NEW CITY- Rockland County Executive Ed Day has declared a State of Emergency in response to the City of New York planning on housing about 340 asylum seekers in Orangeburg. According to Day, NYC is planning to send the group of 340 men to stay for four months, followed by attempted integration into the county. Day informed NYC Mayor Eric Adams yesterday that Rockland would not allow this plan to stand and has enacted this State of Emergency in direct response.
“The City declared itself a Sanctuary City in December of 2016 committing itself to supporting undocumented individuals while this County has not for the simple fact that we are one tenth the population of New York City and incapable of receiving and sustaining the volume of undocumented migrants Mayor Eric Adams intends to send over,” said County Executive Ed Day. “This County already has a housing crisis due to the lack thereof and lack of affordable housing options. This crisis is so extreme that Rockland has been unprecedently deputized by the State of New York to take over Building and Fire Code enforcement in the Village of Spring Valley. Sending busloads of people to this County that does not have the infrastructure to care for them will only compound that issue tenfold while straining support systems that are already at a breaking point.”
The State of Emergency prohibits other municipalities from bringing and housing people in Rockland County. Further, it prohibits hotels from housing immigrants without a license. The State of Emergency is effective May 6, 2023, and will remain in effect for 30 days, at which time it may be extended.
“Our current system is not built to support large influxes of population seekers,” said Rockland County Department of Social Services Commissioner Joan Silvestri. “Social Services funding is also not applicable to undocumented individuals, so we have no financial support to help those without a legal status.”
“Congress and the President need to wake up and do what needs to be done by fixing our broken immigration system once and for all,” said Day. “This is not about being anti-immigration but as it stands the system is incentivizing illegal immigration which does nothing to support our infrastructure; rather it is just draining taxpayer resources from the families already here and struggling including homeless, disabled, seniors, low-income, and other vulnerable populations.”
