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New York|Adams Is Allowing ICE to Return to Rikers. Here’s What to Know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/nyregion/rikers-island-ice-adams-trump.html
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Federal immigration officials had been barred from the New York City jail complex. The mayor says they can return, but only to work on criminal cases.
April 10, 2025Updated 10:08 a.m. ET
For years, a handful of federal immigration agents worked out of a trailer office at the jail complex on Rikers Island in New York City. Their sole mission: to identify detainees who were undocumented so that they could be transferred to federal custody and deported.
The practice, at times contentious, turned Rikers into a deportation pipeline for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, leading to the expulsion of thousands of undocumented immigrants, including many who were never convicted or had only minor violations.
The city barred ICE from Rikers after passing sanctuary laws in 2014 that limited the city’s cooperation with the federal government and all but sealed the pipeline. But after a 10-year hiatus, ICE will soon reestablish a presence at the city’s largest jail after the administration of Mayor Eric Adams issued an executive order on Tuesday restoring its access.
The mayor said that, this time around, ICE and other federal agencies will have a more limited presence at Rikers, with the agency’s work restricted to criminal investigations, such as tackling transnational gangs.
Those assurances did little to tamp down concerns from civil rights groups and immigration lawyers. They said that the move violated the spirit of the city’s sanctuary laws and could give ICE a foothold to re-establish its deportation pipeline at Rikers.
Even former top ICE officials warned that the executive order could still help the president’s broader deportation efforts, even if it was narrowly crafted to prevent the city from helping President Trump enforce federal immigration laws, many of which are civil, not criminal matters.
