‘He’s selling the city’: behind Eric Adams’s New York City administration | Eric Adams

This Valentine’s Day, a new political power couple said their vows on the plush white couches of Fox & Friends in midtown Manhattan: Donald Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams.

The pair appeared on the conservative TV show to discuss an agreement they had reached the day before. Their deal reversed longstanding New York City policy by letting federal immigration agents back onto Rikers Island, the city’s jail complex that largely holds people who have been charged but not yet convicted of crimes. The surprise agreement came as the newly installed leaders of Trump’s Department of Justice were making an extraordinary push to dismiss criminal corruption charges that the agency had been pursuing against Adams.

As Adams grinned beside him, Homan said that allowing Ice agents to once again roam the city’s jail complex was just “step one”.

“We’re working on some other things that we don’t really want to talk about,” Homan said, alluding to their joint efforts to circumvent New York’s “sanctuary city” law.

Then Adams, a Democrat who had risen to power vowing to protect immigrants from the president’s agenda, publicly pledged his acquiescence to the White House’s hardline immigration enforcement agenda: “Let’s be clear: I’m not standing in the way. I’m collaborating.”

The mayor’s about-face could mark a significant victory in Trump’s drive to crack down on efforts by US “sanctuary cities” to fight mass deportations by limiting their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Adams’s TV appearance with Homan was the culmination of a years-long shift. The transformation started two years ago, months after Republican governors started sending buses of migrants to New York City.

At first, Adams welcomed the asylum seekers, but he increasingly blamed them for the city’s fiscal woes, as his administration struggled to fund shelters and services for tens of thousands with little help from state and federal Democrats. The mayor’s anti-immigrant stance then went into overdrive late last year, soon after the re-election of Trump, whose administration in turn moved swiftly to free its newfound ally of federal corruption charges.

Weeks after the election, the mayor, who had once declared that the city would “ALWAYS stand up to” Trump and that immigrants fleeing oppression should remember they were “ALWAYS welcome here”, sounded like a different man.

Weeks after the election, the mayor, who had once declared that the city would ‘ALWAYS stand up to’ Trump and that immigrants fleeing oppression should remember they were ‘ALWAYS welcome here’, sounded like a different man

This new Eric Adams declared that he was “not going to be warring” with Trump and derided those who had “snuck into this country”.

Melissa Mark-Viverito, a former speaker of the New York City council, said Adams’s turn is purely about his own “self-interest and self-preservation”. Candidate Adams used pro-immigrant rhetoric “to get what he wanted”, she said, but to Defendant Adams, it’s no longer useful.

“It’s to save his own skin,” said Mark-Viverito, who championed some of New York City’s landmark sanctuary city legislation. “He’s selling the city and throwing the city under the bus for his own personal gain. There’s absolutely no way to say otherwise.”

Adams’s communications staff did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but in a statement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) praised the New York City mayor’s recent willingness to work with the agency.

“Ice stands ready to work with our law enforcement partners without condition and welcomes the Adams administration’s decision to put public safety over politics by reestablishing an Ice unit at Riker’s Island and correct the dangerous false narrative that caused the Ice unit’s removal in the first place by the prior administration,” said Ice spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

From ‘champion’ of immigrant communities

Without New York City’s immigrants, Eric Adams would not be mayor.

Back when he was a state senator and Brooklyn’s borough president, Adams championed legislation from immigrants’ rights groups, held cultural nights to celebrate the city’s numerous diasporas, and criss-crossed the outer boroughs hosting fundraisers and hanging up posters with his face everywhere from Little Pakistan in South Brooklyn to Flushing, Queens, home to the city’s largest Chinese community.

Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, remembers Adams as a dependable ally on many issues such as the New York state “Dream Act” and educating undocumented residents on their rights.

At events, Awawdeh recalls, Adams would declare himself “the champion” of immigrant communities, fighting for immigrant kids, students and small businesses.

In response, immigrants boosted Adams. They donated en masse to his fundraisers. Without their votes, the once obscure borough president would not have narrowly won the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary.

But Adams’s pro-immigrant rhetoric shifted months after thousands of asylum seekers began arriving in New York City en masse, many shuttled in buses sent by red-state governors seeking to score political points against blue cities.

At first, the mayor welcomed the newcomers “with open arms”. But with then president Joe Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul refusing to provide New York City with significant funding, Adams turned publicly against asylum seekers, following backlash about the newcomer families congregating outside shelters and selling candy on the subway.

Providing shelter and services to the immigrants took a significant chunk out of Adams’s annual budget, prompting him to float unpopular social service cuts and further eroding his ability to finance more ambitious programs.

Amid these challenges, Adams increasingly sought to blame asylum seekers and the escalating costs of providing for them.

“Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams told residents at a town hall on the affluent Upper West Side. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

By September 2024, Adams had bigger concerns than his political future. He was facing a federal indictment from the southern district of New York accusing him of soliciting illegal campaign contributions and accepting lavish trips to Turkey in exchange for doing the bidding of the Turkish president, Recep Erdoğan.

And more campaign finance-related indictments seemed to be on the way.

That year, federal investigators working with the eastern district of New York raided the properties of a longtime adviser and a hotel developer, both of whom had helped organize contributions for Adams.

Weeks after Trump’s re-election, Adams began soliciting meetings with Homan and Trump surrogates and echoing Trump’s immigration policy in public appearances.

Days before Trump’s inauguration, Adams traveled to Mar-a-Lago to sit down with the president-elect, a meeting his advisers said was to discuss “gangs”. Then, hours before his scheduled MLK Day events in New York City, Adams canceled on his constituents and scored a last-minute invitation to Trump’s inauguration, where the mayor of the US’s largest city sat in an overflow room and posed for a photo with influencers Jake and Logan Paul.

After months of Adams’s entreaties, Trump’s new Department of Justice moved to dismiss his criminal charges – over the objections and public protests of numerous prosecutors who framed the sequence of events as a corrupt “quid pro quo”. Adams’s attorney has consistently denied that there was any quid pro quo.

But in a court appearance on Wednesday, Trump’s acting deputy attorney general stood before a federal judge and repeatedly insisted that he was dropping Adams’s charges because they were interfering with his ability to cooperate with Trump’s immigration agenda.

How that cooperation will take shape remains unclear, especially given the lack of information coming from the Adams administration, which did not answer specific questions about newly announced initiatives such as the re-entry of Ice officers onto Rikers Island.

Now they have a compromised mayor of the largest city in the country
Melissa Mark-Viverito

Mark-Viverito, the former speaker of the New York City council, fears that Adams’s collaboration could take New York City back 15 years to a time when corrections officers would hand over lists of immigrants in the jail system to Ice and hold them for federal pickups without judicial warrants and without regard for the kinds of crimes they were being accused of.

She said the cooperation between Adams and the Trump administration seeks to “completely gut” the sanctuary laws that got Ice out of Rikers and limited local law enforcement’s collaboration with the federal agency.

“Now they have a partner in crime,” Mark-Viverito said. “Now they have a compromised mayor of the largest city in the country.”

In a statement, McLaughlin, the Ice spokesperson, applauded the mayor’s cooperation: “We look forward to more areas of collaboration and cooperation and keeping the community safe.”

In response to questions about Ice access to immigrants scheduled to be released from Rikers following the dismissal of their criminal charges, McLaughlin suggested they too could be targeted.

“Non-cooperative jurisdictions waste taxpayer money and government resources while putting their communities at risk,” she said. “In cooperative jurisdictions, Ice can arrest a criminal alien in a safe, controlled location, such as a jail, court lock up area or police precinct, away from innocent members of the general public, thereby limiting their exposure to harm.”