If Joe directs the border patrol to allow illegal migrants to legally stay in the US awaiting trial they are not free to go where they want?
I didn't know that interstate travel was illegal. Ironic we have a federally funded Interstate Road System designed for that exact purpose.
Just kidding...I think Joe should set up interment camps along our border. That sound legal?
New York City Sues Bus Companies That Brought 30,000 Migrants From Texas
The lawsuit accuses 17 companies of carrying out a plan by the governor of Texas to send tens of thousands of migrants to New York.
By Dana Rubinstein, WSJ
Jan. 4, 2024
Mayor Eric Adams of New York on Thursday ratcheted up his feud with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, filing suit against 17 transportation companies that he said had carried out a plan by Mr. Abbott to send more than 30,000 migrants to New York City and make the city pay for their care.
New York is seeking more than $700 million in damages from those companies, an amount the lawsuit describes as the cost of caring for and sheltering the migrants.
The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, argues that purposely transporting the migrants with the “evil intention” of shifting the costs of their care to New York violates state law.
“This lawsuit is baseless and deserves to be sanctioned,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement. “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 added that the migrants who boarded buses or flights to New York “did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden administration to remain in the United States.”
The transportation companies named in the suit include Buckeye Coach LLC, based in Ohio, and Classic Elegance Coaches, based in El Paso, Texas. The owner of Buckeye had no immediate comment. A person answering the phone at Classic Elegance Coaches referred a reporter to the state of Texas.
In a minute-long video released in conjunction with the lawsuit, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, said New York City could not “bear the costs of reckless political ploys from the state of Texas alone.”
The arrival of more than 160,000 migrants in New York City has consumed much of Mr. Adams’s first two years in office. A decades-old consent decree, unique among major American cities, requires New York to provide shelter to anyone who asks.
Roughly 70,000 migrants remain in the city’s care. Mr. Adams has estimated that sheltering the 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 budget 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 the migrants, limiting the hours and locations at which they can drop them off.
That has resulted in buses making drop-offs at unpredictable times in New Jersey.
Mr. Adams’s administration cited those drop-offs in the suit as further evidence of the bus companies’ “bad faith.”
The suit has the support of New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, whose budget has also been strained by the cost of sheltering migrants.
“Governor 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,” she said in a statement.
The suit cites Section 149 of New York’s social services law, which says that anyone who brings a “needy person” into New York State “for the purpose of making him a public charge” must either take the person out of the state or “support him at his own expense.”
The city is making a novel 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 the right to travel does not apply to noncitizens, said Roderick Hills, a professor at New York University’s law school.
“Nevertheless, the city seems to have reached deep into obsolete parts of the state code to find old laws that had been enacted in an age when states routinely excluded ‘paupers’ from their territory unless those indigent persons were ‘settled’ within the state,” he said.
“Given the obsolescence and constitutional infirmity of this 1940s-era New York law,” he added, it is “hard for me not to view this lawsuit as pure P.R.”
The suit was filed by Paul, Weiss, one of the United States’ most prominent law firms, on behalf of New York City, and signed by the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp. It was also signed by Steven Banks, the former social services commissioner and head of the Legal Aid Society in New York, who is, on a separate front, fighting the city’s efforts to weaken its right-to-shelter law.
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