Council celebrates judicial ruling keeping ICE off Rikers
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The City Council, including Councilmember Sandy Nurse, Speaker Adrienne Adams and Councilmember Alexa Aviles, celebrated a recent judicial ruling that found a mayoral executive order allowing ICE to open an office on Rikers Island null and void. Photo by John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The City Council on Tuesday celebrated its victory over the Adams administration, successfully suing to prevent a mayoral executive order allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Rikers Island from taking effect.
Rallying on City Hall’s steps, a group of councilmembers, including Speaker Adrienne Adams, were joined by criminal justice advocates to tout their legal win against the mayor, who dispatched a top deputy earlier this year to issue an executive order opening up the city’s jail complex to ICE and other federal agencies.
A Manhattan judge last week said the mayor’s order was “illegal” and struck it down.
New York Supreme Court Justice Mary Rosado said in her ruling that the order, written by First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, had the “impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.” The order came shortly after the Justice Department pushed to drop the federal corruption case against Adams. In exchange, the mayor promised to help President Donald Trump’s administration with its deportation efforts, the Council alleged in its April lawsuit.
Rosado said in her order that by having the order issued, Adams violated the city’s charter, which says that “no public servant shall use or attempt to use his or her position as a public servant to obtain any…privilege or other private personal advantage, direct or indirect, for the public servant or any person or firm associated with the public servant.” The charter also requires public servants recuse themselves from issues even if there is an "appearance of impropriety,” which the mayor did not do.
“The court recognized all along that the mayor and Randy Mastro’s attempt to do Trump's bidding and, by extension, betray their obligation to New Yorkers, was unlawful,” Speaker Adams said on Tuesday.
The Council and advocates said the legal victory was part of a broader effort to combat the Trump administration’s super charged efforts to detain and deport immigrants in New York City and beyond.
Immigration arrests have exploded over the past several months in the five boroughs, when masked ICE agents began expanding the number of arrests made during court check-ins.
The number of ICE arrests jumped by 46 percent in May, to 409 up from 281 last year, according to recent reporting by THE CITY. The increase continued into June.
The federal government was sued over the practice of arresting immigrants, many of whom do not have a criminal history, at their immigration court check-ins and for their practice of keeping people in a makeshift detainee room at 26 Federal Plaza, the agency’s New York City headquarters.
“It's so important that we understand that ICE is not here to keep us safe,” Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, said during the rally on Tuesday.
“ICE is a growing military force, and it is being deployed across the country to test the limits of how much we will allow ourselves to be subjugated,” the Brooklyn lawmaker added. “And of all the corrupt things that we've seen Eric Adams do, the fact that the mayor readily sacrificed 4 million immigrant New Yorkers was the lowest point I think I've ever seen.”
Last week, Mastro said that the administration “vehemently disagree[d] with the judge’s decision.”
The first deputy mayor, who vowed to appeal the order, claimed that Rosado incorrectly found that Adams didn’t come up against any conflicts of interest in his administration’s issuance of the order and that Mastro “acted entirely independently of the mayor.”
Rosado took a different position.
“The argument that the conflict was cleansed by delegating to First Deputy Mayor Mastro is farcical," the judge’s ruling read. “First Deputy Mayor Mastro is not independent of Mayor Adams and he was appointed and delegated the specific task of issuing Executive Order 50 after Mayor Adams made it publicly known his desired outcome.”
A Manhattan judge recently shot down an executive order issued by Mayor Eric Adams’ top deputy that would have allowed ICE to open an office on Rikers Island. Photo by Benny Polatseck/Mayoral Photography Office
Should the city prevail in its appeal and allow ICE to open an office on Rikers Island through the order, it would be the first time ICE would be allowed to operate in the jails since 2014, the year legislation designating New York City as a sanctuary city was passed by the City Council. The law, which was signed by former Mayor Bill de Blasio, explicitly banned ICE from operating within the jails or in any city facility.
Mastro and Adams claimed that allowing the agency back into the jails was a matter of safety.
“This executive order is about the criminal prosecution of violent transnational gangs committing crimes in our city,” Mastro said in a statement last week. “Our administration has never, and will never, do anything to jeopardize the safety of law-abiding immigrants, and this executive order ensures their safety as well.”
“It is a shame that we can’t put politics aside and allow the executive branch to do its job of making New York City as safe as possible for the 8.5 million New Yorkers who call this city home," he added.
But criminal justice advocates said on Tuesday that the city would have little control over the type of enforcement carried out by ICE, which the Supreme Court recently said could detain people based on their race or language they speak.
“All New Yorkers benefit when we have a clear separation between our city agencies and ICE,” said Rosa Cohen Cruz, the director of immigration policy for the Bronx Defenders. “All New Yorkers deserve to be able to trust in the integrity of institutions without fearing that ICE is going to come and disappear them.”
