Fed up East Harlem residents are begging the Trump administration to do what the their local leaders will not — shut down the controversial safe injection site that’s been a magnet for crime and chaos in their neighborhood for years, The Post has learned.
Grassroots organizations East Harlem Neighborhood Group and One City Rising are pleading with US Attorney General Pam Bondi to swiftly shutter the government-backed shooting gallery, which they said is in clear violation of federal law.
“Our daily living situation has become wholly untenable as a result of this facility opening in our residential neighborhood,” they wrote in the three-page Feb. 17 letter to Bondi, a copy of which was shared with The Post.
The East Harlem facility, which along with a second site in Washington Heights is operated by the nonprofit OnPoint, has seen consistent open-air drug dealing just outside its doors since its 2021 opening, residents said.
“Every day in the area outside the facility and in the blocks surrounding the facility drug dealing occurs regularly in broad daylight, while drug addicts can be found nodding off, lying in the street, begging for handouts, and committing petty crime,” the note reads.
“We need federal intervention to shut it down,” they wrote, echoing a plea made by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn).to the US Department of Justice last week.
The Post witnessed the mayhem this week, including a man palming $20 bills from a giggling, hunched-over junkie before handing him a plastic baggie just 150 feet away from the facility’s entrance on East 126th Street, across from a preschool.
Two blocks down, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 124th Street, a man in a North Face jacket handed off plastic bags containing a trio of white pills and roughly a half-ounce of weed to a man in exchange for what appeared to be $40.
A hour and a half later, a strung-out bearded man was seen laid out on the concrete on Lexington Avenue near East 125th Street next to a pool of his own vomit, drawing disgusted looks from passersby.
“I thought that was supposed to be put to help people, but they’re not helping — they’re making it worse,” barber Cole Brown, 38, told The Post.
“People are going there to get help, and they’re buying drugs!”
But security guard Devon Frost said the program was a good thing, at least for addicts given sterilized needles, which helps to stop the spread of diseases, such as AIDS.
Still, he added: “They shouldn’t give them needles, they should try to get them off heroin.”
In November 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio celebrated the nation’s first government-backed “overdose prevention centers” opening in East Harlem and Washington Heights, where junkies could snort or inject their drug of choice under medical supervision, in addition to picking up clean paraphernalia to use either in or outside their walls.
Mayor Adams, announced plans for three more safe injection facilities in March 2023 to be up and running by 2025. No new sites have been opened since.
All the while, residents in East Harlem bemoaned a hellish scene that’s ravaged their community, noting their complaints have been ignored by local leaders.
“My sons walk by people injecting themselves in their neck, in their leg, they’re walking by bodies that are slumped over,” said Elizabeth Jarrett Van Clief, 55, co-chair of the East Harlem Neighborhood Group, who has lived in the neighborhood since 2004.
“This had never happened before this injection site opened.”
Drug-related 311 complaints to the East Harlem safe injection site’s address have soared to 272 in 2024, up 377% from just 57 in 2020, the year before the facility opened, according to an NYPD spokesperson.
Sam Rivera, OnPoint’s executive director, championed the safe injection sites’ operations, noting staff have intervened in over 1,800 overdoses in addition to providing social services such as medical and mental health care.
Health Department spokeswoman Rachel Vick similarly defended the facilities as providing “valuable community support” by connecting New Yorkers to various services.
Jarrett Van Clief said she and her neighbors’ hopes for change in their neighborhood were dashed when then-Manhattan US attorney Damian Williams warned in 2023 that the OnPoint facilities were operating in clear violation of federal law — but did not shutter them
President Trump’s return to the White House has made locals “cautiously optimistic,” she said, adding the current administration seems “more concerned with law and order” than the Biden administration.
Cody Diaz, a shelter resident in East Harlem, pointed to the White House this week moving to axe the loathed congestion pricing tax as a sign the current administration has a chutzpah to close the much-maligned facilities.
“Anything is possible with Trump,” sad Diaz, 42.
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.
