City of Portland Claims Migrant Crisis an “Act of God”

The city of Portland has finally discovered who is responsible for the thousands of homeless migrants that have inundated the city since 2019 and caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis: God.

In response to a civil lawsuit brought by a local healthcare executive and former Democratic candidate for State Senate, the city’s attorneys have argued that the arrival of the migrants and the resulting need for emergency was not their fault.

Instead, the migrant influx was an unforeseeable “Act of God” for which no human is responsible.

Also known as force majeure, the “God clause” is commonly included in contracts as a defense against liability in the event a natural disaster makes fulfillment of a contract impossible.

It’s an argument the city hopes will get them off the hook for breaking their contract with the executive, Steve Woods, CEO of Promerica Health.

The lawsuit, first reported by the liberal Portland Press Herald, concerns a healthcare convention Woods was scheduled to host at the Portland Expo building May 5-7.

The city reportedly broke off the contract with Woods on March 28 in order to accommodate several hundred migrants at a makeshift refugee camp in the Expo facility.

At the time, more than one thousand migrants, mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, had arrived in Portland homeless, jobless, and seeking taxpayer-funded care and accommodations.

More were on the way.

Woods argues that the city had several other options to deal with the migrant crisis that didn’t involve breaking his contract, like piling migrants into local schools or Portland’s cruise ship terminal in the Old Port.

As a result of the decision to break off the contract with Promerica, Woods claims he suffered financial damages in the form of higher rents and expenses. He says he’d sold thousands of tickets and had landed more than 60 sponsors at the time the city cancelled his contract.

Woods is seeking $250,000 in compensation.

The city has no plans to pay.

Portland Communications Director Jessica Grondin told the Portland newspaper that the city isn’t liable for damages because of a clause in the contract that allowed it to terminate Woods’ agreement in the event of “unforeseen circumstances” like “Acts of God.”

The legal dispute will come down to whether the need to use the Expo building for a migrant shelter was actually an unforeseeable event caused by our Heavenly Father rather than a voluntary decision made by city leaders.

Woods contends that other Expo renters, specifically the Maine Celtics, got better treatment than he did and that his contract was broken because alternative shelter options were less politically palatable to city leaders.

But Woods doesn’t address the other obvious problem with the “Act of God” argument: namely, the migrant crisis was the perfectly foreseeable result of deliberate policy decisions made by Portland’s leaders.

The Portland Expo was first used as a migrant shelter in 2019 in response to a nearly identical influx of migrants from less developed nations.

Portland’s leaders enthusiastically embraced the wave of migration even as it struggled to humanely accommodate the new arrivals.

In April of 2019, after former Republican President Donald Trump floated the idea of sending illegal migrants to sanctuary cities, Ethan Strimling, then-mayor of the city, rolled out the welcome mat.

“If he wants to send more immigrants our way, bring them on,” Strimling told news outlets, as fast as he could.

Strimling added that Portland was a sanctuary city where those who have entered the country illegally need not worry about U.S. immigration laws being enforced.

That open-door policy was amplified to an international audience in a June 23, 2019 New York Times story.

“I love the fact that these folks are coming here, and they want a better life, and they’ve chosen Portland,” then-City Manager Jon Jennings said.

“If we have discovered the magic wand that will bring young families to Portland to help us build the next generation, why would we want to stop that, especially when it costs us so little money?” Strimling told the Times.

The Times story also conveyed at length the various city programs that would offer migrants financial support upon their arrival in the Pine Tree State.

The government lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic briefly slowed the flow of migrants into Maine, but would-be asylum seekers the world over would remember Portland’s magic wand, the promise of sanctuary, and the offer of financial support for anyone who made the harrowing journey to Portland.

At the end of 2022 and throughout 2023, migrants continued to arrive in southern Maine seeking the deal Portland’s leaders had offered them.

Whether by Divine Providence or in response to the actions of Portland’s leaders, more than 1,000 migrants have arrived in Maine in 2023 alone, and the city continues to struggle with the burden of accommodating its “New Mainers.”

As for Woods and his conference, the Promerica event will be held this weekend, Sept. 16-17, at the Cross Insurance Arena.

Woods joined WGAN’s Matt Gagnon Friday morning to discuss his civil suit against the city.