Portland, Maine asks residents for DONATIONS to house migrants in local gym
Maine is now bearing the brunt of the migration crisis as the state’s largest city, Portland, is now asking its citizens to donate to help mitigate the wave coming to the northern US state.
The Portland Exposition Building’s basketball arena has reopened as a makeshift shelter with beds along the floor to house hundreds of asylum seekers. It is the second time in recent years that the center has been used for these purposes.
City spokesperson Jessica Grodin told the Portland Press that the cost of running the Expo Center could exceed $100,000, which is why they are now seeking donations.
After operating as a shelter in 2019, the Expo Center reopened Monday and will house 300 people each night by providing a bed and three meals a day, as well as vaccinations and health screenings.
The city plans to keep the arena open through August.
The Portland Expo Center reopened Monday as a makeshift shelter for asylum seekers after operating as a center for two months in 2019. The city of Portland, Maine is asking residents for donations to help fund housing and supplies for the migrants
The basketball arena in the center is equipped to allow 300 migrants to sleep on cots
Some residents have expressed dissatisfaction with the expo center being used as a migrant shelter, while the city of Portland continues to experience an increasing problem of homelessness among its own citizens.
And overall, the largest city in Maine, with a population of just 68,313, is reaching its maximum migrant housing capacity.
A new separate emergency shelter in Portland reached its maximum capacity of 208 people on opening night last month, according to Portland’s Director of Health and Human Service Kristen Dow.
Since early 2023, more than 1,000 migrants have traveled to Portland, Maine – mostly from the African countries of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The city has provided space and supplies for approximately 1,200 asylum seekers each night through shelters and hotels.
Running the basketball arenas as a shelter for two months in 2019 cost Portland about $400,000 — and according to the Portland Press, the city raised nearly $1 million in private donations to support the 400 asylum seekers who arrived that summer.
Portland activist Richard Ward told Fox & Friends on Wednesday that the city’s priorities are upside down, saying they are allowing migrants to be housed at the Expo Center before taking care of their own homeless citizens.
“Last year they told the people who were Mainers, Americans who were homeless — they gave them tents and sleeping bags and they kind of did the same thing,” Ward said in an interview Wednesday morning.
More than 1,000 migrants have traveled to Portland, Maine since early 2023, mostly from the African countries of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Migrants walk with their belongings to the Portland Expo Center on Monday, April 10
He added, “The Expo Center was opened to asylum seekers and then Americans who were homeless were given tents and sleeping bags.”
Ward agreed that the city was “essentially” telling Americans to fend for themselves while placing migrants in shelters with access to personal supplies.
“I think we should take care of the Americans first,” Ward said. ‘It’s not that the asylum seekers are bad people. Some of them are great people. But we have Americans here sleeping under bridges, people sleeping in tents. There’s just no shelter for them.’
“There isn’t enough housing here for people to even live here, a thousand people is just a huge burden on a city…if there is simply no housing available at all,” he concluded.
While the crisis on the southern border is exacerbated by weak immigration policies, states in the northern US have also seen a surge across the border from Canada, which is largely unmanned.
While numbers on the northern border are much smaller than those in the south, it remains a weakness as efforts focus on dealing with the thousands of migrants crossing the southern border every day.
Customs and Border Protection found 154,998 migrants at the southern border in February – figures for March have not yet been released. The most recent, while still high compared to previous years, is a sharp drop from December’s record number of crossings in one month of 251,995.