along the southern US border in protest over President Joe Biden's immigration policies.
New York has declared a state of emergency in response to tens of thousands of asylum seekers arriving in the city.
On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan to house as many as 2,000 migrants on Randalls Island in the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
A migrant centre was set up on the island last year and then taken down weeks later after the number of people being sent to New York from southern border states diminished.
The city has already opened more than 190 emergency shelters, including car parks and former jails.
One of those shelters includes the Roosevelt Hotel, beside Grand Central Station, where two weeks ago hundreds of people waited on the street outside to be processed.
City officials announced a plan last month to house 1,000 migrants in the car park of a state psychiatric hospital in Queens. Last week, city officials began to send migrants to recreation centres at two parks in the borough of Brooklyn, McCarren and Sunset.
The city's mayor said the city is struggling to support the amount of people seeking shelter
Officials are also considering housing people in a retrofitted hangar at John F Kennedy Airport and temporary tiny homes, according to an internal memo seen by CNN earlier this year.
Other parks are also being considered, including Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.
A car park beside a baseball stadium, a race track, and beaches Coney Island and Orchard Beach were also listed on the memo as potential options.
Mayor Adams' spokesperson Fabien Levy would not comment on the memo when approached by CNN in May, but said some migrants had been housed in "old NYPD training gyms" after running out of shelter space.
New York City has a unique court-ordered obligation to provide emergency shelter to anyone who asks for it, but officials have said in recent weeks that the influx of migrants seeking asylum in the US had made it increasingly difficult to fulfill that duty.
Mayor Adams said the city is struggling to support the influx of migrants and has called for the federal government to provide assistance.
"We're at capacity. We have been providing those food, shelter, clothing, food, educating children, making sure they get the level of dignity they deserve. But we cannot kid ourselves," he told US broadcaster ABC News.
A portion of the migrants sent to New York from southern states arrived from Texas as part of Governor Greg Abbott's plan to send asylum seekers to so-called sanctuary cities.
Mayor Adams criticised this move, telling ABC News: "[It's] dehumanising to treat fellow human beings in this magnitude as political stunts, it's a wrong thing to do. And I say that with a clear understanding, no city should be going through this."
Neighbouring state Massachusetts also declared a state of emergency amid an influx of migrants seeking shelter.
Many of the migrants arriving in Massachusetts arrived by plane from other states.
There are nearly 5,600 families or more than 20,000 people - many of whom are migrants - currently living in Massachusetts state shelters, including infants, young children and pregnant women.
That is up from around 3,100 families a year ago, about an 80% increase, the state's Governor Maura Healey said.
Want a quick and expert briefing on the biggest news stories? Listen to our latest podcasts to find out What You Need To Know.