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Following the precedent set by Rockland and Orange counties, Suffolk is the latest county to try to block attempts by New York Mayor Eric Adams to ease the overflow of migrants in the Big Apple by busing them to other places. Suffolk County Presiding Officer Kevin McCaffrey says leaders there are exploring legal action to push back. Appearing on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program, McCaffrey summed up the argument by saying, “This is a federal problem, and it’s filtering down from the state to the city, and we’re saying that’s your problem. It’s not our problem. Don’t make it our problem.”
“We’re concerned about an influx of migrants,” McCaffrey told Berman and Riedel. “For an extended period of time, they’re gonna be going to our schools, have an impact on our social services, on our police departments, on our emergency services, so we have real concerns about the impact of bringing a large amount of people to our community that are going to rely on the services, and, the fact of the matter is, a lot of them have come across unvetted.”
Suffolk has hired legal counsel, but McCaffrey intimated that’s just step one. “One of the things that we’ve talked about doing is looking at what kind of temporary restraining orders we could get. We’re going to look into what permits were issued on the county level to facilities that may be housing these migrants. The county health department issues permits to these hotels. We issue them the hotels on a short-term basis. Now, if they’re going to be turned into long-term rentals, that’s a different story. They need to come back to us so we could compel the county health department to revoke their permits from the health department."