Adams’ lame lawsuit against bus firms ignores the migrant crisis’ real roots

New year, old mayor. January’s first week brought fresh evidence Mayor Adams still has no idea how to manage the nearly two year old migrant crisis. His latest gimmick is to sue bus companies bringing migrants from Texas. In announcing the lawsuit Thursday, Adams slammed what he called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “reckless political ploys” of sending migrants north.

But Adams’ suit is the ploy. The city is suing 17 small companies under a section of state law that forbids bringing “a needy person from out of this state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge” — that is, a recipient of taxpayer spending. The city wants $708 million to pay for the cost of sheltering the 33,600 people the companies have transported.

The city’s case is weaker than weak — as shown by the fact the court filing must stretch back to 1832 to explain how it wants the law enforced. Rather inconveniently, nearly a century later, in 1941, the Supreme Court declared a near identical California law unconstitutional, in violation of the interstate commerce clause.

Constitutional niceties aside, bus companies are not in the business of asking their passengers whether they view themselves as “public charges.” Bus firms, railways and airlines are neutral carriers. As long as someone has paid your fare — it can be your mom, it can be the state of Texas — and as long as you behave yourself in transit, they don’t bother themselves about what you might do to support yourself when you arrive.

For decades, bus firms have brought down and out people from across the country to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where they then beg for dollars on Times Square streets. Should Greyhound (not named in the mayor’s lawsuit) ask every passenger who boards in Maine if he can support himself once he gets to Manhattan? And what’s the definition of “public charge” — anyone who gets more in services than he pays in taxes? Thanks to our progressive tax system, that’s millions of people who live in New York and who got here on some conveyance from somewhere else in the world, whether a plane, train or bus.

But Adams is selective. He’ll go after small out of state bus firms that have contracted with the state of Texas, sure. Adams knows these companies have no way of retaliating against him. Notice the mayor isn’t suing Abbott , who could, in a Republican White House, someday (er, possibly soon) hold power over New York City.

By the mayor’s logic, though, he should also sue the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Last week, after bus companies began dropping migrants off in New Jersey instead of New York to evade the mayor’s new restrictions on drop offs, the Port Authority’s PATH service brought the new arrivals into the city.

Adams should also sue the charter airlines that fly migrants around the country on behalf of the Biden administration. Adams claims, though, that only the bus companies are afoul of the law because they have “evil intention,” in profiting off their contracts with the Texas government. But New York’s entire social services world is similarly profiting from emergency shelter contracts.

Indeed, it is New York City, not Texas, that has determined migrants become unique “public charges.” Nobody forces the Big Apple to offer all new arrivals emergency shelter at no bid contract prices. And the 33,600 people transported by bus companies from Texas make up a fraction of the 165,000 migrants who have come to New York since 2022 and fewer than half of the nearly 70,000 migrants in city shelter.

That’s if Adams can even prove that each of the 33,600 people transported by the bus companies has individually become a “public charge.” The arcane law Adams cites doesn’t deal in groups; it deals in individuals. This lawsuit is Adams’ emptiest gambit to show he’s doing something . He’s not fooling anyone.

Last week was the worst week so far in his migrant mismanagement. One migrant stabbed another to death at the city’s Randall’s Island mass shelter, and a brawl broke out among hundreds of men waiting outside in the freezing rain for shelter downtown. But Adams still won’t question the city’s unique right to shelter in state court; nor will he call upon President Biden to secure the borders as the number of crossings breaks records.

The small fry bus companies only connect the two. Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal..