Mayor Eric Adams’s Threats to New York as a Sanctuary City

SUMMARY

The Immigration and Nationality Law Committee issued a statement urging Mayor Eric Adams to maintain New York City’s longstanding sanctuary city policies. These protections are not only central to the City’s identity as a welcoming haven but are essential for its socioeconomic health. For over three decades, mayors with diverse political ideologies have upheld New York City’s sanctuary city status, ensuring all residents, regardless of status, have access to services without fear of deportation, including accessing medical care, taking their children to school, and reporting crimes to the police and cooperating in law enforcement investigations. Accordingly, studies have long shown that sanctuary jurisdictions perform better than comparable non-sanctuary jurisdictions across a range of social and economic indicators. Recent proposals indicate a troubling shift in the Mayor’s approach, allowing federal immigration presence in local facilities, potentially conflicting with sanctuary laws, and eroding public trust. “The City Bar urges our elected officials to uphold the sanctuary laws that protect families, encourage civic confidence, and contribute to economic and public safety.”

STATEMENT

The New York City Bar Association (the “City Bar”) urges Mayor Eric Adams to maintain New York City’s longstanding sanctuary city policies.[1] Recently, the Mayor has indicated a desire to alter these policies, which have historically offered essential protections to immigrants regardless of their immigration status. These protections are not only central to the City’s identity as a welcoming haven but are essential for its socioeconomic health. Any changes could instill fear and disarray within communities, undermining the strength and dynamism that characterize New York City. It is crucial to reaffirm our support for immigrants’ rights and call upon the Mayor to revisit his stance.

For over three decades, mayors with diverse political ideologies have upheld New York City’s sanctuary city status, ensuring all residents, regardless of status, have access to services without fear of deportation. Since 1989, New York City mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudolph Giuliani have upheld the City’s sanctuary city status.^[2] New York City’s sanctuary protections^[3] enable all New Yorkers, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, to feel safe in accessing city services, including accessing medical care, taking their children to school, and reporting crimes to the police and cooperating in law enforcement investigations, all without fear that city officials or municipal workers will turn them over to immigration enforcement agents.^[4] Accordingly, studies have long shown that sanctuary jurisdictions perform better than comparable non-sanctuary jurisdictions across a range of social and economic indicators.^[5]

Immigrants play a crucial part in the City’s economic framework. Sanctuary cities like New York outperform non-sanctuary counterparts in socioeconomic metrics, highlighting the value of inclusive policies. Nonetheless, on September 6, 2023, Mayor Adams remarked that the so-called “migrant crisis,” a term used to describe the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrant newcomers to New York City since April 2022, would “destroy New York City.”^[6] He claimed that, “[w]e have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut – every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us.”^[7] This rhetoric correlating the arrival of immigrant newcomers with the purported destruction of the City raises the danger of increased discrimination and violence against recently arrived immigrants throughout the City.^[8]

Mayor Adams’s rhetoric overly simplifies fiscal challenges by attributing them to immigrant communities and diverting attention from other critical budgetary issues such as mismanaged funds and ineffective contracts. For several budget cycles, the mayoral administration has cited the so-called “migrant crisis” as a reason to implement blunt cuts to services across a wide range of agencies and mayoral offices. The administration has ignored the variety of other factors contributing to a strain on the City’s budget—such as slowed economic growth and the expiration of COVID-era funding.^[9] Moreover, the New York City Independent Budget Office has found that the City’s budgeted costs have remained elevated since the population surge in summer 2023, even as the number of new arrivals has declined,^[10] suggesting that the City may be using immigrants as a scapegoat to mask other financial problems or as a political football to try to wrest more funding from the federal government.[11]

Moreover, reports from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and testimony from oversight hearings of the New York City Council have revealed that, in responding to the recent arrival of immigrants, the City has awarded numerous expensive, no-bid contracts to entities with no prior experience serving immigrant communities rather than awarding contracts to trusted community partners or immigrant-serving agencies through a competitive bidding process that could have maximized value and saved the City money while still providing quality, culturally appropriate services.^[12] It seems that political cronyism may be as much to blame for the budgetary problems as anything else.

Studies consistently debunk the myth linking immigrants to a rise in crime, and the City’s data confirms a decline in crime rates, contradicting claims that sanctuary policies compromise safety. In February 2024, Edward Caban, then-commissioner of the New York City Police Department, conflated immigrants with crime by citing an alleged “migrant crime wave.”^[13] There was no factual basis for this conflation. Indeed, as the administration recently announced, “crime [was] down across New York City in 2024, with 3,662 fewer crimes.”[14] Studies have also consistently shown that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes.^[15]

Again, using purportedly increased criminal activity as an excuse, Mayor Adams has questioned New York City’s detainer laws.^[16] The City Bar has long believed that the detainer laws are necessary for ensuring that the City complies with the constitutional requirement of probable cause when working with immigrant enforcement agents to detain an individual.^[17] In February 2024, the Mayor came out in favor of modifying the City’s sanctuary status laws to make it easier for his administration to help federal authorities deport immigrants merely suspected of crimes.^[18] Such overhaul of the City’s local laws would flout due process and upend local criminal court proceedings while perpetuating family separation and dividing communities.^[19]

The Mayor’s efforts to upend the City’s sanctuary policies have become more pronounced in the last few months. Since the election of Donald Trump as president in November 2024, Mayor Adams has met with Tom Homan, the president’s anti-immigrant U.S. border czar,^[20] and stated that the City could be “very helpful” in enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.^[21] In January 2025, the Adams administration distributed a memorandum to municipal employees and migrant shelter operators^[22] that contained an overbroad exception to the New York City local law limiting non-local law enforcement access to non-public areas of City property.^[23] The memo instructs City employees that they may allow immigration enforcement officials to enter without a judicial warrant any time they “reasonably feel threatened.”[24]

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, Deputy Speaker Diana Ayala, and Chair of the Committee on Immigration Alexa Avilés described the Adams administration’s new guidance as “highly irresponsible, confusing, and dangerous to New Yorkers and our workforce,” because it “is inconsistent with City law and also exceeds the policy guidance, required by local law, for how city agencies should interact with non-local law enforcement.”^[25] Heads of unions that represent New York City workers noted that the guidance would make frontline shelter staffers less safe because their “members will be put in an impossible situation of performing their duties of keeping shelter residents safe while the City gives them contradictory and unclear guidance.”^[26] The Legal Aid Society warned that the new guidance would deter families from seeking shelter and undermine trust in city institutions.^[27] Mayor Adams’s administration, through Corporation Counsel Muriel Goode-Trufant, ultimately issued follow-up guidance via a flowchart that more closely conformed to local law.^[28]

The City Bar is also concerned that the Mayor may have reached private understandings with the federal government related to immigration issues that are tied to the pending federal criminal case against the Mayor. We previously addressed this issue in our statement dated February 17, 2025,[29] but it is worth reiterating some of the facts here. Consider the following chronology:

• On February 10, 2025, U.S. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil J. Bove III ordered Danielle R. Sassoon, then the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to move to dismiss without prejudice the federal charges against Mayor Adams, leaving open the possibility of bringing the charges again at a later date.[30] In his letter to Sassoon, Bove said that the decision to drop the charges was unrelated to the merits of the case, and that the case was distracting Adams from helping Trump with immigration enforcement.[31] Sassoon and seven other prosecutors resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order.[32]

• In a February 12, 2025, letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon said Adams’s lawyers had proposed a “quid pro quo” in which the mayor would help enforce Trump’s hardline immigration policies only if the charges were dropped.[33]

• On February 13, 2025, Mayor Adams announced that he would issue an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, a significant shift in the City’s sanctuary policies.^[34] As of this writing, the Mayor has yet to issue the executive order, and it remains unclear whether the proposed opening of an ICE satellite office on Rikers Island would fall within the narrow parameters permitted by local law.^[35]

• A day later, on February 14, 2025, Mayor Adams and U.S. border czar Tom Homan appeared side-by-side on “Fox & Friends.”^[36] During this appearance, Homan remarked that, in addition to working together to reopen an ICE facility on Rikers Island, he and Mayor Adams were “working on some other things that we don’t really want to talk about in open areas because the City Council will be putting roadblocks upon us,” and that if the Mayor “doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”^[37]

Recent proposals indicate a troubling shift in the Mayor’s approach, allowing federal immigration presence in local facilities, potentially conflicting with sanctuary laws, and eroding public trust.[38]

The City Bar is steadfast in its dedication to preserving New York City’s role as a sanctuary city. We urge our elected officials to uphold the sanctuary laws that protect families, encourage civic confidence, and contribute to economic and public safety.

About the Association
The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has 23,000 members, is to equip and mobilize a diverse legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org