Brooklyn residents outraged over migrant shelter located feet away from elementary school: 'None of us knew'
As New York City students prepare to return to class, residents in Brooklyn are infuriated by city officials' decision to open an all-male migrant shelter just feet away from an elementary school.
"I try not to worry about this too much," Brooklyn mom Irina Edelstein said on "Fox & Friends First" Thursday. "There's enough running around and getting ready for school as it is. And, trying not to let anxiety get to me."
The 400-bed migrant shelter opened in Gowanus in April, roughly 1,000 feet from City Life Academy, a private Christian K-12 school.
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School leaders and residents in the Brooklyn neighborhood were left outraged over an alleged lack of transparency from city leaders, as well as the proximity of the shelter to the school.
"No one told us from the city side about the shelter's coming up," the mother of three said. "We found out from local residents when they stopped us at the pickup and they said, did you guys know right around the corner here, the shelter's opening up for 400 men. None of us knew. Even the principal didn't know."
City officials did not follow environmental testing protocols and violated other building codes to accelerate the shelter's opening, according to an investigation by the International Women's Forum (IWF).
"Our school hosted the meeting where council members said that ‘we reached out to all the schools, we spoke to all the principals,’ which is absolutely not true," Edelstein said.
The NYC Mayor's Office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
While Brooklyn is thousands of miles from the southern border, the borough, like the rest of New York City, is facing an overwhelming surge of migrants. According to city officials, over 200,000 migrants have descended on New York City since the spring of 2022.
The migrant surge has prompted the city to cut budgets and allocate more spending for sanctuary city services. New York City is soon projected to have spent more than $5 billion over the last two years on the migrant crisis – an estimate that is expected to double by 2025.
Along with expenses, the migrant surge has also led to a rise in crime, including high-profile crimes like the attack on NYPD officers earlier this year and a migrant accused of raping a woman at knifepoint earlier this month.
Edelstein recounted one time when an alleged migrant was spotted trying to break into her car while she was picking up her children from school.
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"I was walking back to my car and one parent stopped me and she said, there are two guys [that] just walked by your car and tried to open it while you were inside the school. And she said that looked like the guys who were residents of the nearby shelter," she told host Todd Piro.