At a press conference Mayor Eric Adams regularly holds on Tuesdays, the embattled politician who is still fighting bribery and fraud in a federal corruption investigation under the Biden administration, shared his willingness to collaborate with incoming Trump-era officials on deportation policy.
“Those who are here committing crimes, robberies, shooting at police officers, raping innocent people, have been a harm to our country, our country,” Adams said. “I would love to sit down with the Border Czar [Tom Homan] and hear his thoughts on how we’re going to address those who are harming our citizens.” A clip from the conference has since been shared on several right-wing accounts, MAGA allies and by Elon Musk too.
When asked by a journalist at the press conference if he was open to hearing what the Trump administration’s plan is to deport immigrants and if the city should cooperate with them, Adams said other presidential administrations have set a precedent for it.
“I want you to all go back and google Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Google what they said about those who commit crimes in our city and what they said in our country,” Adams said. “They said those who commit crimes need to get out right away. That was their position. So, this is not a new position.”
Adams has raised concerns among advocates, who see his statement as a pledge to collaborate with Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who President-elect Trump has chosen for a role he calls Border Czar. In the announcement last month, Trump said Homan “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” Trump and his allies have also shared that they consider recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to not have legal status in the U.S., threatening to strip them of status and deport them too. The threats have raised concerns in immigrant communities who have benefited from TPS, like Haitians and Venezuelans. It has also thrown DACA recipients into a tumultuous time as they grapple with the prospect of being deported, thereby tearing them away from the only home they have ever known, having grown up in the U.S. since childhood.
In this regard, Adams’ willingness to collaborate with President-elect Trump’s administration, who won the 2024 election on a mass deportation agenda, has been condemned by several organizations. “Rather than scheming with dangerous people like incoming ‘border czar’ Tom Homan about how to attack and marginalize immigrant New Yorkers, the Mayor should be working to unite and protect our City from Trump’s extremist deportation plans,” Murad Awawdeh, President and CEO, New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement.
Adams’ statement also underscores a fallacious assumption by the Trump administration. The president-elect has vowed to launch “the largest deportation of criminals in American history,” but data shows there aren’t many criminals who could be deported immediately. Less than 1% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts in fiscal year 2024 included deportation orders for alleged crimes.
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“The Constitution is for Americans,” Adams also said during the Tuesday press conference. “I’m not a person that snuck into this country. My ancestors have been here for a long time.”
The statement is seen by civil rights and immigrant rights advocates to popularize a notion that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. Natalia Aristizabal, the Deputy Director of Make The Road NY, in a statement, said, “Mayor Adams cannot strip immigrants of due process simply because he’d rather cozy up to the incoming Trump administration. Everyone in the United States is entitled to the rights outlined in the constitution.”
The director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, Elora Mukherjee, told Gothamist that “the mayor’s claim has no basis in law.” Mukherjee added that “Laws set forth in the Constitution generally apply to everyone present in U.S. soil whether or not they are a citizen and regardless of their immigration status.”
Mayor Adams’ statement remains a pressing concern particularly in a state where — beyond a 2017 ban for state agencies to not inquire about a person’s immigration status and a 2020 ban from making immigration arrests at courthouses statewide — there is no broad measure that exists to address local law enforcement’s collaboration with ICE.
