Mayor Eric Adams should be suing President Biden over the Big Apple’s migrant crisis — not the bus companies that Texas has paid to dump asylum-seekers here, the Lone Star State’s governor said Sunday.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told “Fox News Sunday” that Adams’ lawsuit — which is seeking $708 million in damages from 17 charter and bus companies — will not only fail badly in court, it is aimed at the wrong target.
“He needs to be suing Joe Biden, not these bus companies,” the Republican governor said. “Because it’s Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s policies that’s causing the massive, multimillion [migrant] influx into the United States that leads to many of them wanting to go to New York.”
Abbott — who called Adams’ lawsuit a “political statement” — said the Democratic mayor’s legal action “violates the United States Constitution in several respects.
“The lawsuit is completely legally baseless, and the mayor is going to lose very badly for this very specific reason,” Abbott said. “And that is: Everybody who is bussed to or are [flown] to New York is already authorized by the Biden administration to be within the United States legally.
“The mayor is going to lose and lose badly, and I hope he is forced to pay the legal fees for the cost of anybody having to defend against that lawsuit,” the governor added.
Neither Abbott nor the state of Texas has been named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
The suit claims charter bus companies earned millions of dollars from the Lone Star State as they’ve ferried more than 33,000 migrants from Texas to the streets of New York.
The companies acted in “bad faith” as they helped along Abbott’s migrant-moving scheme, which has sent people from Texas to Democratic-led cities such as New York, Chicago and Denver, the lawsuit said.
The coach companies got more than $1,650 per person they transported — a bloated price tag that is more than five times as much as the average one-way ticket from Texas to New York City — while failing to help cover the cost of caring for the migrants once they got here, the suit claimed.
The Adams administration did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment Sunday.
The Adams administration has said it has spent about $3.5 billion so far on the migrant crisis and projects to spend $12 billion in total by the end of 2025’s fiscal year.
Hizzoner has also cracked down on bus companies in other ways — namely, by ordering them to notify the city of their arrival and restricting where and when they can drop migrants off.
“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 in a statement.
“These companies have violated state law by not paying the cost of caring for these migrants, and that’s why we are suing to recoup approximately $700 million already spent to care for migrants sent here in the last two years by Texas.”
Abbott also said Sunday he has sent eight letters to Democratic President Biden about the extraordinary amount of border crossings but has heard nothing in response.
Instead, the US Department of Justice sued Texas over a new immigration law that would let cops arrest people suspected of entering the US illegally.
Abbott defended the law, saying it doesn’t conflict with federal statutes.
The state is just “enforcing the laws passed by Congress,” the governor said.
