In his weekly press conference today, Mayor Eric Adams reiterated his positions on immigration and New York’s sanctuary city laws, continuing to align himself with the incoming Trump administration’s hardline policies. Adams’ comments follow an interview with WCBS-TV’s Marcia Kramer yesterday where he stated that he was looking at options to go around New York City Council, which overall does not share Adams’ views on the need to reform its policies on migrants.
Eric Adams has consistently stated that the de Blasio administration overreached with its changes to New York’s sanctuary city laws, and repeated those concerns today. “We cannot communicate with ICE when people commit serious, violent acts – I disagree with that,” the mayor said. “That was not the sanctuary city law that mayor Koch put in place, it was not the sanctuary city law that Bloomberg did, the previous administration made a major change.” The De Blasio administration that preceded Adams’ expanded sanctuary city protections by removing the ICE office at Rikers Island jail and narrowing the cases in which New York City officials can cooperate with the federal agency’s requests to detain people for deportation. Despite De Blasio’s changes that call for less cooperation, ICE has broad authority to arrest or detain based only on immigration status that it can and does use within New York City. According to federal data, ICE arrested nearly ten thousand people in New York in 2023, the vast majority with no criminal record whatsoever, based purely on their immigration status.
At issue is the legality of the mayor’s ability to circumvent the city’s legislative body in changing De Blasio’s reforms, which he says he will do by leaning on the head of the city’s Law Department, the corporation counsel. “My directions to the corps counsel is: give me my options,” the mayor explained in the briefing today, “if I had legal standings to overturn that law, then that’s the conversation I want to have with the corp counsel.” The current corporation counsel (the title has nothing to do with private corporations, and is just an indication that New York City is legally categorized as a “municipal corporation”) is Muriel Goode-Trufant, a 30-year veteran of the city’s Law Department. There is yet to be any public announcement from her or the department.
Adams prepares for a meeting on Thursday with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, saying in today’s briefing that he was “excited about the conversation.” Homan was a major factor in the first Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy while he was at ICE, which separated around 12,000 children from their migrant parents. The vast majority of families were never reunited.
