By Jack Morphet, Georgett Roberts and Jesse O’Neill – The New York Post
A migrant at the newly opened shelter in Brooklyn’s popular McCarren Park raved to The Post on Tuesday life is good — with three hot meals a day, spacious clean living quarters and use of the leafy refuge’s pool.
“They treat us very well,” said Miguel Mujica, a 39-year-old dad of two from Venezuela. “There’s nothing they stop us from doing.”
Mujica has been staying at the McCarren Play Center in trendy Williamsburg since Saturday, a day after the city set up 100 military cots for asylum-seekers there to help take pressure off city shelters that are bursting at the seams.
While his wife, 5-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son live out of a family migrant hotel in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he said he was kicked out of for an undisclosed reason, the asylum-seeker has been enjoying taxpayer-funded amenities such as specially prepared Venezuelan cuisine and free WiFi and international calls at the center.
Oh, and the park’s massive pool next door.
“I brought my wife and children to the pool on Sunday, and there was no problem,” said Mujica, one of 56 migrants currently staying at the airy makeshift shelter, all of them men from Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominican Republic, according to a worker.
“We all swam between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m.,” Mujica said, adding, “It’s a very nice pool.”
The leafy park, which divides the lively hip neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is proving the perfect respite for Mujica, who left his $40 a month job as a forensic pathology assistant in Venezuela and is now working under the table doing demolition and construction in Brooklyn.
He said he earns between $700 and 800 a week, or what would amount to a roughly $40,000 annual cash salary — untaxed.
“There’s no curfew at the shelter,” Mujica noted — while ticking off the culinary delights it offers.
“They give us good hot food, which is freshly made; the food is very good,” he said.
“It’s mostly Venezuelan food. Pasta and rice with chicken, beef or goat,” Mujica said. “Lunch is mostly chicken and rice. Yesterday, I had a chicken cutlet. You can get water and juice whenever you want, no limit.”
He added there is also round-the-clock access to snacks and fruit, although no hot coffee.
“It’s good here,” he said.
“All the bathrooms and showers are in good condition. It’s not crowded. There is storage to keep our belongings safe and lots of cameras everywhere.”
Mujica has been in the US since September, when he and his family crossed the southern border into Texas. He said they came to New York City because “this is where the shelters are.”
He had stayed at migrant hotels in Jamaica and Downtown Brooklyn, most recently being relocated after his Rockaway Boulevard hotel was requisitioned for families, Mujica said.
He said he is saving to rent a place for him and his family while they enjoy free food and housing.
“I don’t know how I will get out of the shelters, I really don’t know, but I want to rent somewhere of my own for me and my family,” he said.
“But everything is so expensive, and I cannot afford the $2,500 rent,” he said, mentioning a conservative figure given that two-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn average about $3,800.
Mujica applied for his working permit a month ago but hasn’t been granted it yet. The process typically takes about six months.
“I can’t work legally yet. I am in the process of getting a working permit. I applied one month ago. It’s faster for some people and slower for others,” he lamented.
Mujica said he has applied for asylum and already had one interview with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City with an immigration court hearing scheduled for 2025.
“I understand the process is very slow because we are not hundreds who crossed the border, we are thousands, and that takes work to process,” Mujica said.
“I came to America to make a better life for my family and earn a decent wage,” he said, adding he was “happy” that he did.
As Mujica enjoyed his new Williamsburg digs, city officials were racing to build more temporary shelters on Randall’s Island soccer fields Tuesday.
Parks workers dismantled the goal posts on several fields and took them away in trucks as they brought in cots and began erecting tents in the morning’s light rain.
A supervisor was overheard saying they hoped to get the structures up by the end of Wednesday and have them covered by Thursday.
After that, workers would have to set up electricity and bathroom facilities before they could start moving people in.
The construction comes about nine months after a temporary migrant shelter costing at least $650,000 on Randall’s Island was closed by the city because of lack of use.
“It’s not fair,” said Mamadou Bah, 18, a high-school senior who arrived at the site for soccer practice Tuesday, only to see the field starting to be transformed into the shelter.
“[Mayor Adams] probably thinks he knows what he’s doing. He’s trying to give chances to more refugees. But he’s taking away chances from the soccer players,” the teen said.
Michael Leon, a local soccer coach, added, “You could easily go to any of the fields on the Upper East Side, and they’re always packed.
“There is barely any space to play, so a lot of people come to Randall’s Island because it’s away from the city, it’s a little bit harder to access, so if you really want to play sports, you come here, and if this isn’t available, what do you really have? Just picnic areas, I guess, in in Central Park. That’s it,” he said.
“Outdoor space in a city like New York City is so valuable. There has got to be another solution. They can’t be to the detriment of a child’s mental health in terms of just the freedom to be outside. You can’t really take that away from them.”
Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that the city returned to build shelters on the island because the migrant crisis had grown exponentially.
“When we built Randall’s Island, last year, we had 15,000 migrants/ asylum seekers. We’re now at 97,000,” Adams said.
The mayor said the new shelter site on the East River island was conceived by city Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol.
“We have to have him do an analysis on what was the best place for us to do it. How large are we going to do it. And this is what he decided. I got a great team. I trust my team. They got us this far,” Adams said.
“That’s the space where we’re going to use because I trust him, and I trust the team that they put together.”
-Additional reporting by Desheania Andrews