Rogue migrants set up illegal camp outside Randall’s Island site: ‘Every day we come back, there’s more’

Migrants booted from Big Apple shelters have been setting up an illegal mini tent city outside Randall’s Island’s housing site — despite the Adams administration’s best efforts to thwart them. “For the past month or so, we will come here, and there’ll be one or two tents set up, and we’ll ask them to take them down,” a city Parks Department enforcement officer told The Post at the site on Sunday.

“But every day when we come back, there’s more.” Parks workers on Sunday morning broke down one shabby encampment that had been housing about 21 asylum seekers barred from the island’s 2,000 bed tent city erected in August after timing out on its 60 day residency limit. The rogue migrants had set up their own tarps and tents on a grassy strip just outside the tent city, even erecting tables to peddle coffee and hot chocolate to other asylum seekers legally living in the site’s massive sanctioned tents.

“We’ll move them out and correct the situation that’s been developing, but when I came back from vacation a few days ago, there were seven tents joined together by big tarps, and as you can see, more and more scooters,” the Parks officer said. Many of the migrants have begun working underground as food delivery messengers — making motorized scooters a common site wherever the asylum seekers are being sheltered.

“We’re telling them that they can’t set up tables here and sell coffee to the migrants inside, but they’re being told by security inside that as long as they go outside, on the other side of this fence, they are fine to do it,” the exasperated city worker said. “They tell us that they can no longer stay inside, they’ve run out of days, and they have nowhere to go, so that’s why they are staying here,” the officer said of the rogue migrants.

“We explain to them that they can’t just set up a tent in the park.” It wasn’t clear whether any of the migrants living in the illegal tents had tried to reapply for another space in a city shelter. More than 162,000 migrants from the US border have been processed in the Big Apple since the spring of 2022 — with about 70,000 still being housed and fed by the city..