A judge is temporarily blocking the Adams administration from allowing ICE back onto Rikers Island, according to a temporary restraining order signed by a State Supreme Court judge Monday.
Judge Mary Rosado barred City Hall — specifically New York City Mayor Eric Adams, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro and the city Department of Correction — from moving ahead with any agreement with federal agencies to operate on Rikers until she hears from both parties.
She ordered members of the Adams administration and the City Council — which is suing the mayor to block the executive order allowing federal law enforcement to return to the penal island a decade after it departed — to appear before her in State Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning, at which point she could choose to extend or lift her temporary restraining order.
Thus far, federal agencies have not yet moved onto Rikers, as Adams and Mastro, who signed the executive order, have said they’re still hammering out a memorandum of understanding with federal agencies that want to set up shop there. A spokesperson for Adams didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
In its lawsuit, the Council argued that allowing immigration officials back onto Rikers was a violation of the city’s conflicts of interest law, alleging President Donald Trump’s federal prosecutors only moved to drop corruption charges against Adams in exchange for his help on immigration enforcement.
It also questioned whether Mastro had the legal authority to sign the executive order in the first place, after Adams said he was delegating the matter to Mastro to avoid any appearance of a conflict.
Adams and Mastro have denied there was any quid pro quo between the mayor and Trump administration, and have argued allowing federal law enforcement to operate out of Rikers would help the city tamp down on international gang activity.
The 2014 law that booted ICE from Rikers and barred the NYPD and the Department of Correction from honoring most of the agency’s requests to detain inmates on their behalf, did include a carveout that allowed the mayor to use an executive order for ICE to reestablish an office on the island, so long as the federal immigration agency was not conducting civil enforcement there.
Before then, between 3,000 and 4,000 New Yorkers a year were funneled into deportation proceedings from the Rikers jail facilities, which advocates said often occurred for low-level convictions of immigrants with legal status, or even pre-conviction for undocumented people.
Mastro signed the Rikers executive order a week after Adams’ federal charges were formally dropped by a federal judge Dale Ho, who’d written in an opinion “everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” but found he had no choice but to dismiss the charges.
While Mastro’s order does specify that federal authorities are not supposed to conduct civil immigration enforcement from their Rikers post, the Council has argued that under the leadership of Trump many federal agencies have been newly deputized to conduct immigration enforcement, and the city has no way of assuring the information shared with them wouldn’t be used in that manner.
In their lawsuit they pointed to the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held at a prison in El Salvador despite judicial orders for the Trump administration to return him.
“ICE has long been notorious for sweeping unintended targets into its enforcement activities, meaning that allowing ICE back onto Rikers for the purpose of criminal investigation purposes is only a short and slippery slope to civil immigration enforcement,” the lawsuit reads.
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