On the heels of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday remained mum on his administration’s plans to protect the Big Apple’s undocumented immigrant population from the new commander-in-chief’s threats of mass deportations.
During his weekly “off-topic” press conference on Jan. 21, the mayor said he has been “very clear” that he would uphold the city’s sanctuary laws, which bar local law enforcement entities from working with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in many cases. However, he refused to go into specifics on how he plans to do so.
Instead, on Tuesday, he sought to calm frayed nerves among immigrant communities around the five boroughs.
“I’ve been very clear on this, and it’s not going to change,” Adams said. “We want to bring down the anxiety. We want our immigrants to know that this is the city of immigrants; this is the country of immigrants. It’s imperative that you go to school, use the hospital service, use the police services.”
At the same time, the mayor also repeated Tuesday that migrants who “commit violent crimes in our city have violated their right to be in our city and in our country.” He has never made clear whether he is speaking about migrants who have been convicted of a list of nearly 200 crimes, for which the city can cooperate with ICE; or those who have been merely accused of a crime, who are protected by sanctuary laws.
The city still has nearly 50,000 undocumented migrants in its care, following a wave of over 230,000 newcomers who have arrived in the five boroughs since spring 2022.
On Monday night, Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at closing the southern U.S. border with Mexico to immigration; ending citizenship granted to children of noncitizens born in the US — known as birthright citizenship; and blocking migrants from seeking asylum. The president also pledged to deport “millions of criminal aliens” in his inauguration speech in the US Capitol Rotunda.
Yet when asked by a reporter Tuesday, Mayor Adams, who attended Trump’s inauguration on Monday, did not offer any specific plans he says the city has developed to protect immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime from deportation by the Trump administration. Instead, he said immigration policy is determined by the federal government and all the city can do is make sure its agencies are aware of federal rules.
“It comes to one thing: the federal government is responsible for immigration policies,” Adams said. “Our training is to make sure that they know, that our agencies know that. … It’s scenario and role-playing. We have instructed our agencies.”
While Adams has often bemoaned the city’s sanctuary laws, his silence on how he would specifically uphold them is notable. This has fed growing speculation that Adams is avoiding crossing Trump on any issue because he hopes the president will pardon him if he is convicted in his federal corruption case.
The mayor also gave a full-throated endorsement to Trump’s broader immigration agenda.
“We need to secure our border,” he said. “We need to make sure that we don’t allow those with criminal intentions to come to our city and country. That’s what the American people stated. And that is what we should be looking towards coordinating to make it happen.”
Kcassman