The City Council gave Speaker Adrienne Adams the power Thursday to sue Mayor Adams’ administration over violations of the city’s sanctuary laws following City Hall issuing an executive order allowing federal immigration agents back on Rikers Island.
The 51-member council approved a resolution through a voice vote on April 10 authorizing the speaker to sue City Hall on the body’s behalf if the executive order is found to violate city sanctuary laws, which bar the city from cooperating with federal immigration authorities on civil enforcement.
Speaker Adams, during an April 10 news conference ahead of the vote, accused the mayor of advancing the executive order as part of an alleged quid-pro-quo between his private attorney and Trump’s Justice Department to drop his federal corruption charges. The mayor has repeatedly denied that he made any deal with the Trump administration.
Hizzoner announced his intention to sign the directive after meeting with Turmp’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan in February and just days after the DOJ moved to dismiss his charges.
“This mayor has been compromised,” said the speaker, who happens to also be a mayoral candidate. “His administration’s latest executive order inviting ICE onto Rikers Island is the latest example…Let’s be clear, this is about the mayor fulfilling his end of the bargain [with] Trump, selling out New York in exchange for the dismissal of his federal corruption case.”
Yet when asked if the council had a lawsuit ready to go, the speaker said her office is “not looking at a lawsuit per se right now.” She said they are examining the executive order and its signing by First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro after Mayor Adams recused himself from the process to determine the legality of both.
“Our intention is to legally follow through with our resolution and go through this executive order to determine its legality,” the speaker said.
In its resolution, the council argues that the executive order violates city Conflicts of Interest law because of Mayor Adams’ alleged quid pro quo. They further charge that Adams did not truly remove himself from the process even if Mastro signed the order.
“Conflict-of-interest laws provide that Executive Order 50 is the poisonous fruit of Mayor Adams’ corrupt deal and thus invalid,” the resolution reads.
The executive order breaks with a decade-long precedent that ICE has not operated in any capacity on Rikers Island since the passage of a 2014 law that barred it from holding office space there for civil enforcement matters. It calls for the city to enter into a “memorandum of understanding” with the Trump administration that would stipulate that both the city and federal authorities must limit their collaboration to criminal investigations.
Mastro on Thursday said the directive does not violate the 2014 law but instead is “narrowly tailored” to only allow collaboration between the city and ICE on criminal investigations to target “transnational gang” members who were designated as terrorists by the Trump administration. Therefore, he said, a potential City Council lawsuit would be “meritless.”
“It is only for criminal enforcement and expressly excludes civil matters, so that is not permitted under the executive order, and that is not going to happen under the executive order,” Mastro said. “I think that it disrespects some pretty great public servants…to even ask the question when it’s not going to happen and it’s not permitted by the executive order.”
Mastro said there would be unspecified consequences for Department of Correction staff and federal immigration authorities who violate the city’s sanctuary laws, but that the situation would not arise in the first place.
However, council leaders argue that the order opens the floodgates to federal immigration authorities pursuing civil enforcement on Rikers Island in violation of city law. They pointed to a recent instance where the Trump administration mistakenly deported a Maryland construction worker named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador after accusing him of being a gang member — a claim his lawyers dispute.
“We don’t trust the Trump administration, and this is where this is coming from,” Speaker Adams said. “So how are we ever supposed to trust the real effect and what will happen as a result of ICE being brought onto Rikers?”
