The City of New York’s lawsuit to recover the $80.5 million stolen by FEMA is showing a federal administration at odds with the truth and with even a sense of reality. Mayor Adams and his lawyers must keep pushing forward and win this case, for New York and for all localities and states.
The city filed the federal suit on Feb. 21, after city Comptroller Brad Lander discovered that the feds had gone into NYC accounts at Citibank and removed money it had already allocated as part of an initiative to help states and localities shoulder the costs of housing asylum seekers.
Friday’s reply by the Justice Department is just kooky. It talks about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua assuming control of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, which the evidence doesn’t show. The Roosevelt is just the central intake location for migrants arriving by bus at Port Authority.
DOJ lawyers claim the case “involves a question of whether, if a federal grantee providing housing for illegal aliens allows that housing to be taken over by a terrorist organization and used as a base of operations for serious illegal activity, the federal government may pause that grantee’s funding.” This is emphatically not the question this case actually poses for a multitude of reasons.
The government has very much failed to provide any evidence that Tren de Aragua or any gang had taken over any of the hotels being funded by the grant, which seems an important thing to establish. Second, even if we assumed that this was true, the concern here is not about a “pause,” because this is no more a pause than a loan shark sending goons to empty out your pockets is a pause in the loan. The money was taken, proactively, out of the city’s bank account in what seems like an illegal misuse of the financial system’s safeguards.
The city’s blunt response, filed yesterday, that this is a “fictional account” based on a “post hoc, hastily-constructed façade” of compliance with the law is absolutely correct, and any court should agree and strike it down.
Here in reality, the facts are that the money was appropriated by Congress and used appropriately by NYC as it stepped up to provide a critical service for a population that sorely needed it, only getting a tiny reimbursement for the trouble. If the MAGA crowd has a problem with NYC resorting to putting asylum seekers — who are not “illegal aliens” by the federal government’s own definition — in hotels, they should take it up with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who was sending busloads of legally present migrants without any coordination or advance notice.
The reason the Trump administration is trying to amp up the salacious claims of a federally-funded terrorist headquarters is because they think this is the easiest way to distract from what is a fundamentally pretty easy legal question. Can the federal government reach into municipal bank accounts and help itself to already-disbursed funds? Of course not.
If that were the situation, we might as well drop the pretense of having a Congress with its own powers or a federal system with state prerogatives. If that’s the argument Trump wants to make, then he should come out and make it.