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City Wants Hearing Moved From Staten Island, Saying It's Too Hard to Get To

By Nicholas Rizzi | December 21, 2016 5:33pm
 A judge ruled a lawsuit against an IDNYC policy will be heard in Staten Island after the city tried to get it moved to Manhattan.
A judge ruled a lawsuit against an IDNYC policy will be heard in Staten Island after the city tried to get it moved to Manhattan.
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DNAinfo/Trevor Kapp

STATEN ISLAND — The Forgotten Borough might as well be a foreign land for some city officials.

A Staten Island judge was asked to move a court hearing to Manhattan because city employees found it too inconvenient to get on the ferry.

The hearing involved a lawsuit filed by borough-based Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis and Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. in an attempt to stop the city from deleting data gathered during IDNYC applications.

The judge denied the request.

"The City's aggressive attempt to have this case moved from Staten Island to Manhattan is disappointing," said Malliotakis.

"We often say we are the forgotten borough under this administration and it’s because of actions like this."

City lawyers asked Tuesday to move the case to Manhattan court because it would be hard for officials to get to St. George for hearings. Judge Philip Minardo refused, Castorina said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio previously said he would purge the documents gathered during IDNYC applications rather than hand them over to the federal government.

His promise came after the election of Donald Trump, who has talked about deporting 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants.

After the lawsuit was filed, the city announced it will no longer save any documents filed by applicants for municipal IDs as of January.

De Blasio launched the IDNYC in 2015 to give identification cards to residents including undocumented immigrants, the formerly incarcerated and transgender individuals for who getting regular ID is difficult.

The program has had more than 900,000 applications since it launched. It was crafted with a "destroy in case of Tea Party" clause which allows date to be erased.

The Republican lawmakers said destroying the data could create a security risk by making it impossible to trace people who obtained the cards fraudulently and harder to investigate if they used the ID to commit a crime.