The commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, Manuel Castro, refused to criticize elements of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda when grilled by City Councilmembers at a budget hearing Thursday morning.
Castro — whose official biography notes that he “crossed the border with his mother and grew up undocumented in New York City” and “was part of the early generation of young immigrant activists known as DREAMers” — wouldn’t say if he’d been instructed to hold his tongue by Mayor Eric Adams, who himself said he won’t publicly criticize the president.
In his first month and a half back in office, Trump has made sweeping attempts to remake the nation’s immigration system, attempting to end birthright citizenship, moving to terminate various forms of legal immigration including Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole, and revoking longstanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement guidance not to conduct immigration raids in schools and houses of worship, among other changes.
Castro declined to respond when Councilmember Shahana Hanif (D-Brooklyn) pressed him to outline what parts of the president’s agenda the Adams administration opposed, and what parts it’s actively fighting.
“We can’t and don’t want to weigh in on these ongoing debates,” Castro said.
Hanif went on to ask if Castro’s office had been instructed by Adams not to criticize the president’s policies.
“We continue to follow the instructions of our communications deputy mayor and the teams that are providing what we can and cannot share,” Castro said. “These are orders that we have to follow.” He didn’t specify what those orders are.
A spokesperson for Adams didn’t return a request for comment immediately.
THE CITY reported last month that Adams had warned high-ranking officials in his administration from criticizing the president, in the fallout of days of confusion over the city’s shifting policies on potential ICE raids at various city-owned facilities.
With an annual budget of under a million dollars and fewer than a dozen full-time staffers, Castro’s office isn’t the main agency that interacts with immigrant New Yorkers day to day as they access any number of city services including shelters, hospitals and schools.
Still, the office created in 2001 by a voter referendum is seen as a key bully pulpit for the city’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants, tasked with advising and setting policy on behalf of the city’s immigrants who make up nearly 40% of the city’s population. Then-commissioner Bitta Mostofi was an outspoken and regular critic of policies she felt would be detrimental to the city’s immigrants under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Castro’s testimony Thursday was the latest example of what Adams’s many critics see as deference to the Trump administration in exchange for the Justice Department’s push to drop criminal corruption charges against the mayor.
The hearing came a day after Adams joined three other Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities to testify before the Republican-led House oversight committee in Washington, D.C., where Republicans are threatening to withhold federal funding to sanctuary cities and even to refer city leaders who don’t comply to the DOJ for criminal charges.
The Trump administration last month abruptly revoked $80 million in federal funding already allocated to New York City to reimburse it for expenses it spent handling the migrant and asylum seeker crisis. City attorneys are suing in that case, but haven’t joined onto a number of other legal challenges to Trump administration policies, including one challenging his attempt to end birthright citizenship, which has been joined by states including New York, and the city of San Francisco.
During Thursday’s hearing, Castro also refused to comment on Adams’s call for New York City to roll back its “sanctuary city” laws and the promise the mayor made after meeting with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan nearly a month ago to sign an executive order allowing ICE back onto Rikers Island. That order has yet to be filed.
“No sanctuary laws or politics have changed,” Castro said. “I want to keep it at that so as not to confuse.”
Hanif, for her part, said it was “quite embarrassing” that the commissioner of immigrant affairs “has nothing to say about the Trump Administration’s rollback on immigration protections and the mass deportation agenda.”
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