Internal emails show Biden administration officials allowed a massive migrant encampment at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to operate for more than a year despite explicit fire safety warnings from New York City firefighters, while telling superiors the site was "clean and well-run."
FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Dean Koester warned a National Park Service official in a July 15, 2024, email that the nearest working fire hydrant sat 2,500 to 3,000 feet from the shelter, roughly half a mile away. In the event of a fire, Koester estimated it would take about 30 minutes just to establish a water source. The encampment had no sprinklers. Sleeping arrangements inside its five large tents were "maze-like," a layout that would have made evacuation during an emergency difficult at best. The New York Post obtained the emails through documents secured by the Center to Advance Security in America, a public-oversight organization.
Koester's email to NPS official Minka Sendich did not hold back:
"[W]e have always maintained that this situation is not optimal. In fact, we reported that the nearest operable fire hydrant is 2500, 3000 feet [from the shelter], and we estimate it will take about 30 minutes to establish a positive water source [in the event of a fire]. The lack of fire protection and dearth of nearby hydrants place shelter residents in a perilous situation."
The hydrants at Floyd Bennett Field had not received routine maintenance since 1972, when the former airfield was folded into the Gateway National Recreation Area. Roughly 2,000 migrants, many of them families with children, lived at the site from November 2023 until then-Mayor Eric Adams shut it down in January 2025. For more than fourteen months, the encampment operated under conditions that the city's own fire department described as dangerous, and no evidence in the available records shows the federal government acted on those warnings.
The gap between what federal officials told their superiors and what city officials were reporting on the ground is stark. On January 9, 2024, NPS Gateway National Recreation Area Superintendent Jen Nersesian sent an email offering a rosier picture of the encampment:
"I toured the encampment yesterday and it appeared clean and well-run, albeit in cramped, bare-bones living conditions."
That email arrived one day after Democratic Assemblywoman Jaime Williams and other Brooklyn and Queens officials sent letters sounding alarms about deteriorating conditions. Williams wrote directly to Mayor Adams on January 8, 2024, relaying complaints from constituents:
"My office has received numerous complaints from residents who are upset about excessive solicitation from migrants who are begging for money, food, and clothing."
Williams added that she had personally witnessed the panhandling and contacted site administrators, only to be told that "all of the needs of the migrants are being met inside the facility." A separate joint letter from Williams and other local officials the same day warned the park was turning into what they described as a "dumping ground" that was "deteriorating faster than one could ever have imagined."
Two days after those letters, students at nearby James Madison High School were removed from their classrooms when migrants took shelter in the school's gymnasium during a night of heavy wind and rain. The Associated Press reported that the school received threatening phone calls and a bomb threat after serving as emergency shelter, and students were forced to switch to remote learning. The facility sat in a flood zone, miles from schools and services, with cots instead of mattresses and outdoor trailer bathrooms.
The encampment did not materialize by accident. A House Republican-led committee found that the site was established following coordination in August 2023 between Mayor Adams, Biden White House senior adviser Tom Perez, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Perez, who directed the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, personally negotiated with city and state officials on where to lease land for migrant housing. A Homeland Security internal email dated August 21, 2023, stated that questions about Floyd Bennett Field should be directed to the White House, contradicting the administration's public claims that executive agencies bore primary responsibility.
DHS official Rebecca Sternhell testified to congressional investigators that the White House was involved in determining which sites could be used for migrant encampments in New York. The committee escalated its probe by requesting hundreds of documents from President Biden, Vice President Harris, and six senior White House officials. Committee Republicans wrote that "despite the Biden-Harris White House's clear involvement, responses received by the Committee from the White House entirely eschew responsibility and attempt to redirect responsibility for the administration's actions to executive agencies."
Governor Hochul's own words undercut the administration's deflection. She told the committee: "For months, I've been in close communication with the White House about the asylum seeker crisis." Her office did not respond to the Post's requests for comment on the newly surfaced emails. Neither did the National Park Service.
The committee's investigation also examined how the encampment was approved in the first place. Fox News reported that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sent letters to Hochul and Adams pressuring them to accept a lease for Floyd Bennett Field. A senior Department of the Interior official told congressional investigators they "did what DHS asked us to do" when moving forward with the plan. The White House Council on Environmental Quality appears to have allowed the Interior Department to bypass the normal environmental review process required under federal law, a concession, as House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman noted, "rarely given to American citizens."
Westerman warned that the precedent could open national parks across the country to similar encampments. "President Biden's failing border policies are coming to a park near you," he said. Committee members flagged potential violations of both the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Park Service Organic Act, which governs how park lands may be used.
Williams, the Democratic assemblywoman who filed suit against the city over conditions at the site, continued to document problems well beyond her January 2024 letters. The Washington Examiner reported that she filmed and shared footage of at least five unregistered, unplated vehicles used by migrants being towed from outside the tent shelter. Physical tensions arose between migrants and towing officials, prompting calls for police backup.
Williams did not hide her frustration at the contradiction:
"So, free shelter, free clothing, free food, and you drive. And I have homeowners struggling to pay their mortgage, tenants struggling to pay their rents."
She added: "Where did they get the money [to buy vehicles]? This is bigger than all of us. It is bizarre." Williams did not respond to the Post's requests for comment on the newly obtained emails.
James Fitzpatrick of the Center to Advance Security in America, the organization that obtained the documents, connected the Floyd Bennett Field fiasco to a broader policy failure:
"Biden open border policies wreaked havoc on working-class families across the country, particularly in cities with large minority populations. Through aggressive public oversight, CASA obtained documents showing that Biden National Park Service officials kept thousands of illegal aliens crammed into Floyd Bennett Field despite knowing it was unsafe and preventing law-abiding New Yorkers from using the facility as it was intended."
The timeline tells its own story. Biden administration officials coordinated the encampment's creation in August 2023. By January 2024, local elected officials, including Democrats, were warning that the site was deteriorating and that migrants were panhandling in surrounding neighborhoods. The NPS superintendent toured the camp and told her superiors it looked fine. Two days later, schoolchildren lost their classrooms to storm-displaced migrants. Six months after that, the FDNY put in writing that the site lacked basic fire protection and that residents faced a "perilous situation." The encampment stayed open for another six months.
No evidence in the available records shows the federal government took corrective action on the fire safety deficiencies after Koester's July 2024 email. No one from the NPS, the Biden White House, or the governor's office has publicly explained why the warnings went unheeded. Over 100,000 migrants arrived in New York City beginning in spring 2022, and the city's resources buckled under the weight, but Floyd Bennett Field was not a solution born of necessity. It was a site chosen through backroom coordination, approved by bypassing environmental law, and maintained in defiance of the city's own fire department.
When the people in charge know a building has no sprinklers, no working hydrants, and maze-like sleeping quarters, and they keep 2,000 people living there anyway, that is not governance. That is negligence dressed up in talking points.
