Riverhead’s controversial emergency order, originally intended to stop migrants and asylum seekers from being relocated to the town, will be renewed indefinitely, Supervisor Tim Hubbard told RiverheadLOCAL in an interview last month.
Hubbard, who has continued to renew the emergency order first issued by former Supervisor Yvette Aguiar in May 2023, said on July 18 that he would stop the emergency “when they stop shipping migrants up north towards New York City and there’s just even a remote possibility that they would be brought here.”
“I don’t know that there’s a statistical point” when the order would end, Hubbard said. There is still the “threat” of people who need housing in border states coming to the town, he said.
“There’s going to have to be a much stronger stance on the border crossing than there is now,” he said. “I mean, what [President Joe Biden] recently did is better than what we’ve had, but it’s — in my opinion, a lot more can be done yet.”
The Biden administration recently implemented executive actions to stop migrants who cross the U.S. border outside of ports of entry from claiming asylum if the encounters exceed 2,500 after a four day period. Biden took executive action after Congress failed to pass a bipartisan negotiated immigration reform bill. Unlawful crossings at the U.S. southern border dropped for the fifth consecutive month in July after a record breaking spike in December, according to reporting by CBS News.
Hubbard said he “would like to see it go back to the norm of, if you come into this country the proper way. Period. Just like many, many, many immigrants have done. Legally. Through the proper channels.”
Hubbard: Emergency order ‘makes a statement’
It’s been almost 15 months since Aguiar declared the emergency, claiming on May 16, 2023 that “well over 1,000” migrants were imminently being bused to Riverhead by New York City. Her order was, she acknowledged, based on the comments of WABC radio host Curtis Sliwa and sources she declined to identify. Hubbard, a councilman at the time, said the next day the emergency order was based on Sliwa’s comments. Aguiar said in a May 17, 2023 interview on Newsday TV she had received the information “about the imminent busing from she had “from law enforcement.” Former Riverhead Police Chief David Hegermiller told RiverheadLOCAL he had “no credible knowledge” supporting rumors of migrants being bused to the town.
The vocal criticism of the order has died down and the one legal challenge to the order, an action brought by the City of New York, was voluntarily discontinued last September.
Riverhead’s current executive order does two things: It orders businesses that allow short-term rentals, including hotels and motels, to “not accept any persons for long-term/non-transient housing inconsistent with approved and/or permitted uses and/or approved site plans” within the town. It also orders that homeless shelters in the town “refrain from displacing housed individuals with no confirmed permanent housing for the purpose of providing shelter to other persons.”
At first, the emergency order specifically prohibited asylum seekers and migrants, but was amended to remove references to those groups on the advice of outside counsel hired by the town to defend the order from the city’s lawsuit.
Hubbard said the town has not issued any tickets or arrested anyone for violating the emergency order. Town Attorney Erik said last year that the order has a “limited, narrowly tailored scope.”
“Because, I mean, at the end of the day, we are just enforcing our building codes, we’re enforcing our town code,” Howard said. Under town law, housing for 30 or more days is considered long-term and requires a town rental permit.
So why have the emergency in place at all?
“It makes a statement,” Hubbard said. Anybody looking to send migrants to Riverhead “might think twice about it because of the emergency order we have up. And do they want to get entangled in some kind of court process by doing it?”
“So it’s kind of a safeguard or a prophylactic for us as the town to stop this from happening, from stopping immigrants from invading our town in large numbers,” Hubbard said.
‘An emergency order in want of an emergency’
After the two initial placements of migrants in hotels upstate without the consent of local officials, New York City ceased trying to shelter migrants outside the city’s borders last May. Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped in with her own emergency order, directing the implementation of a comprehensive plan involving state agencies and local governments in the relocation of migrants bused to New York City from out of state, principally from Texas. The governor also directed the opening of state-owned facilities in the city as emergency shelters. In all, the city opened more than 200 shelters across the five boroughs.
Other actions taken by the city, including a “crackdown on out-of-state bus companies” hired to transport migrants to the city, and a lawsuit against the charter bus companies, have helped slow the influx of migrants into the city to weekly number lower than any time since 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants to New York City. City officials also credit Biden’s executive orders restricting admission of asylum seekers, which substantially reduced their numbers crossing the border.
It’s not clear whether Riverhead’s emergency order fits within the parameter’s of New York State Executive Law, which establishes the powers of a local emergency order in cases of natural or man-made disasters.
According to state law, the executive of a municipality can declare a state of emergency “in the event of a disaster, rioting, catastrophe, or similar public emergency within the territorial limits” or — which town officials say is the case in Riverhead — if there is a “reasonable apprehension of immediate danger” that imperils public safety.
During a state of emergency the executive can establish curfews and restrict traffic, designate “specific zones within which the occupancy and use of buildings and the ingress and egress of vehicles and persons may be prohibited or regulated,” and suspend local laws and regulations “which may prevent, hinder, or delay necessary action in coping with a disaster or recovery,” among other things.
“The executive order appears to be more of a political statement than an actual needed executive action,” said Oscar Michelen, a litigation attorney and the president of the Long Island Hispanic Bar Association.
“Certainly if thousands and thousands of immigrants were being put into Riverhead hotels, etc., and it drained on the community where it couldn’t sustain itself, and resources now were not available and people were going hungry and Riverhead couldn’t provide sufficient police protection or education, etc., those are the types of times you can say, ‘Hey, we can’t take any more. We have an emergency,’” he said.
But, Michelen said, a possibility is not an emergency. “This is an emergency order in want of an emergency,” he said
For that reason, many individuals and organizations questioned the legality of Riverhead’s emergency order.
NYCLU: Order has ‘an unconstitutional goal’
One of those groups was the New York Civil Liberties Union, which challenged in federal court similar executive orders issued by the county executives in Rockland and Orange counties. That case was dismissed as moot July 19, because the counties had — like Riverhead— issued new orders removing “migrants” and “asylum seekers” as the targets of the orders and adopted language instead prohibiting the establishment of short-term housing or shelters that violate the state’s Social Services Law. The new executive orders present a new controversy, the court ruled, which rendered the case moot. NYCLU can file an amended complaint, according to the court decision.
NYCLU spokesperson Kaye Dyja said in a statement last week that Riverhead’s order, like others across the state, “maintain the unconstitutional goal of preventing recently arrived immigrants from making those locations their home.” The organization said last year that it was looking closely at Riverhead’s order, but never filed a legal challenge.
LatinoJustice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for immigrant rights, is currently investigating Riverhead’s emergency order, a spokesperson confirmed.
Neither the NYCLU nor LatinoJustice made an attorney available for an interview.
In June 2023, struggling to find temporary housing for tens of thousands of asylum-seekers bused there from Texas over the past year, New York City sued Riverhead and 30 counties across the state, including Suffolk, asking a court to invalidate executive orders that block the city from arranging housing for asylum-seekers in their jurisdictions. The city said the orders violated state and federal laws, including those protecting civil and human rights under the U.S. Constitution.
On Sept. 14, New York City voluntarily discontinued the lawsuit against all but the counties of Rockland and Orange — where the city had originally contracted with hotel operators to house asylum seekers at the city’s expense — after a state court ruled that each action must be adjudicated separately in the defendants’ counties, rather than as one case in New York County. The court did not rule on the legality of the orders before the lawsuit was discontinued. New York City and Rockland County last week agreed to discontinue that lawsuit; the action between NYC and Orange County remains pending.
The New York City Law Department declined an interview request for this article.
Michelen said he expects the emergency order to continue unless another legal challenge comes along. “I think [the town would] be very hard pressed to prove in court that the possibility would justify something that would have a chilling effect over people coming into a hotel,” he said.
The individuals who would have the best chance of challenging the order are the people whose hotel stay or travel to Riverhead is hindered by the order, or the hotel itself, if it is obstructed from doing business, Michelen said.
Asylum seekers are in the U.S. legally: lawyer
The majority of people being sent from border cities to places like New York City are coming into the country legally through the asylum process. “They’re coming in at checkpoints. They’re not sending buses of people that they’re catching trying to cross the border illegally. Those people are detained,” Michelen said.
A large number of immigrants have permission to live and work in the U.S. and are temporarily protected from deportation. That group includes people seeking asylum, which is a form of protection provided to refugees fleeing persecution or fear of persecution in their country.
Asylum seekers are permitted to work in the U.S. while their applications are pending — although a person looking to work must have been in the U.S. for at least 150 days to apply for permission. People who are granted asylum are immediately authorized to work. The asylum process can take years to conclude due to backlogs. More than 8 million asylum seekers and migrants will be living inside the U.S. by the end of September because of backlogged courts, according to reporting by Axios.
“It’s also short-sighted, in my opinion, to try to ban people who want to come and work in jobs that you need exactly those types of workers — folks who would be in agriculture, in the service industry,” Michelen said. “Those are the jobs that we need on the East End.”
Michelen said Riverhead’s order and Hubbard’s statements are “part of a political dialogue that, I think, is dividing the country.”
“And it’s trying to send a message that they’re gonna kind of protect their town from change, or from an influx of those people who don’t look like the majority of the population,” he said.
Supervisor’s language ‘stirs up hate and anger and fear‘: Latino advocate
That kind of rhetoric has consequences for the entire Latino community, said Minerva Perez, executive director of OLA of Eastern Long Island, a nonprofit Latino support organization.
“Just by hanging on to this emergency order, the message is not a forward thinking message that Riverhead is giving,” Perez said in a recent interview, “because, in reality, our entire country is based on how we accept the fact that there will be immigration, there will be migration. What our processes looks like to make sure that is done in a safe way, in a healthy way, are all elements of that.”
OLA was one of several groups and individuals who vocally opposed the emergency order after it was first imposed and warned board members about the risk it could pose to the town’s Hispanic and Latino population. The groups make up roughly 16% of Riverhead Town’s population, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
Hubbard’s rhetoric surrounding the emergency order mirrors that of many Republican politicians, who have used issues surrounding immigration and immigrants as a central issue. Donald Trump, the former president and Republican presidential nominee, has said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and vowed to deport millions of undocumented migrants, reinstate travel bans and take other actions on immigration if elected.
“For him to stand on a national agenda, to use his voice in that way that harms his local community just so he can be a bit of a puppet, or a vocal puppet for a national agenda — I think it’s a shame. I think it’s sad, quite honestly,” Perez said of Hubbard. “I think we need other kinds of leadership that allow a difficult conversation to happen around immigration, but not one that uses the same old terminology that just stirs up hate and anger and fear.”
“We still have to address things in ways that address our national needs, but we cannot stop considering people as human beings,” Perez said. “And the language that he’s using — things like ‘invasion’ — we’re talking about fear mongering, and we’re talking about stirring up people in a way that only leads to danger and people getting harmed.”
There have been a couple times where the emergency order has hampered Perez’s work, she said. When the order was first imposed, she was trying to find temporary housing for a victim of domestic violence and her child in a Riverhead motel. Perez said she was forced to find housing for the woman further west because the motel had been notified about the order.
The order has made Perez think about the consequences of locating someone who can speak Spanish and has an accent to Riverhead, she said.
Pamela Greinke, executive director of the nonprofit Hope and Resilience Long Island, which covers the cost of hotel stays for domestic violence victims on the East End, said Riverhead’s order further endangers victims who may be seeking safety.
“So far, the time needed has not exceeded 30 days, but there may be a situation where a client needs more time in a hotel in order to be safe,” Greinke said. “So, this executive order directly impacts their ability to maintain the safety they need while pursuing their protections through court.”
Greinke said the order also “perpetuates the narrative that immigrants are more likely to be criminals; numerous studies have shown that to be untrue,” citing a study by university economists.
“Asylum seekers are not looking for a vacation spot; they often have experienced multiple layers of trauma and abuse; then to deny them safe housing while they take a moment to catch their breath and process it all, that just creates an additional, inhumane barrier for a person seeking safety,” Greinke said.
Perez said she asked for a meeting with Aguiar last year, but that the former supervisor declined to meet with the organization. Perez said she would welcome a conversation with Hubbard about the order.
“I would love to know that he’s willing to speak in public about his willingness to take a look at the deeper side of how an emergency order like this affects everyone else — not the people who he thinks are ‘invading,’ but everybody else,” Perez said.
While they might not be coming by the busloads, Perez said migrants coming into the U.S. are still relocating to the area despite the emergency order and finding success in their new home.
“It’s happening right now, and people are carefully, and with support of friends and family, starting lives, because there are dire situations where they’re coming from,” Perez said, “and they are becoming contributing members of our community right here on the East End of Long Island.”
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