Rockland To File Court Papers Over Restraining Order Against NYC

ROCKLAND COUNTY, NY — Rockland County lawyers are due to file papers New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn to oppose New York City's challenge of the temporary restraining order preventing it from temporarily housing several hundred migrants in a local hotel.

A restraining order was issued Thursday by Judge Thomas Zugibe in State Supreme Court in Rockland. The city appealed, but the Appellate Division left the order in place pending resolution of the city's challenge.

Rockland officials argued that the city is "mirroring the operation of a homeless shelter" by hiring a shelter operator and staff, providing security, establishing rules for guest conduct and curfews, providing case management, laundry services, and three meals a day, "all of which is not consistent with a hotel stay of a guest at no cost. However, it is consistent with the operation of a homeless shelter."

NYC Mayor Eric Adams said the city would challenge all the legal obstacles to its plan to pay for shelter, food and services for some of the 60,000 migrants who have arrived in NYC in the past year at locations outside its borders . "If someone is saying in the State of New York that you are not allowed to come here, that's just a bad precedent."

Local opposition to the stand of County Executive Ed Day's administration has come from a Stony Point-based group, Proyecto Faro which works with asylum-seekers. "Rockland is a pluralist county whose entire economy is able to function thanks to immigrants who do work documented people don’t want to do, who pay taxes, and are a large consumer block," said Elizabeth Roberts, its director of administration and finance, in a news release last week.

Meanwhile, Rockland's legal strategy has been copied by Orange County, where NYC placed about 50 asylum-seekers in a hotel Thursday to the surprise and fury of County Executive Steve Neuhaus, who said Adams had assured him Wednesday that none would be coming in the near future. The county filed two lawsuits Friday against the plan.

Yonkers city officials learned that some will be housed there on Friday, earning the anger of Mayor Michael Spano but the cautious support of Westchester County Executive George Latimer.

Latimer, who said last week that he saw two dimensions to the problem, one practical and the other moral, wrote an op-ed piece for The Journal News, in which he said, in part:

My administration in Westchester County sees this in pragmatic terms. The people who are migrants are in dire need. Our city neighbor is trying to address that need. They, too, need help. Realistically, we have limited resources and can help to a limited degree. If we can manage some numbers, with proper services and controls in place, we, too, can help. We do not have the resources to take on overwhelming numbers — if other places, everywhere each do a modest share, we can make this influx manageable.

There are some of our residents and not just a few, who will bitterly oppose any such rational response, however well managed and limited that may be. And there are as well many other residents who support compassion and rational responses to this.
I don’t doubt we’ll see at the next Election Day how we are judged.

And I don’t doubt that when the political careers are over, and when our time on this planet is over, we will be judged again.

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