New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) is suing 17 charter bus companies for their role in an effort by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to send an estimated 30,000 migrants to the city and overwhelm its public assistance programs, a court move that marks the latest clash between the red-state governor and his blue-city targets.

The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Thursday, seeks at least $708 million from the transportation companies, what New York City says is the approximate cost of sheltering and caring for the tens of thousands of people who have been sent there since the spring of 2022.

The complaint argues that the charter bus companies have operated in bad faith by profiting from Texas’s plan to transport people seeking public assistance and to shift those costs to New York, a violation of New York state’s semi-obscure 19th-century Social Services Law.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), in a statement supporting Adams’s lawsuit, accused Abbott of using vulnerable migrants as political pawns.

“It’s about time that the companies facilitating [Abbott’s] actions take responsibility for their role in this ongoing crisis,” Hochul said. “If they are getting paid to break the law by transporting people in need of public assistance into our state, they should be on the hook for the cost of sheltering those individuals - not just passing that expense along to hard-working New Yorkers.”

Most of the bus companies named in the suit are based in Texas, though several operate from California, Ohio and Iowa.

The lawsuit says the bus companies’ “evil intent” is evident in the high profit margin reaped from the Texas contracts, which paid more than five times the cost of a regular one-way ticket. The complaint cites a November report from Axios that found via a records request that Texas spent roughly $1,650 per person between April 2022 and October 2023 on busing, while a typical ticket costs about $291.

Abbott denounced New York’s complaint, calling it “baseless.”

“It’s clear that Mayor Adams knows nothing about the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, or about the constitutional right to travel that has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Abbott said in a statement Thursday. “Every migrant bused or flown to New York City did so voluntarily, after having been authorized by the Biden Administration to remain in the United States.”

Abbott has been public about his plans to bus or fly asylum seekers from the southern border to other states as a way to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies. He has openly targeted large cities run by Democratic mayors, including New York, Chicago, Denver and Washington.

Mayors of these cities have criticized Abbott for not coordinating with local officials, which for more than year led to often chaotic drop-offs at odd hours and sometimes on weekends, when staffing to receive and process migrants was minimal. City officials in destinations such as Chicago have warned that the lack of notice creates a dangerous situation for migrants as the weather turns colder, with many arriving without winter attire.

In recent weeks, Chicago and New York limited how many migrant buses can arrive each day and restricted the times they can drop off passengers. In response, Texas has flown or bused the asylum seekers into surrounding suburbs before putting them onto commuter trains bound for the cities.