Mayor Eric Adams met with “border czar” Tom Homan on Thursday morning at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Manhattan for about an hour, releasing a statement later in the day detailing what they had discussed, and reminding New Yorkers of his effort to “find common ground” with the Trump administration.
The mayor, who was just let off the hook by Trump’s Department of Justice on federal corruption charges, announced that he and Homan “are now working on implementing an executive order that will reestablish the ability for ICE agents to operate on Rikers Island.” The federal agency has not had an office in the prison complex since 2015, when then-mayor Bill de Blasio passed stronger sanctuary city laws that limited the city’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The second proposal to come out of the meeting, according to Adams’ statement, is to “embed more NYPD detectives into federal task forces.”
Prior to their meeting, the New York Post reported that Homan was “not happy and hasn’t seen enough progress” about the city’s cooperation with the Trump administration on deportations, according to a source close to him. The Post’s source went so far as to say that the mayor must “beg and be a good boy for Trump” in the wake of the dropped federal charges against him. ICE announced that they had rounded up 100 migrants in the first week after Trump was inaugurated on January 20th, although the agency has not revealed where they are being held or how they will be processed.
Homan, credited as the “intellectual father” of Trump’s family separation policy in his first term, also met with members of the City Council “Common Sense Caucus,” a Republican contingent in the majority-Democratic city legislature, who pressured Adams on his cooperation with the Trump administration. Caucus member Joann Ariola, who took part in the meeting, stressed the need to “hold him (Adams) accountable to those promises that were made” to Homan after the two met in December. She did not specify what those alleged promises are.
The mayor ducked questions from reporters about the meeting hours later at a press briefing about housing and made a hurried exit, sticking to his policy of only accepting “on-topic” questions. Standard practice is for politicians to accept queries about any topic in any forum. As of this writing, the mayor has not scheduled an “off-topic” press conference, where reporters could freely ask him about his meeting with Homan. He has not held one since Wednesday of last week.
