New York City Mayor Eric Adams attacked the city’s sanctuary laws on Tuesday, signaling a significant change in a decades-old policy and announcing his support for cooperating with federal immigration agents.
The mayor’s criticism of the laws, which New York has enacted over the past ten years in an attempt to safeguard its immigrant community, was at its harshest to date in his remarks. These rules restrict the ways in which local organizations can support federal detention and deportation activities.
Adams, a Democrat, stated that the Big Apple’s police force should be allowed to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers when someone is suspected of a major felony, such as robbery or gang involvement, citing his “fundamental disagreement” with those regulations.
According to current rules, if a foreign person has been charged with a crime but not found guilty, the city is not allowed to work with ICE. “We should be communicating with ICE, and if ICE makes the determination of deporting, then they should,” Adams said.
“The mere fact that we cannot share with ICE that this person has committed three robberies, that this person is part of an organized gang crew, the mere fact that we can’t say that or communicate that, that’s problematic for me,” he added.
The sanctuary rules implemented by New York have faced significant criticism in the last several weeks due to a number of high-profile events involving migrants, such as a shooting in Times Square and an attack on police in Manhattan.
Adams’s spokesman, Charles Lutvak, stated that the mayor was particularly against two laws that had gone into effect in 2014 and 2017, under his predecessor, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The first prohibits the city from complying with immigration officials’ requests to detain criminal suspects unless those individuals have been found guilty of specific violent crimes and a court has issued an order for their removal. The second forbids the city from providing resources to support immigration enforcement initiatives.
