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,........

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