On Wednesday, the mayors of Boston, Denver, Chicago, and New York sat before an often extremely hostile panel of federal representatives at a House Committee on Oversight hearing on local sanctuary policies. Even before the hearing, the committee’s official Twitter account put out a propaganda video attempting to tie these policies and the mayors overseeing them to crime.
One odd man out was Mayor Eric Adams, who alone among the mayors has openly called for more cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and last month seemed to trade the dropping of federal charges against him for closer ties to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement apparatus and its coordinator Tom Homan. Adams was questioned by Democratic congress members about the deal and repeated his position that there was “no quid pro quo.”
Despite this closeness, the only thing that has thus far substantively changed with regards to the city’s approach is the still-undefined plan to put an ICE presence on Rikers Island, which Adams has said would focus vaguely on “violent criminals and gangs,” a notion that has become catch-all language for defending more aggressive immigration enforcement policies. At the end of the day, Adams faces a local version of the constraints that have hampered the Trump administration: neither the president nor the mayor are kings, and cannot by executive diktat supersede the statutory schemes set out by the legislature, whether that’s Congress or the City Council.
While the GOP-controlled Congress has shown itself rather willing to roll over and abdicate many of its prerogatives to the Trump-Musk power grab, the Council has been much more forceful in defending its power and integrity. The day that Adams announced the potential ICE Rikers presence — following the pretty explicit quid pro quo with the Trump DOJ and immigration coordinator Tom Homan — Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, Immigration Committee Chair Alexa Avilés, and Criminal Justice Committee Chair Sandy Nurse released a joint statement saying they were “prepared to defend against violations” of NYC’s 2014 sanctuary law, which broadly prohibits city cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
That law generally allows the NYPD and the Department of Correction to honor an ICE detainer — essentially a request by the federal agency to hold someone in custody for them to come pick them up — only if that person has been convicted of a “violent or serious crime,” defined in the law as a hate crime, a set of serious vehicular felonies, or one of a list of other felonies that range from homicides to witness tampering, or if they are on a terror watch list. Even under those circumstances, ICE must present a judicial warrant, signed by a federal judge and not just an ICE administrator, to take custody.
Per the latest available statistics, covering the quarter of July 1 to September 30 last year, the NYPD received 11 requests and honored none of them, while the DOC received 118 and honored five. This law would seem to pretty explicitly prohibit an ICE presence on Rikers for civil immigration enforcement, which is probably why Adams is trying to shove it in the “criminal” bucket. It is true that ICE does have a component that is mainly focused on criminal-side investigations like trafficking, counterfeiting, and child sexual abuse material, but it’s unclear why they’d need a physical office at Rikers to do this mostly investigative work.
In any case, as I and others have noted, Trump has explicitly directed these agents to deemphasize these criminal investigations and turn their attention to immigration enforcement, which is almost a direct inverse to the administration’s frequent public claims that they are focusing on “the worst of the worst.” The upshot of all this is that the laws are relatively unambiguous in a way that Adams, despite whatever deal he may have entered into, cannot just flout. There won’t be NYPD enforcing immigration law, ICE cannot legally begin carting people off of Rikers Island for civil immigration violations, and so on.
Lately, though, there’s been an effort by MAGA officials and legislators to frame sanctuary policies, officials enforcing them, and even people engaging in basic know-your-rights advocacy and workshops as themselves somehow flouting the law. Homan has been obsessed with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for weeks, repeatedly insinuating that her efforts to share information on rights under the law with constituents is, bizarrely, a violation of law in itself, and is asking the Justice Department to intervene. This push was so explicit and consistent that AOC sent Attorney General Pam Bondi — who herself is now suing New York State over our refusal to share DMV data for immigration enforcement purposes — an unusual letter asking whether she was being investigated.
Homan has threatened prosecution against sanctuary jurisdiction executive officials up to and including the governor of New Jersey, who had made some odd comments about personally hosting a potential migrant at his home. Meanwhile, federal legislators who should know better (or most likely don’t care) are claiming that there is some federal prohibition on sanctuary policies that simply doesn’t exist. At yesterdays’ hearing, Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer berated the mayors over noncooperation and insisted that “it is federal law to turn over those illegal criminals to ICE,” which just is not true. Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna went a step further and told the four mayors that she was making criminal referrals to the DOJ for each of them, an absurd pronouncement.
It has never been the case that states and localities were forced to cooperate or conduct the federal government’s enforcement for it. Plus, it’s a bit bewildering to hear people that otherwise have declared themselves all in on federalism and state and local rights when it comes to things like environmental regulation and anti-aboriton measures, now endorse the idea that a federal police force should get to force local law enforcement into carrying out its goals. Of course, this just highlights that this is about the politics of the issue as opposed to any deeply-held adherence to legal principles.
If a lot of this sounds like mere rhetoric that is dubiously legally enforceable, that is true, but we should remember that rhetoric has an impact. As I wrote recently for City & State, a big part of the Trump administration’s strategy is really about marketing, or magnifying fear among communities of immigrants, documented and undocumented, regardless of their actual ability to follow through. The legal threats and intimidation and sense that the administration will come after officeholders and institutions that defy their goals has its own impact.
Last week, Politico reported that The Floating Hospital in Queens, a sizable community health center, had begun asking would-be patients for proof of citizenship, ostensibly to comply with some unspecified Trump order. As the article pointed out, federal law requires these centers to provide services regardless of ability to pay or status. So, the center appeared to be violating federal law in an effort to comply with some Trump directive that it read far more broadly than other peer institutions, and which probably would not stand up to legal scrutiny. This is exactly what the administration wants: for people to overcorrect or overinterpret and act out of fear of repercussions that likely wouldn’t come, all as a force multiplier to its overall enforcement objectives. It’s a giant bluff, and it will work unless everyone in a position to call that bluff does so.
