The New York City Council is gearing up for a legal battle over the city’s sanctuary laws barring local authorities from assisting in federal immigration enforcement.
Lawmakers passed a resolution Thursday allowing Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to sue Mayor Eric Adams and possibly President Donald Trump over the issue.
The resolution — a required step before the Council can sue — comes two days after the Adams administration signed an executive order allowing federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to reestablish an outpost on Rikers Island.
It also came the same day President Trump posted to Truth Social that he was drafting paperwork to withhold all federal funding from “sanctuary cities” like New York City.
At a press conference Thursday afternoon ahead of the resolution’s passage, Speaker Adams pointed to the long-anticipated City Hall executive order that came a week after a federal judge agreed to drop corruption charges against Mayor Adams at the behest of Trump’s Department of Justice.
“This is about the mayor fulfilling his end of the bargain to Trump, selling out New Yorkers in exchange for the dismissal of his federal corruption case,” she said.
“The mayor is putting his personal interest in Trump’s extremist agenda above our city’s and New Yorkers,” said the speaker, who is also running for mayor. “It is the Council’s responsibility to stand up for New Yorkers, and we intend to continue doing so.”
She spoke hours after an impromptu press conference at City Hall by new First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who defended the executive order he signed in place of Mayor Adams. The mayor has said he was deferring to Mastro to craft any executive order about Rikers to “maintain trust,” after he faced widespread criticism for a perceived quid pro quo with the Trump administration.
Even the federal judge who signed off on the Justice Department’s request to drop the corruption charges they’d filed against Adams wrote that the perceived exchange of help on Trump’s immigration priorities for the dismissal of the case against the mayor “smacks of a bargain.”
First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro speaks at City Hall defending his executive order allowing federal immigration officials back onto Rikers Island, April 10, 2025 Credit: Gwynne Hogan/THE CITY
But Mastro, speaking on Thursday, said the Rikers order was “all about public safety and protecting New Yorkers from these violent gangs.” He said the city is still working on memorandums of understanding with various federal agencies interested in setting up shop at the jail, but declined to say when those would be finished or how many federal officers would be on site.
“They wanted to work with us on criminal investigations and criminal cases to vanquish these organized criminal groups, transnational groups that are posing a threat in our city,” he said.
‘It Won’t Happen. It Can’t Happen.’
Mastro’s executive order argues federal agents are needed on Rikers to help the city combat “violent transnational gangs and criminal enterprises,” citing the Trump administration’s recent designation of MS-13 and Tren del Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations.
The Trump administration is ramping up its deportation efforts, targeting non-citizens it claims are gang members and sending some to an El Salvadoran jail. Advocates for many of the deportees argue the government has provided little evidence — and almost no due process — to back their claims that the accused are gang members.
Asked how the city would prevent federal agencies from funneling people into its widening deportation dragnet, Mastro pointed to the part of the order that explicitly states the city’s cooperation cannot be around civil immigration enforcement.
“The executive order is carefully, narrowly tailored to address the specific issue of violence and gang violence by transnational groups who are designated terrorists,” he said. “It won’t happen. It can’t happen.”
The 2014 so-called detainer law that booted ICE from Rikers forbade the NYPD and the Corrections Department from holding detainees at the behest of ICE unless there was a judicial warrant and someone had been recently convicted of a “violent or serious” crime. But it does allow a carveout for the mayor to use an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities to set up an office on Rikers Island — as long as their goal is not civil immigration enforcement.
The executive order doesn’t touch most of the city’s detainer law, which dictates that DOC can’t hold immigrants at ICE’s request other than those charged with the most serious crimes.
Still, Speaker Adams said she was concerned about how the city could assure it wasn’t cooperating in immigration enforcement.
“We don’t trust the Trump administration and this is where this is coming from,” she said.
Demonstrators rally outside City Hall against Mayor Eric Adams’ executive order allowing ICE and other federal agencies back onto Rikers Island, April 10, 2025. Credit: Gwynne Hogan/THE CITY
For years, before the 2014 passage of the detainer law, ICE agents roamed freely on Rikers and regularly asked jail officials to yank undocumented city detainees out of their housing units for deportation proceedings. ICE agents were often allowed to interview detainees without lawyers present, and sometimes without their knowing they were sitting in front of an immigration officer, advocates said.
Undocumented immigrants could be funneled into deportation proceedings before they’d been convicted of anything, while those with legal status could be put on the pathway to deportation for minor convictions like marijuana possession. This happened to about 3,000 and 4,000 people — undocumented and with legal status — each year, according to estimates from the time.
That access cost the city money. A policy memo prepared by Make the Road New York at the time suggested the city was spending around $53 million per year housing about 3,500 immigrant detainees ICE had held who might have otherwise been released.
ICE was supposed to take people they’d put on detainer into custody within 48 hours, but the agency often took days or weeks to do so. Just last year New York City settled a $92 million class action lawsuit filed by immigrants held illegally past their release dates between 1997 and 2012.
Reuven Blau contributed reporting.
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