New York Mayor Eric Adams is ready to reverse decades of sanctuary city policy that prevents local law enforcement officials from collaborating with federal immigration authorities.
“We can’t have the small number of migrants and asylum-seekers that have been identified as dangerous hide under the law,” he said at a news conference Tuesday.
“There is nothing you can do about it, because you cannot tell ICE,” he said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The city’s laws were meant to protect the city’s immigrant population by limiting how local agencies can assist in federal detention and deportation efforts.
The sanctuary policies have drawn intense backlash from conservatives in recent weeks following some high-profile incidents involving migrants, including a brawl with police and a shooting in Times Square.
Adams’ comments are a shift from three decades of New York City mayoral administrations, which began supporting sanctuary city policies in 1989 when Mayor Ed Koch issued an executive order preventing city agencies from sharing information about migrants with federal immigration authorities.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute at the NYU School of Law, said other mayoral administrations followed suit by implementing policies that give city agencies greater discretion to resist immigration enforcement.
Adams “is saying he wants to go back to a pre-de Blasio level of cooperation with the federal government,” Chishti said, referring to former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Him saying I’ll hand over even the accused goes beyond anything in the past.”
Marlene Galaz, the director of immigrant rights policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, said Adams’ comments put targets on migrant communities’ backs and misinform New Yorkers about how sanctuary city laws work.
“We’re really concerned about the mayor fanning the flames of hate and tensions that already exist in the city,” she said.
Galaz said sanctuary city policies make cities safer by ensuring that migrants are comfortable reporting crimes and acting as witnesses in criminal investigations without fear of deportation.
She referred to a 2017 study by the Center for American Progress, which found that counties with sanctuary policies experience 35.5 fewer crimes per 10,000 people on average than those that lack such policies.
Any change in the city’s ability to collaborate with federal immigration authorities would require passage by the City Council, which said Wednesday it “has no plans to revisit these laws.”
At a news conference Feb. 8, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams rejected rhetoric from city and state officials who advocated for reversing sanctuary city policies after the arrests of seven migrants in the Times Square attack on two New York police officers.
“These bipartisan city policies have no connection to this incident,” the speaker said. “City law does not interfere in the criminal legal process or any federal immigration law. I can assure you that the New York City Council has no power to change the United States Constitution.”
The mayor said he would allow New York City law enforcement to work with federal immigration authorities to deport migrants suspected of crimes or before they have undergone due process.
“They didn’t give due process to the person that they shot or punched or killed,” Adams said in response to a reporter who asked about the implications of his proposed legal change for due process. “There’s just a philosophical disagreement here.”
Some of the city’s Republican U.S. representatives have spoken in favor of Adams’ proposed change. Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis suggested Tuesday on X that Adams should take executive action or give the City Council legislation to repeal sanctuary city laws.
Similarly, Republican Council member Joann Ariola of Queens said she supports Adams’ view that ICE should be able to collaborate with law enforcement officials to deport migrants accused of crimes before they have been convicted.
“When a migrant has used a knife to stab someone at a base camp or has brutally beaten a police officer and it is on tape, I don’t think that they are entitled to any due process,” Ariola said. “They entered our country illegally, they are now committing violent crimes in our country, and therefore ICE needs to get involved and they need to be deported.”
The five other Republican City Council members could not be reached for comment.
Kenneth Genalo, the director of the city’s ICE Enforcement and Removal Field Office, said in a statement that he welcomes opportunities to work with the mayor to remove those who pose public safety threats to the city.