New York City is suing bus companies that took 30,000 migrants from Texas
New York Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday intensified his feud with Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, filing suit against 17 transportation companies that he said carried out a scheme by Mr. Abbott to send more than 30,000 migrants to New York City and city pays for their care.
New York is seeking more than $700 million in damages from these companies, an amount the lawsuit describes as the cost of caring for and housing the migrants.
The court casefiled in the Manhattan State Supreme Court, argues that deliberately transporting migrants with the “evil intentions” of shifting the cost of their care to New York violates state law.
“This lawsuit is without merit and deserves to be punished,” Abbott said in a statement. “It is clear that Mayor Adams knows nothing about the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, or the constitutional right to travel recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
He added that the migrants who boarded buses or flights to New York “did so voluntarily after being cleared by the Biden administration to remain in the United States.”
The trucking companies named in the lawsuit include Buckeye Coach LLC, based in Ohio, and Classic Elegance Coaches, based in El Paso, Texas. Buckeye’s owner had no immediate comment. A person who answered the phone at Classic Elegance Coaches referred a reporter to the state of Texas.
Within a minute video released in conjunction with the lawsuit, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, said New York City “could not alone bear the costs of reckless political shenanigans by the state of Texas.”
The arrival of more than 160,000 migrants in New York City has consumed much of Mr. Adams’ first two years as president. A decades-old consent decree, unique among major American cities, requires New York to provide shelter to anyone who requests it.
About 70,000 migrants remain in the city’s care. Mr. Adams estimates that sheltering migrants will cost the city $12 billion over three years.
He has warned that the influx of migrants would “destroy New York City,” and he has blamed the severe cuts he has imposed on the cost of caring for them.
In recent weeks, he has adopted a more aggressive legal strategy to address the issue. Last week, he announced the city’s first controls on how charter buses can transport migrants, limiting the hours and locations they can drop them off.
That has led to buses in New Jersey making deliveries at unpredictable times.
Mr. Adams’ administration cited these drop-offs in the lawsuit as further evidence of the bus companies’ “bad faith.”
The lawsuit has the support of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, whose budget is also under pressure from the costs of sheltering migrants.
“Governor Abbott continues to use people as political pawns, and it is time for the companies that facilitate his actions to take responsibility for their role in this ongoing crisis,” she said in a statement.
The lawsuit cites Section 149 of the New York Social Services Code, which states that anyone who brings an “indigent person” into New York State “with intent to publicly incriminate him” must either remove the person from the state achieve, or ‘must provide support’. him at his own expense.”
The city is making a new argument based on a law that has not been enforced since the Supreme Court declared in 1941 that such laws violate a constitutional right to travel — although it is possible that the right to travel does not apply to non- citizens, Roderick Hills said. , a professor at New York University Law School.
“Nevertheless, the city appears to have dug deep into outdated portions of the state code to find old laws that were enacted at a time when states routinely excluded ‘paupers’ from their territories unless those indigent individuals were ‘settled’ within the state. ” he said.
“Given the obsolescence and constitutional weakness of this 1940s New York law,” he added, it is “hard for me not to view this lawsuit as pure PR.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of New York City by Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s leading law firms, and signed by the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp. It was also signed by Steven Banks, former social services commissioner and head of New York’s Legal Aid Society, which is fighting on a separate front against the city’s efforts to weaken the right to shelter law.