The city suddenly shut down a Bushwick migrant shelter over the weekend, leaving asylum seekers to find their own way to a new emergency center, according to a report from Bushwick Daily.
The shelter, at 359 Stockton St., housed about 270 people, city officials told the news outlet.
“None of us from the community or mutual aid groups knew about this. We learned about the shelter potentially closing just two days ago,” Mariel Acosta, a volunteer at Bushwick City Farm, a community garden that sits across the street, told Bushwick Daily.
Since opening last year, the building, once earmarked to be a Blink Gym, was rented out by the city and filled with cots. The shelter was the subject of several media reports over the past year that talked about the terrible living conditions there.
“Many migrants were not previously notified, and it was a surprise when they were verbally told they had to move today and the thing they were given were print outs of Google map directions in English, which they can’t read, to the shelters they were being relocated to,” Acosta told the news outlet.
Some of the asylum seekers who had been kicked out of the shelter after the new 30-day limit rule was implemented had been sleeping in the farm, the report said.
