Mayor Eric Adams of New York City announced on Thursday that he would issue an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, a significant shift in the city’s sanctuary policies.
The mayor said that he would move to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into the jail to assist in criminal investigations, “in particular those focused on violent criminals and gangs.”
The move followed a meeting earlier Thursday between Mr. Adams, a Democrat, and President Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, in Lower Manhattan. The meeting was seen as an early test of the mayor’s relationship with the Trump administration, and of the degree to which Mr. Adams might owe some fealty after the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against the mayor.
Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general who requested the dismissal, said on Monday that dropping the charges was necessary to free Mr. Adams to cooperate with the president’s immigration crackdown.
ICE used to have offices on Rikers Island, allowing it to easily transfer undocumented immigrants jailed there to ICE custody, until the city passed sanctuary laws in 2014 banning ICE from the jail complex.
Mr. Adams had been seeking a way to allow ICE agents into Rikers without violating the city’s sanctuary laws, and he has appeared to have found a loophole. A provision in one of the 2014 laws permits him to issue an executive order to allow access to federal immigration authorities “for purposes unrelated to the enforcement of civil immigration laws.”
In a series of television interviews conducted after the announcement, Mr. Adams framed the move as a necessary step to “remove dangerous people off our streets” and “to root out these gangs.”
Mr. Adams also said that he and Mr. Homan discussed ways to embed more police detectives in federal task forces focused on gangs and criminal activities.
The mayor has already run into opposition from the City Council, which is controlled by left-leaning Democrats who have vocally opposed the mayor’s desire to change the city’s sanctuary laws.
Mr. Adams said that, initially, Mr. Homan did not understand that the mayor could not unilaterally override the city’s sanctuary laws by executive order. But Mr. Adams suggested that his Charter Revision Commission, whose members the mayor appoints, had the power to go around the City Council and propose changes to the law that could be placed on the ballot.
“I need to use the powers that I have,” Mr. Adams told WABC in a radio interview.
The laws prohibit the city from transferring someone in custody to ICE unless they have been convicted of “violent or serious” crimes — a list of more than 170 crimes that includes rape and murder. ICE must also present a warrant signed by a federal judge.
Those laws are still in effect. Yet the mayor’s move stirred outcry from immigration activists and civil rights groups who raised concerns that it would pave the way for more collaboration between ICE and the city at the expense of vulnerable immigrants.
“ICE’s presence on Rikers serves no legitimate purpose, and opens the door to unlawful collusion between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials in violation of our city’s well-established sanctuary protections,” said Zach Ahmad, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Mayor Adams needs to end this shameful flirtation with ICE, and come clean about what promises he has been making behind closed doors.”
Mr. Homan and ICE officials have long argued that the easiest and safest way for the federal government to apprehend undocumented immigrants charged with or convicted of crimes is by working closely with local jails to directly transfer them to federal custody.
“They need to understand, if we arrest a bad guy at Rikers Island, then the alien’s safe, the officer’s safe, the community is safe,” Mr. Homan told Newsmax after he met with the mayor on Thursday morning. “But when you release that public safety threat back in the public, what do I have to do? We need to send law enforcement officers into that community.”
The meeting on Thursday was the mayor’s second meeting with Mr. Homan after they first met on Dec. 12 in City Hall, before the president’s inauguration, during which the two men discussed the possibility of letting ICE back into Rikers. The mayor emerged optimistic from that meeting, declaring that they shared “the same desire” to go after immigrants who had committed crimes in the city.
But an agreement between the city and the federal government had not materialized, and the terrain shifted significantly: Mr. Trump took office and made New York a target of his immigration crackdown, while the Justice Department’s move to drop charges against the mayor raised alarms, among allies and rivals, that Mr. Adams would now be beholden to the president.
Even before the meeting, Democratic leaders — including elected city officials and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader — joined immigration advocates on Thursday to voice fears that the Trump administration had effectively gained leverage over Mr. Adams.
“The White House made a decision to dismiss the criminal charges pending against Mayor Adams without prejudice,” Mr. Jeffries said in Washington. “Translation: It is the intention of the Trump administration to keep the current mayor on a short leash. How the mayor responds to the White House’s intentions is going to determine a lot about the political future.”
Indeed, the meeting, at the Lower Manhattan building where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has a field office, came one day after Mr. Trump took bold steps to retaliate against New York for its immigration policies.
On Wednesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency shocked city officials by unilaterally clawing back $80 million from a city bank account, reversing the transfer of congressionally appropriated funds meant to cover costs of sheltering migrants.
The seizure of the funds left city officials contemplating legal action as they scrambled to decipher how the federal government had pulled the money out of the Citibank account. It even stunned Mr. Adams, who said he would bring up the issue with Mr. Homan.
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