WASHINGTON — The immigration service is so desperate to house the flood of migrants pouring across the US border that it is considering converting an old Grumman manufacturing plant on Long Island to emergency sleep spaces.
During World War II, Grumman facilities in Bethpage, LI, rolled out planes with spirited names like the Avenger, the Wildcat, and the Hellcat.
Now, a part of the facility could house some of the 52,000 unaccompanied child immigrants who have crossed the southern border since last year, mostly from Central America.
The Health and Human Services Department, tasked with caring for the children, has been scouring spaces that include five facilities around New York state. Among them are an empty convent in affluent Clifton Park near Saratoga and a former Walmart in Brockport, 350 miles from New York City.
Long Island officials quickly criticized the Grumman plan.
“Unaccompanied children coming into our borders is a humanitarian crisis, but housing them in an industrial warehouse near a Superfund site is not a humanitarian solution,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-LI).
Israel called new HHS boss Sylvia Mathews Burwell to blast the proposed move, citing environmental factors. “We made it very clear to Burwell about the Superfund site that is right there,” said his communications director, Samantha Slater.
“The administration must look for solutions at the border and not transfer children across the United States,” fumed Rep. Peter King (R-LI), who joined with Israel on a letter raising concerns about the move.
During the Cold War, part of the site housed an aerospace facility and naval weapons plant, and was used for the “de-watering of sludge, including neutralized chromic acid waste,” from a wastewater treatment facility, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
It got contaminated with paint, coating materials, oily wastes, PCBs, sludge laced with chromium, and other nasty-sounding compounds. Treatment of volatile organic compounds in groundwater has been ongoing for a decade, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The feds also scoped out a former Holiday Inn near Niagara Falls, now called the Byblos Niagara Resort in Grand Island, as a possible site for relocation, before realizing it was an occupied and functioning hotel.