With Mayor Eric Adams testifying in Washington D.C. before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on immigration policy Wednesday morning, the New York Civil Liberties Union held a rally on the steps of City Hall, where local leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Big Apple’s longstanding sanctuary city laws, which were first passed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1989. “We are a city of immigrants and the city we built together is unlike any other,” said NYCLU chief executive Donna Lieberman. “It is that success, that power, driven by immigrants and people from all walks of life that terrifies Trump and his MAGA cult.” The hundred-odd NYCLU protesters and Lieberman were joined by all of the citywide elected officials other than Adams – Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation to the mayor), and City Comptroller Brad Lander – as well as City Council members from across the city.
A thread running throughout the event was the ongoing scandal concerning the mayor’s perceived conflict of interest with the White House. A former federal prosecutor who resigned in protest claims she saw the mayor’s lawyers negotiate a quid pro quo with the administration, offering Adams’ compliance on mass deportations in exchange for the case being dropped, which it eventually was. Lieberman accused the mayor of “pandering for a MAGA-stamped get-out-of-jail-free card,” while Jumaane Williams called him a “deputy president for the White House.”
As the Trump administration clashes with sanctuary cities for resisting the stated goal of deporting more than ten million undocumented migrants, New York’s mayor has played both sides, agreeing to the White House’s demands to facilitate ICE’s operations in his city (reopening ICE’s office on Rikers Island, permitting agents to perform searches in sensitive locations like schools and churches), while paying lip service to immigrants in speeches and op-eds, like the one he published yesterday in the New York Post.
For Councilwoman Carmen De La Rosa, who represents District 10 in upper Manhattan and Marble Hill, the hypocrisy is too great to ignore: “we have people like Eric Adams who campaigned in my community and told the people of Washington Heights that he’s ‘Dominican, baby,’ to then go to Congress to sell us out.” De La Rosa, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, went on to illustrate the harm in the policy Adams is allowing from federal authorities. “When children go to school in the morning, and they have the real thought in their mind that when they come home, their parent might be deported,” she told reporters on the steps of City Hall, “those are the real traumas that we are inflicting.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, echoed De La Rosa’s concerns and gave hard data about how deeply they will affect New Yorkers. “Right now, forty percent of New York City residents are immigrants,” he said. “Fifty percent of New Yorkers live in a household with at least one immigrant member, and that includes one million children who live in mixed-status households who would be at risk of family separation if Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies go through.”
The concern is well-founded, as Trump’s so-called “border czar” Tom Homan is credited as the source for the family separation policy in his first term, which wrenched thousands of children from their parents, many of whom have never been reunited. Lander’s words are backed up by evidence that the mass deportation threat from Homan and Trump this time around is already affecting daily life in the city, as the New York Times reports that people in immigrant neighborhoods are limiting their time out in public for fear of being stopped by ICE.
The city has yet to share any data concerning the number of deportations carried out so far by the Trump administration in the city, though reports suggest that the White House is frustrated over the slow pace of deportations.
