New York City Mayor Eric Adams is fed up.
Illegal immigrants keep wanting to come to his city, and the state of Texas keeps on giving them bus transportation to get there. He can’t get a meeting with the White House or the president to discuss the border crisis and its effects on the nation’s most populous city. According to him, he’s running out of money.
“The federal government said to New York City: ‘We’re not going to do our job — you do our job. You take care of 4,000 people a week, Eric, you and your team,’” Adams said at a media briefing in December, according to the New York Post. “I’m not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel from the federal government.”
So he’s doing what any sensible mayor would do in this situation: He’s filing a lawsuit. But he’s a Democrat, so he can’t be entirely sensible.
Thus, he’s suing … the bus companies that brought the illegal immigrants to New York City. For $700 million. And no, none of that is a misprint.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the city filed a lawsuit late Thursday against 17 transportation companies that were contracted to provide transportation to illegal immigrants who arrived in NYC, asking them to pay for the nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars the city estimates it’s spent on the migrant crisis.
“The suit, filed by the commissioner of the city’s Department of Social Services, relies on a law requiring anyone ‘who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of the state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge’ to either transport that person out of the state or pay for his or her care,” the Journal reported.
Since the spring of 2022, the suit claims, Texas has sent at least 33,600 migrants NYC’s way. This is on track with Texas’ own data regarding the transportation of illegal immigrants, which is part of what it dubs “Operation Lone Star.” In addition, the city has sent 28,000 immigrants to Chicago, 13,800 to Denver, 12,500 to Washington, D.C., 3,400 to Philadelphia and 1,300 to Los Angeles.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who’s been the motive force behind the aggressive measures to combat the burden of the border crisis on his state, called the suit “baseless” and said the city “deserves to be sanctioned” in court for a frivolous claim.
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“It’s clear that Mayor Adams knows nothing about the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, or about the constitutional right to travel that has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said in a statement.
“Every migrant bused or flown to New York City did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden administration to remain in the United States,” the statement continued. “As such, they have constitutional authority to travel across the country that Mayor Adams is interfering with. If the mayor persists in this lawsuit, he may be held legally accountable for his violations.”
Statement on New York City’s lawsuit targeting Texas’ migrant transportation program.
Full statement here: https://t.co/4hwjgzhLPY pic.twitter.com/haAk6DPQVR
— Gov. Greg Abbott (@GovAbbott) January 4, 2024
Now, to be fair, Adams has been a critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis and has complained — as he did in the December media briefing — about the lack of effort he’s seen from the White House in combating it. But when it comes down to it, Adams puts the blame on … Texas.
“New York City has and will always do our part to manage this humanitarian crisis, but we cannot bear the costs of reckless political ploys from the state of Texas alone,” Adams said Thursday.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, echoed her support for Adams’ suit.
“Gov. Abbott continues to use human beings as political pawns, and it’s about time that the companies facilitating his actions take responsibility for their role in this ongoing crisis,” Hochul said.
However, the root of the “ongoing crisis” is neither Texas, which it isn’t suing, nor the bus companies that were contracted to provide transportation to individuals who wanted to go where they ended up going. It is, instead, the White House.
Adams’ lawsuit may make for a convenient distraction. After all, Abbott has long been the bogeyman for Democrat failures when it comes to the border. The federal government has long fought against virtually every aspect of Operation Lone Star, either rhetorically or legally. It refuses to dissuade migrants from illegally crossing into the United States or further gumming up our already clogged immigration court system with asylum claims that are mostly frivolous.
Furthermore, jurisdictions like New York and Chicago are prime destinations for migrants, thanks to the fact that they’ve gone out of their way to advertise themselves as “sanctuary cities” — until, of course, the monthly influx of 200,000-plus illegal immigrants actually take them up on the offer en masse, then they start a hue and cry about how a Texas Republican is responsible for their woes.
So, just to recap: A Democrat-created border crisis overwhelms a Democrat-run city that advertises itself as being a Democrat-instituted “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. A Democrat mayor gets fed up with a Democratic-run White House and its inattention to either his city’s woes or the border crisis in general. So he sues … the bus companies a Texas Republican contracted to take the illegal immigrants newly allowed into the country by the Democratic-run White House to his city, where they wanted to go in the first place.
There’s an irony here, and Mayor Adams won’t get it — not until he’s dug himself an even deeper hole than he’s already in, anyway.
