New York City has sued 17 charter bus companies that transported migrants from Texas, the mayor, Eric Adams, announced on Thursday.
The lawsuit, filed in New York state court in Manhattan, says the city is seeking $708m from the firms because that was the cost it incurred to house the migrants and provide services to them over the past two years.
In that time, more than 33,000 people were bussed to the city as a part of Operation Lone Star, a joint effort between the Texas department of public safety and the Texas military department that began in 2021 to curb illegal immigration. Operation Lone Star was born from what the Texas Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called “Biden’s reckless open-border policies”.
But Adams said the transportation companies had violated a 19th-century New York state law that requires anyone who transports a needy person likely to seek government assistance from another state to cover their expenses.
“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.
“Governor Abbott’s continued use of migrants as political pawns is not only chaotic and inhumane but makes clear he puts politics over people. Today’s lawsuit should serve as a warning to all those who break the law in this way.”
Texas’s attempts to enforce border security – an issue that officially falls under the purview of the federal government – has in the past been condemned by the justice department, homeland security, civil right groups and other legal experts.
On Wednesday, the justice department sued Texas to block a new and controversial state immigration law from going into effect that would allow state police to arrest any person they suspected had crossed the US-Mexico border without authorization. The justice department called the state law, SB4, “clearly unconstitutional”.
Republican-led states, such as Texas and Florida, have bussed migrants coming into their states to “sanctuary” cities, or cities that protect undocumented immigrants, such as Chicago, New York and Boston. In 2022, Adams declared a state of emergency amid the influx of buses transporting migrants.
The New York state governor, Kathy Hochul, said she was “proud to support the mayor’s lawsuit”.
Hochul said: “If they are getting paid to break the law by transporting people in need of public assistance into our state, they should be on the hook for the cost of sheltering those individuals – not just passing that expense along to hard-working New Yorkers.”
In a statement reported by the Associated Press, Abbott hit back at the lawsuit.
“Every migrant bused or flown to New York City did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden Administration to remain in the United States,” Abbott said. “As such, they have constitutional authority to travel across the country that Mayor Adams is interfering with.”
