A new city-issued litigation is suing more than a dozen charter bus companies for $700 million, accusing them of illegally transporting tens of thousands of migrants from the southern border to NYC under the supervision of Texas governor Greg Abbott.
The lawsuit seeks to recover financial damages of covering the cost of caring for about 33,000 migrants that have been arriving in the city on the charter buses since the Spring of 2022. Additionally, the 17 bus companies involved have been accused of participating in a “bad faith” relocation plan that violates state restrictions on abandoning “needy persons” in New York.
This suit, which was filed in state court this past Thursday, marked the latest effort of Mayor Eric Adams to redirect the bus loads of asylum seekers sent by Gov. Abbott. Texas has reportedly sent more than 95,000 migrants to “sanctuary” cities, including New York City, Chicago, and Denver, in protest of President Biden’s immigration policies, as stated by Abbott last month.
In response to an increase of bus drop-offs, both NYC and Chicago announced new restrictions in recent weeks that mandate charter companies to provide a notice in advance before any of their scheduled arrivals in those states. Just days after this was enacted, many of the buses began leaving migrants in suburbs surrounding each city without any prior notice, which consequently angered local officials.
Mayor Adams responded to the conduct of the bus companies and defended the lawsuit when it was announced on Thursday, saying the city would no longer “bear the costs of reckless political ploys from the state of Texas alone,” and also commented that the lawsuit should “serve as a warning to all those who break the law in this way.”
Many representatives for the charter bus companies- which are mostly based in Texas- have not yet publicly commented on the situation.
However, some of the bus companies that did respond seemed to be caught off guard by the suit. “We don’t make policies,” stated David Jones, an employee at the Buckeye Coach LLC, one of the charter lines that are named in the litigation, claiming, “We are just a transportation company.”
Gov. Abbott addressed NYC’s legal action as a clear violation of the commerce clause, which guarantees the constitutional right to travel, claiming that migrants authorized to remain in the U.S. “have constitutional authority to travel across the country that Mayor Adams is interfering with.”
Although Adams’ administration asserts that the recent focus on private charter bus companies is due to legal protections afforded to the state of Texas under a doctrine known as sovereign immunity, which exempts them from facing some of the repercussions of transporting the migrants. Therefore the lawsuit depends on a provision of state law that bars knowingly transferring “a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge.”
The suit also cites a report that indicates the charter bus companies received roughly $1,650 per person, which is much more than the standard one-way bus ticket, as evidence of the companies’ involvement being in “bad faith.”
In a broader perspective of this issue, Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, described the lawsuit and the controversy around it as a distraction from the overarching conflict at hand, arguing Mayor Adams should be focused on helping migrants find stability.
“He needs to stop taking pages out of Governor Abbott’s playbook and step up and lead the city of New York,” Awawdeh told AP.
