Two Staten Island Republican state legislators are suing the city to stop Mayor de Blasio from deleting records from the IDNYC program that could be used by incoming President-elect Donald Trump to follow through on his mass deportation pledges. The municipal identification program comes with a destroy-in-case-of-strongarm-conservative-federal-government clause, which, as it turns out, was a prescient idea. De Blasio has vowed to protect New York City's estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants from Trump's roundup.
In their suit, Assemblymembers Nicole Malliotakis and Ronald Castorina of Staten Island argue that destroying the IDNYC files would run afoul of the state Freedom of Information Law, which requires the preservation of documents, and they have said that the records could be useful in future criminal investigations that involve bank accounts opened with the IDs.
"The mayor and the Council speaker are intent on the destruction of all of the records connected to the IDNYC programs. The records, we feel, are very pertinent and important to governmental purposes and this act in fact would violate FOIL," Castorina said at a press conference yesterday.
Responding to the conservative lawmakers' concerns last week, Democratic Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said they could "go ahead and sue us."
Referring to this, Castorina said, "So the speaker invited this litigation, and therefore, just by virtue of the fact that the invitation, that the litigation was invited, there should be a complete block on this information from being destroyed, pending a hearing and whatever motions and or proceedings that we will present to the Supreme Court here in Richmond County."
Castorina, a Trump backer during the presidential campaign, whom you may recall for calling abortion "African-American genocide," or his bill to make assaulting cops a hate crime, claimed that "This is not an immigration issue." Rather, he said his concern was for terror protection and the integrity of city banks.
Trump—whose wife Melania appears to have worked as a model illegally after arriving in the U.S. on a visitor visa, and who has been accused by 11 women of sexual assault—has blamed undocumented immigrants for crime and taking Americans' jobs, and has promised to deport all 11 million people estimated to be in the country without documentation. More recently, he revised the figure to 2-3 million "criminal illegal aliens." The new figure is still concerning to immigrant advocates, in part because experts estimate that only around 820,000 undocumented immigrants have a criminal conviction, meaning following through would require rebranding a large chunk of the population as criminals, building on mechanisms put into place by presidents Bush and Obama.
More than 900,000 New Yorkers have signed up for the municipal ID since it was rolled out in 2014, with free admission to various museums and other perks for signing up designed to entice New Yorkers with legal status.
De Blasio reiterated his intention to protect the records to reporters yesterday, saying, "The whole idea of IDNYC was to give people the opportunity in this city to live a better life for themselves in this city."
Responding to the lawsuit, Mark-Viverito's office sent a statement to the Observer belittling Malliotakis, whose party is a minority in the Assembly.
"It’s sad but not surprising that backbench Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis is more interested in filing ridiculous lawsuits than she is in serving New Yorkers—900,000 of whom have already signed up for IDNYC," spokeswoman Robin Levine told the publication.
