Earlier this year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that his latest plan to relieve the overwhelmed migrant shelters in the Big Apple would include loading many of the migrants on buses and sending them to suburb and rural counties around the upstate region. They would then presumably be placed in hotels and other facilities and the county officials could seek compensation for those rooms from Gotham. As you’ve likely heard by now, that didn’t go over well at all with the upstate folks, and various mayors and country officials began declaring states of emergency and barring such migrant transfers from taking place in their districts. Adams responded with a flurry of lawsuits in June, seeking to have the courts force the upstate counties to comply with his will. So how has that worked out? According to a new report from Politico yesterday… not well at all. Adams has either given up or been defeated at every turn.
Mayor Eric Adams’ office quietly ended legal challenges against most of the upstate county governments that were sued by New York City over their emergency orders meant to bar migrants.
City Hall confirmed to Playbook that 17 of the 31 cases against county governments were abandoned. The legal challenges were dropped after a judge ruled New York City would have to litigate each case in the individual counties, a potential travel nightmare for the city’s counsel’s office.
As noted above, Adams and the City of New York filed 31 lawsuits. The Mayor initially attempted to have a state judge hear all of the cases simultaneously and hopefully decide in his favor. The judge tossed that idea and said that each case would need to be heard individually in the affected regions. After that, New York City quietly abandoned 17 of the 31 cases citing the logistical problems for the city’s attorneys to travel to and handle that many cases.
Of the remaining 14 cases, ten of them were thrown out of court. The cases were based on a claim by New York City that the counties couldn’t declare states of emergency in this fashion. In their rush to achieve a legal victory, they apparently failed to notice that ten of the counties had never declared a state of emergency. They had simply refused to accept the busloads of migrants. So all ten of them were dismissed unceremoniously.
Only four lawsuits remain and the county executives involved are not budging. They are located in Rockland, Orange, Onondaga, and Dutchess counties. Adams’ prospects in those regions don’t appear very bright either and none of these attempts have been embraced by Governor Kathy Hochul. She has been working to get more money and resources sent to New York City to deal with the migrants, but she has shown no interest in exporting Gotham’s problems to her upstate residents. Part of the reason involves politics and the next round of elections, but the other part is actually based on very valid principles.
New York City is huge and its municipal government controls its own turf. But as large as it is, that government holds no power to dictate what goes on around the rest of the state, a point that Hochul has made repeatedly. Further, New York City established itself as a sanctuary city with a dubiously defined “right to shelter” so they effectively asked for the massive headache they encountered when more than 100,000 people showed up to take them up on their offer. The upstate counties established no such rules and made no offer of sanctuary. They provide shelter for their own homeless residents, but they are under no obligation to do so for an army of foreigners, whether they show up of their own volition or are shipped there by Eric Adams.
Sorry (not sorry), New York City. You made this bed and now you’re being forced to lie in it. And you seem to be picking up an awfully large number of fleas. Perhaps it’s time to change course, abandon your right-to-shelter approach, and stop trying to pan your problems off on others.
