New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration announced Thursday that it had filed a lawsuit against more than a dozen charter bus companies responsible for shipping hundreds of migrants in from Texas, demanding the operators fork over the $708 million officials claim it has cost to house and feed them.
The lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court, lays out a plan implemented by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022 to bus migrants to “sanctuary cities” until “there is a change in immigration policy at the Southern Border.” At least 17 charter companies have taken “millions of dollars” from Texas to assist in that scheme, transporting the migrants to New York City for the exorbitant price of $1,650 per person, according to the complaint. (Thousands more have been brought to other cities like Denver, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.)
More than 33,600 migrants have since made landfall in the city, the lawsuit states, citing numbers released by Abbott’s office late last month. “New York has a law to address just this kind of conduct,” it warns.
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That regulation, Section 149 of the New York Social Services Law, requires that anyone who brings “a needy person” into the state “for the purpose of making him a public charge” foot the bill for that person’s care, if they stay there.
“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 in a statement.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added that Abbott had continued “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.”
“If they are getting paid to break the law by transporting people in need of public assistance into our state,” she continued, “they should be on the hook for the cost of sheltering those individuals—not just passing that expense along to hard-working New Yorkers.”
The lawsuit has yet to be reviewed by the county clerk, according to ABC News.
New York City has struggled to keep up with the demands of sheltering the thousands of asylum seekers who have flooded into the city in recent months, with a record-high of 14 full buses arriving from Texas in a single night last week, according to The New York Times.
Adams’ administration, which has previously called on the federal government to intervene in the crisis, responded last Wednesday by penning an executive order requiring bus companies bringing migrants in to provide advance notice of their arrival. Within days of the crackdown, officials in neighboring New Jersey said, bus drivers began dropping migrants off at New Jersey train stations, allowing them to continue on into New York City in an apparent workaround.
