Mayor Adams will almost certainly lose the city’s recently filed lawsuit against more than a dozen of the bus companies hired by Texas to bring migrants to New York. But this is a case where defending the city matters more than a legal victory.
“Texas Governor Abbott’s continued use of migrants as political pawns is not only chaotic and inhumane but makes clear he puts politics over people,”
Adams said in a video message announcing the lawsuit. The mayor is suing 17 of the bus companies hired by Abbott for violating Social Service Law 149, an obscure state law designed to punish “any person who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of the state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge.”
Those found guilty of the misdemeanor, says the law, can be fined $100 and “shall be obligated to convey such person out of the state or to support him at his own expense.”
It seems like a statute tailor-made for the current crisis. The only problem, says law professor Roderick Hills, is that such measures violate the Constitution.
“Lots of states in the 19th century had these laws. They were called settlement and removal laws. And the idea is if you were a poor person and you went to a place where you’re not settled, you should be removed,” Hills told me, noting that the Supreme Court struck down such measures in a landmark 1941 case, Edwards v. State of California, that rendered New York’s law null and void, though it remains on the books.
“This law is so unconstitutional and obsolete that it has never been enforced since 1942,” said Hills, who predicts that Adams will lose the suit.
But hauling the bus companies into court, even on flimsy legal grounds, is exactly what Adams should be doing. The expense of defending themselves will make transportation companies think twice about whether they wish to continue aiding and abetting Abbott’s callous political stunts.
More importantly, the lawsuits allow the the elected leader of our city
to demonstrate that some values are worth fighting for whether or not the courts agree. Adams is showing malicious political pranksters like Abbott that there will be legal and financial consequences for ferrying thousands of needy people without proper food, clothing, health care, or so much as a heads up to the receiving authorities in New York.
It wouldn’t be the first time one of our mayors fought the good fight against impossible legal odds. Back in 1998, a group of white Queens residents showed up at the Broad Channel Labor Day parade on a float labeled “Black to the Future 2098” that featured men wearing blackface and Afro wigs, eating fried chicken and watermelon, with one man hanging off the back of the float in a mock reenactment of the racial murder of a man named James Byrd who’d been dragged to his death in a gruesome racial murder in Texas earlier that year.
When video of the offensive stunt surfaced, it turned out that three of the men on the racist float were city workers — a cop and two firefighters — and Mayor Rudy Giuliani promptly announced that all three would be fired.
“Any police officer, firefighter, or other city employee involved in this disgusting display of racism should be removed from positions of responsibility immediately,” Giuliani said. “They will be fired.”
Thorny legal and political issues popped up immediately. As civil servants with union protections, the officers were entitled to disciplinary hearings and other due process, which Giuliani had ignored. The New York Civil Liberties Union added a free-speech argument in court, claiming that employees should not be fired for exercising the right to act like idiots at home on their own time. The Reverend Al Sharpton even testified, as a surprise witness on behalf of the officers, that Giuliani was scapegoating the white police officer as a way to deflect attention from NYPD policies that had enraged many Black New Yorkers.
Giuliani knew he was on thin ice legally but held firm, much to his credit. “They’re technically suspended,” he said of the officers, “but they’re never getting back into the Police Department or the Fire Department unless the Supreme Court of the United States ordered us to take them back.”
And so the case of Locurto v. Giuliani wound its way through the courts for years, finally concluding one level shy of the Supreme Court when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that the firings should stand because “the First Amendment does not require a government employer to sit idly by while its employees insult those they are hired to serve and protect.”
Whatever his past and current misdeeds, Giuliani’s fight to uphold a basic code of public decency for city workers was a political good deed. Decades later, Adams should follow in Giuliani’s footsteps by fighting the bus case vigorously even though it looks like a sure loser in legal terms. This should be the last time other states try to turn New York’s compassionate care for the poor into a weapon.
