New York City Mayor Eric Adams has successfully bullied one of the bus companies that the state of Texas contracted to bring migrants north to the sanctuary city.
Roadrunner Charters, Inc. will not deliver any more migrants to New York, New Jersey, or other nearby places while another case is pending in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
“New York City continues to do our part as we lead the nation in managing this national humanitarian crisis, but reckless political games from the state of Texas will not be tolerated,” Adams said in a statement. He wanted to charge the bus companies for the care and feeding of migrants they brought to the city, a ridiculous ask.
Most of the migrants whom Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) sent to New York asked to go there, so it's not exactly clear what Adams is complaining about.
“Our client has nothing to do with the decision to move the migrants from Texas to New York, and they should not be a named party,” Roadrunner attorney Robert Hantman said in an interview. “We look forward to ultimately being successful because you can’t invite migrants to a sanctuary city and expect a bus company to pay for it. It makes no sense, period.”
Adams filed the lawsuit in January against 17 bus companies as a means of crimping Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s plans to send migrants north. Adams is seeking $700 million to care for migrants bused to the city.
The Democratic mayor had also issued an executive order requiring advance notice from buses and limiting allowed drop-off times for migrants at Port Authority Bus Terminal and elsewhere. As a workaround, some buses began to leave newcomers at New Jersey train stations so they could continue their journey to New York City by rail.
The pace of new arrivals, including traveling via buses chartered by Texas, has slowed in the winter months, but both New York and Texas officials have said they expect an uptick as the weather warms. The number of migrants coming to New York City began spiking last year in late April.
What should Abbott have done? Seventy- to eighty-thousand illegals were pouring into Texas every single week for months, and the president was doing nothing to stop it or even slow it down. Sending the migrants north was an act of desperation, not a "reckless political game."
As it happened, it wasn't until Adams and other big city northern mayors begged Biden for help that Biden finally made a move. The deal he hammered out with Republicans on the border enraged many in his own party, but it would have slowed the migrant surge to a manageable flow.
An Abbott spokesperson told POLITICO recently that the governor planned to continue busing migrants north until President Joe Biden “does his job to secure the border.”
Texas has bused more than 106,000 migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, including New York, the spokesperson said.
It's going to be a long, hot summer in New York City.
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