A Look Inside the World's Largest Refugee Camp

Bilal Jacks was hanging out on a Brownsville sidewalk last month when he heard a man shouting down the block.

“Excuse me for a second,” Jacks said. He headed to the source of the commotion: An argument between a man and a woman had broken out on the sidewalk in front of a deli on Mother Gaston Boulevard.

He quickly worked to calm the situation down, and within a minute or so, the shouting stopped.

Jacks is a lifelong Brownsville resident who works with a nonprofit called We Build The Block, and is also a participant in the Brownsville Safety Alliance. At least twice a year since 2020, nonprofit workers from the neighborhood spend a week calming disputes and responding to most 311 and 911 calls on certain blocks in the neighborhood.

This year's April installment took on a special significance, because organizers' approach is similar to what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vowed do across the city: have trained professionals respond to a range of 311 and 911 calls, and limit police intervention to the most serious cases.

“ This is what it looks like, having people actually willing to put skin in the game, give their time, give their energy to say, ‘I'm committed to keeping my community safe, and here's what I have to contribute to that vision,’” Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Renita Francois told Gothamist at the event in April.

Guardians of safety

Brownsville is the neighborhood with the largest concentration of public housing in the country, according to the city. The poverty rate in the neighborhood was 32% in 2023, according to a study by NYU.

The number of homicides in the precinct that covers the neighborhood has fluctuated and is currently down 80% so far this year, compared to the same period two years ago. In 2024, the precinct recorded 21 homicides for the year, a much higher rate than other precincts in Brooklyn. In 2025, the precinct had seven.

There has never been a shooting during a Brownsville Safety Alliance, organizers said.

Organizers said sending civilians to respond to some public safety calls is just one part of how the Brownsville Safety Alliance keeps the neighborhood safe.

Over the course of the week, various organizations set up foldable tables on Mother Gaston Boulevard and offer services to residents that range from fentanyl testing to help with setting up a bank account or signing up for an identification card.

“ IDs, a very essential thing,” said Dushoun Almond, an organizer known as “Bigga” who works with the nonprofit Brownsville In Violence Out. “The simplest thing is very serious.”

Dana Rachlin, a co-founder of We Build The Block, said safety trainings offered to residents and nonprofit workers throughout the week can have a long-lasting impact on public safety in Brownsville.

The trainings include things like how to administer naloxone and how to test drugs for fentanyl — to stop the bleed training and even how to safely handle a gun.

Throughout the week, firearm instructor Bryon Ruck used a barbershop on the block as a classroom. He set up a foldable white table toward the back of the shop and instructed nonprofit workers and residents on how to safely handle and unload handguns using replica pistols.

The goal of the firearm training is safety, Rachlin said.

“We’ve had a ton of accidental discharges resulting in homicides. How can we not be responding urgently?” she said. “All of these things are harm reduction and helping community members be the guardians of their own safety and each other's safety.”

A template

Safety experts who spoke to Gothamist said they are encouraged by the event, but said scaling it up across the city could face red tape issues common in government.

“ It's an effective way of organizing neighborhoods and raising consciousness about public safety so that people start thinking about public safety as a community responsibility,” said Jeffrey Butts, a John Jay College professor who has studied the effect nonprofit groups have on public safety.

But, he added, it would be an enormous task to create sustainable infrastructure to expand an event like this across the city and have it throughout the year.

Liz Glazer, a public safety expert who previously worked in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, said expanding the model could be a heavy lift – but also said renewed focus on the approach presents an opportunity.

“I think that is the major problem to be solved: ‘Do you have the organizational capacity in a neighborhood?’” Glazer said. “That's the challenge, but that also seems to me to be the opportunity because every neighborhood should have those kinds of organizations.”

Rachlin said organizers are hopeful that the policies that guide the event each year — like sharing 911 and 311 calls with civilian responders in real time — can be applied throughout city government.

“What we’re looking to scale are the policies and procedures of how we do this,” Rachlin said. “So that groups everywhere can be doing this because they already kind of are.”

An over-decade-old butcher shop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, had to let two workers go, casualties of a business drop-off the workers tie to neighborhood fears over immigration enforcement.

The manager of a nearby Ecuadorian restaurant, citing the same fears, reports business losses as well.

Vats of unsold chicken soup are now discarded at day’s end. The owner of a cellphone repair shop blocks away, serving much the same client base, had to dip into savings to make the rent, according to manager Saeed Shanto.

“ Everybody's scared, you know?” Shanto said in an otherwise empty shop.

In the heart of Sunset Park's Fifth Avenue business district, where Spanish is the norm at mom-and-pop shops and chain stores alike, proprietors are reporting similar business hardship, with many attributing their declines to fears of immigration enforcement.

New surveys are putting a finer point on the downturn. A fall survey by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, unveiled during a City Council hearing last week, identified Sunset Park as the Brooklyn neighborhood with the largest percentage of surveyed merchants in the borough reporting losses tied to immigration enforcement.

Nearly 80% of the Sunset Park businesses surveyed by the chamber reported being impacted by immigration enforcement, tops among six key Brooklyn neighborhoods. Across the borough, nearly 30% of 131 surveyed businesses reported being hurt by immigration enforcement.

More than half of Sunset Park’s residents are immigrants, mostly from China and Mexico, according to city planning data. The same findings are showing up in Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, two of the city’s most immigrant-rich neighborhoods, where more than 3 in 5 residents are immigrants.

According to a November survey of the two neighborhoods by the Queens Economic Development Corporation, also shared with the City Council, nearly 80% of the 66 businesses surveyed reported a decrease in sales and foot traffic, with fears of immigration enforcement cited as the cause.

Nearly 40% of the businesses described the impact as a “major decrease.” Of the businesses that reported a loss in revenue, 84% said they lost more than $1,000, and 7% said they lost more than $10,000.

Additionally, 22% of the businesses reported that their own employees had missed work or expressed fear of coming into work because of ICE activity. Nearly 20% changed hours, cancelled events, or otherwise altered their operations due to ICE activity or fear of it, and another 11% were considering doing so.

Arlette Cepeda, the interim executive director of La Colmena in Staten Island, a nonprofit serving local immigrants, reported a similar story in the immigrant neighborhoods of her borough.

“ Across our community, we are seeing a growing level of fear,” Cepeda said. “ This fear is not abstract. It has real economic consequences.

Small businesses in our neighborhoods are experiencing a decline in customers.  These are businesses that often operate in thin margins, and even a small drop in revenue can be devastating.”

The findings arise as civil rights and immigration advocacy groups are suing the Trump administration over what they allege is racial profiling of Latino immigrants across the state.

The Trump administration has denied the charges. And in recent months in New York City, a wave of immigrants, largely with no criminal history, have been swept up in what ICE has called "collateral" arrests. Such arrests, on the rise nationwide, are of individuals who are not the original target of an ICE operation.

'We try to survive'

Sightings of federal immigration officers have become part of the neighborhood talk-of-the-town in Sunset Park, prompting fears even among immigrants with legal status. Official ICE data available doesn’t provide information on the number of ICE arrests in a given neighborhood.

But on social media, posts have proliferated in recent months alleging ICE sightings in the neighborhood, along with online fundraisers benefitting affected residents.

In years past, worker Juan Ramirez said there would always be a line at the New Public Meat Market on Fifth Avenue. But now, the shops often remain empty. The owner had to let go of two workers, Ramirez said.

Sales began to decline during the pandemic, but took a nosedive in the past year, Ramirez said, falling 30% from 2024 to 2025. Four other local businesses interviewed by Gothamist reported similar declines.

“ Practically everyone has cut hours, days,” Ramirez said.

At the cellphone repair shop a block away, manager Saeed Shanto said he’d sell $1,500 to $1,700 in merchandise and services each day in 2024. Now, most days, he says he sells $400 to $500. He said he had to lay off the store’s only other employee due to the decline.

The owner has another cellphone repair store on Fourth Avenue, where Shanto said he’s had to pull money from savings to pay the rent.

Shanto suspects that fears of ICE are keeping customers away, as he hears his mostly Latino customers gossip about fears of ICE and sightings in the neighborhood.

By mid-afternoon on a recent Thursday, the Ecuadorian restaurant La Carreta – meaning “the cart” in English — had only received eight customers. In years past, it usually served 20 customers by that time of day. Overall, said manager Benito Ortega, the business has lost 30% in sales this year compared to the previous year.

Ortega suspects a range of issues: fears of ICE, but also rising costs from tariffs and the Iran war. A large box of tomatoes that used to cost $28 in years past is now $80, he said. That, among other rising costs, has prompted the restaurant to raise prices.

At the end of the day, they often throw away vats of salad and chicken and beef soup.

“ We try to survive,” Benito Ortega, the manager of La Carreta, said in Spanish. “Now we’re just surviving, nothing more.”

When police officers decided to take Rhamell Burke to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after they allegedly found him wielding a stick and acting erratically outside the 17th Precinct stationhouse, they were making a call NYPD officers make hundreds of times a month, city data shows.

Police officers initiate nearly 600 such involuntary hospital trips per month, on average, according to a public dashboard maintained by the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.

But the city doesn’t publicly disclose data on what happens next.

How city hospitals determine whether to admit someone for psychiatric care or discharge them from the ER is receiving fresh scrutiny, after police said Burke fatally pushed a 76-year-old man down the stairs of a Chelsea subway station just a few hours after he was discharged from Bellevue’s psychiatric emergency room.

Burke has been charged with murder in the death of retired teacher Ross Falzone, in a case that is shining new attention on the city’s hospital psych protocols.

On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called on the state Department of Health to investigate Bellevue’s handling of Burke and similar cases. State health officials quickly said they would go a step further and investigate the psychiatric evaluation and discharge practices at all city-run hospitals.

Christopher Miller, a spokesperson for NYC Health and Hospitals, said he expected the probe would find that Bellevue’s care was appropriate. “NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue is justly nationally recognized for its services for complex patients and all New Yorkers without exception,” Miller said.

The hospital system did not respond to a request for comment on Burke’s particular case.

In nearly half of the cases in which a clinician ordered someone to be involuntarily taken to a city-run hospital for a psychiatric evaluation in 2025, the person was admitted, according to city data.

But the city doesn’t publish data on outcomes for involuntary hospital trips initiated by the police, which make up the vast majority of these transports. The city is starting to collect more data on the outcomes of these trips to better inform its policies, but isn’t making that information public, City Hall said Monday.

Bellevue is the hospital where most people are taken when they’re brought to the hospital against their will, city data shows.

Under state law, a physician can hold someone in the hospital for up to 72 hours if they appear to pose a danger to themselves or others and for up to 60 days with the corroboration of a second physician, though such psychiatric holds can be challenged in court, said Jennifer Parish,  the director of criminal justice advocacy at the Urban Justice Center’s Mental Health Project.

State lawmakers amended the law last year to clarify that a patient can also be held involuntarily if they are unable to meet their basic needs because of their mental illness.

When deciding whether to hold someone in the hospital, physicians are likely to listen for whether a person is explicitly threatening to hurt themselves or someone else, said Philip Yanos, a professor of psychology at John Jay College.

“They ask these questions in a way that allows the person an opportunity to talk about what their ideas and plans are,” without being too transparent, Yanos said.

He said clinicians might also look for signs of disorganized thinking that could relate to a person’s ability to care for themselves.

“You might be so confused that you're not eating or you're likely to walk into traffic and get hit by a car or something like that,” Yanos said.

Yanos works with an assertive community treatment team that helps people with serious mental illnesses. He said when a client ends up at the hospital, his team often gets a call asking if their behavior is out of the ordinary or cause for concern.

It’s unclear whether Burke was connected with other mental health care services in the community.

But Yanos emphasized that psychiatric professionals are not oracles. “Professionals don't have the ability to predict future behavior with a lot of accuracy,” Yanos said.

Still, he said, collecting information from other treatment providers could help. Parish added that information from family,  medical records or police could also aid in emergency room physicians’ evaluations.

It’s unclear how much information the police shared with Bellevue staff when dropping Burke off.

Recent run-ins with the police

Court records and criminal complaints reviewed by Gothamist show Burke, who previously had a career as a dancer on Broadway, had at least six encounters with police in the three months before Falzone's death, with each incident more violent or erratic than the last.

It began on Feb. 2, when Port Authority officers tried to stop Burke for allegedly stealing a bag of potato chips from the Duane Reade inside the World Trade Center.

He pushed and flailed at three of them, leaving one with a swollen shoulder and calf, another with a cut hand and bruised knee, and a third with a swollen hand, according to a sworn complaint.

He was charged with second-degree assault, a felony, and released on non-monetary conditions after pleading not guilty.

Twelve days later, on Feb. 14, an MTA worker watched Burke kick down the door to a locked break room at the 23rd Street station on the 1 line, smash subway car windows with a shovel and roll a trash can onto the live southbound track, taking a train full of passengers out of service, according to a criminal complaint.

He was charged with burglary and reckless endangerment, pleaded not guilty and was released again.

On Feb. 25, officers found Burke sleeping across multiple seats on a subway train at the Jay Street-MetroTech station. Police said he fought with them and they recovered a knife and drugs. He was released on his own recognizance.

On April 2, Burke kicked a stranger in the back at the West Fourth Street A train platform after a verbal dispute, police said.

He was charged with misdemeanor assault and released. Sixteen days later, he was charged with disorderly conduct after another subway incident and again released.