Adams Asks Trump Administration to Stop Courthouse Migrant Detentions

Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday demanded that the federal government stop making arrests at New York City immigration courts, marking a break with President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as the mayor runs a long-shot re-election campaign.

Mr. Adams, along with the city’s top lawyer, Muriel Goode-Trufant, said that New York City had filed a brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the administration’s authority to detain people who show up for mandatory immigration hearings.

The brief claims that New York City’s leaders “cannot effectively govern” if many residents are too frightened to appear for routine legal proceedings. The detention practice, the city argues, threatens to “deter people from accessing the court system on which local governance depends.”

“We should allow New Yorkers to feel secure to attend legal proceedings in their pursuit to obtain legal status,” Mr. Adams said in a statement, adding that “no one in our city should feel forced to hide in the shadows.”

Mr. Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges last fall and for months drew closer to President Trump as he lobbied the government to abandon the case. The mayor publicly supported some of the president’s policies targeting migrants, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped after prosecutors said they were hindering him from helping with the administration’s deportation campaign.

The mayor’s statement on Tuesday showed that alliance under strain as Mr. Adams tries to win a second term and distances himself from the president, who is widely unpopular in New York City.

Mr. Adams in recent months has publicly expressed frustration with the city’s sanctuary laws, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and had pushed to allow the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to reestablish a presence on Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail complex, from which it has been effectively banned for more than a decade.

In February, Thomas Homan, the president’s top border adviser, warned Mr. Adams during a Fox News appearance that he would be “in his office, up his butt” should he not comply with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

The interaction, along with the administration’s decision to drop the corruption charges, bolstered claims that there was a quid pro quo, which Mr. Adams and the Justice Department have denied.

Though the scuttled prosecution enabled Mr. Adams to seek a second term, he was politically damaged by aligning with Mr. Trump in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one. Mr. Adams is running as an independent, having opted out of the Democratic primary.

Last month, days after an off-duty customs officer was shot in Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department sued Mr. Adams in his official capacity, claiming that New York City’s sanctuary policies were undermining the federal government’s crackdown.

The lawsuit claimed that New York’s laws had engendered the attack. Two men arrested in connection to the shooting had entered the country illegally, federal officials said. More broadly, the suit claimed that sanctuary policies violate federal law by blocking ICE from interviewing detainees and endanger agents by forcing them to seek out migrants in communities rather than in jails.

In a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, on Tuesday, Ms. Goode-Trufant defended the city’s sanctuary city policies, saying that states and cities “need not participate” in federal immigration enforcement.

The suit that Mr. Adams supported Tuesday was filed this month by organizations that represent undocumented immigrants facing deportation. It claims that the Trump administration has turned mandatory court hearings into traps and has denied migrants due process.

ICE agents arrested more than 3,200 immigrants in the New York City area between late January and the end of July, about a threefold increase from the six-month period before Mr. Trump took office. Many were detained after being summoned to immigration court or ICE offices, according to federal data.

In recent months, conditions inside immigration holding cells in New York have come under sharp scrutiny by elected officials, activists and judges.

That includes Mr. Adams, who in July sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding that it inspect the cells. Last week, a judge ordered ICE to hold fewer people in the cells at its Lower Manhattan offices at 26 Federal Plaza.

The Adams administration has also filed other so-called amicus briefs challenging some of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including over the detention of migrants enrolled in public schools. And the city has sued the administration over $80 million in federal funding meant for migrant shelters that the White House abruptly clawed back this year.

The courthouse arrests, which have become a daily occurrence, have caused an uptick in the number of undocumented immigrants without criminal records being held, according to a New York Times analysis.

The city’s brief on Tuesday went a step further. It claimed that the arrests were not only harmful to the people detained, but also subverted local government.

For instance, the brief says, immigrants are more likely to forgo health care when they fear deportation. Prosecuting crime also becomes more difficult when witnesses or victims worry they will be asked about their immigration status, it argues.

“A system built on individual reporting cannot function properly when large segments of our population are unwilling to report the behavior our laws protect against,” the brief says.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.