Mayor Eric Adams says NYC must ‘modify’ sanctuary laws, offering clearest stance to date

After staying tight-lipped on his position for weeks, Mayor Eric Adams came out in favor of modifying the city’s sanctuary status laws late Monday — lending his support to a growing chorus of mostly conservative voices who have called for abolishing the local immigration protections in the wake of several high-profile crimes involving migrants.

The sanctuary laws, which date back to the 1980s, prohibit city government workers and agencies from helping federal immigration authorities with tracking down and detaining immigrants residing in the five boroughs for deportation purposes. There are exceptions to the laws that allow the city to cooperate with the feds in some cases, including if an immigrant has been convicted of a serious or violent crime.

Existing laws do not permit the city to cooperate with the feds if a foreign national has merely been charged with a crime.

In a town hall-style event in Brooklyn on Monday night, Adams said the existing laws are too lax and that he wants to see them changed.

“The overwhelming number of migrants and asylum seekers that are here, they want to work … but those small numbers that are committing crimes, we need to modify the sanctuary city law that if you commit a felony, a violent act, we should be able to turn you over to ICE and have you deported,” Adams said, a remark that drew applause from participants at the town hall held at a public school in Canarsie. “It is a right to live in this city, and you should be not committing crimes in our city in doing so. Right now, we don’t have the authority to do so.”

Before Monday, the mayor largely avoided offering his view on the sanctuary issue, saying only that the question should be posed to the City Council, whose support would likely be required to tweak the laws. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said earlier this month her chamber has “no plans” to alter the sanctuary laws.

Spokespeople for Mayor Adams didn’t immediately return requests for clarity Tuesday on how exactly the mayor would like to see the sanctuary laws changed.

Before the sanctuary laws were strengthened under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, city agencies like the NYPD and the Department of Correction were able to detain undocumented immigrants charged with crimes on behalf of ICE until the federal agency could take over custody and place them in deportation proceedings. Back then, ICE even had an outpost on Rikers Island, a reality advocates and Democrats labeled as cruel and damaging to the city’s reputation as a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who call the Big Apple home.

Local Republicans and some conservative Democrats started vocally pushing for rolling back the sanctuary protections last month after a group of migrants were caught on surveillance video kicking an NYPD officer outside a shelter in Manhattan. Body camera footage that was later released by the NYPD showed the assault was preceded by the officer putting his hands on one of the migrants.

Amid an influx into the city of more than 170,000 mostly Latin American nationals since spring 2022, there have been a handful of other crimes involving migrants further fueling the calls for changes to the local sanctuary laws.

The mayor’s support for modifications to the laws was hailed on social media by voices on the far-right end of the political spectrum.

“Wow! Mayor Adams is asking for a change in New York City’s sanctuary city law. Good for him,” Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing Turning Point USA group, wrote on X. “Now he needs to go all the way and move to abolish it.”

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