Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem took aim at New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Monday, in the wake of a shooting over the weekend that left an off-duty Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer hospitalized. The shooting was allegedly carried out by Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez and an accomplice named Cristhian Aybar-Berroa, both of whom are undocumented migrants with criminal histories in the United States. Nunez was apprehended after seeking treatment at a hospital for his own wounds as the CBP agent returned fire to defend himself. Aybar-Berroa was apprehended by DHS on Monday.
“Make no mistake,” Noem said in a press conference in New York Monday morning. “This officer is in the hospital today fighting for his life because of the policies of the mayor of this city and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe.” Noem went on to single out mayors of other large cities – Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Michelle Wu of Boston, and Chicago’s Brandon Johnson – with so-called “sanctuary” policies that limit immigration enforcement under certain conditions, saying that “these individuals are protecting criminals.”
“I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place,” Mayor Adams responded a short while later at a press conference in Queens. “I just carry out the rules. The rules are, if you’re in the city of New York, you have a right to services – go to the hospital, educate your children, you have a right to get police services.” The mayor was restating his oft-declared disagreement with the city’s sanctuary city laws, which limit collaboration with federal authorities, with carveouts for violent crime and other exceptions.
Adams also laid blame on former governor Andrew Cuomo. “You know how outraged I am because of Andrew’s bail reform laws on how we have this revolving door criminal justice system,” he said. “So, I am extremely angry that we have a custom border patrol officer that is in the hospital because a person that should have not been on our street was on our street.”
Cuomo’s bail reform passed as part of the state’s 2020 budget bill, which limited the cases in which judges could have a defendant detained pretrial to violent offenses. The reform was a response to what was widely viewed as a two-tiered justice system where the deciding factor of whether a defendant was held pretrial was their ability to gather the funds to make bail, although critics of the measure say that it leaves gaps that allow violent defendants to remain free before their trial, and opens the risk of such defendants not even showing up.
Both Adams and Cuomo are running for mayor on independent ballot lines, and have both served in public office after being elected in Democratic primaries.
Nunez was initially arrested by immigration authorities in April 2023 at the Arizona border, where he was released pending further immigration proceedings. He was then arrested numerous times in the United States for violent offenses, including assault charges, and had a bench warrant for his arrest in Massachusetts for an alleged robbery that included a firearm. Nunez and Aybar-Berroa, both citizens of the Dominican Republic, had orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges.
