De Blasio Hires Builder of Trump Wall for Pop-Up Hospitals

(Bloomberg) -- The company New York Mayor Bill de Blasio chose to construct emergency hospitals at the National Tennis Center in Queens and a cruise-ship terminal in Brooklyn also holds a federal contract to build a portion of President Donald Trump’s Mexico border wall -- a project de Blasio has railed against for three years, describing it and the president as “racist” and “inhumane.”

SLSCO Ltd. of Galveston, Texas has extensive experience in fast-tracking emergency disaster relief and was awarded a $789 million contract for border wall replacement a year ago to work on a stretch south of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Santa Teresa is a suburb of El Paso.

The builder also was hired to construct a $287 million border wall project in California in 2018, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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The company’s website describes its experience with rapid disaster response, including emergency sheltering. It’s building a 1,000 bed pop-up hospital in a cruise terminal in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn and a 350-bed temporary facility at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, site of the U.S. Open. The sites are intended to relieve hospitals that are packed as the coronavirus outbreak spreads in New York City.

SLSCO’s contract with the city is worth $250 million, and the city is expecting reimbursement for that expense from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to Freddi Goldstein, de Blasio’s press secretary.

“SLSCO has been working for the state of New York since Hurricane Sandy in 2012,” Elizabeth Rogers-Alvarado, a spokeswoman for SLSCO’s parent, the Sullivan Brothers Family of Companies, said by email. “We are honored to be assisting in this effort to help her and her residents once again.”

De Blasio, a self-described progressive Democrat whose short-lived presidential campaign featured attacks on Trump’s immigration policies, took his opposition to those policies so seriously that he traveled to the Mexican border at Tornillo, Texas, in June 2018 to protest the incarceration of undocumented immigrants, and to decry Trump’s insistence on building the wall.

As recently as March 18, de Blasio told Today Show interviewer Savannah Guthrie: “There are American military officers right now still building a wall at the southern border when all they should be doing domestically is addressing coronavirus.”

On Tuesday, Goldstein said, “We have one focus: saving the lives of New Yorkers. If you’re interested in helping us do that, we’re interested in doing business with you. These facilities combined will provide care to more than 1,000 New Yorkers.”

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