It’s a meltdown over ICE.
Eric Adams’ top deputy mayor insisted Thursday that ICE won’t start deporting inmates en masse from a resurrected outpost on Rikers Island — as progressive City Council members threatened to sue Hizzoner for allegedly betraying sanctuary city policies.
The city executive order clears the way to reopen the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at the troubled lockup — but only allows the feds to deal with criminal probes, such as those targeting transnational gangs, said First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who signed the directive issued late Tuesday after Adams recused himself.
“Civil matters are excluded. It won’t happen, it can’t happen,” he told reporters during a defensive City Hall news conference.
But when exactly ICE would move back to Rikers remained unclear, as Mastro also revealed that an agreement, or “memorandum of understanding,” between the city and the feds over the office has yet to be finalized.
The heat over ICE only grew Thursday, as City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, no relation to the mayor, said the legislative body is looking for ways to sue over the dead-of-night executive order.
City Council members later took up a resolution giving the speaker authority to “defend against the Adams Administration’s violation of Sanctuary City Laws and the Trump Administration’s attacks on the City of New York.”
The lawsuit threat came on the heels of 30 elected officials firing off a letter accusing the mayor of fulfilling a corrupt “quid pro quo” with President Trump’s administration — and opening the gates for mass deportations from the Big Apple.
The blistering letter demanding that the mayor rescind the order was accompanied by a raucous rally in City Hall Park attended by the council’s speaker and city Comptroller Brad Lander — who are both running in the June Democratic mayoral primary.
Lander, a former Brooklyn councilman, noted he co-sponsored the 2014 sanctuary city law that ultimately booted ICE from Rikers.
He said the law was passed amid concerns that ICE would run roughshod over people’s due process rights.
“You know who we cannot trust with due process? Donald Trump’s ICE,” Lander said.
“I’ll be damned if we’re going to let Eric Adams undermine those laws and put ICE on Rikers. We will not let Eric Adams betray this city one day more.”
ICE had previously funneled between 3,000 and 4,000 New Yorkers every year from local jails to immigration detention before the city adopted sanctuary protections, the letter contends.
Adams, the mayor, has argued that migrants charged with violent crimes should be deported from New York City before they’re convicted — a position he staked out as he moved politically closer to Trump amid his now-dismissed corruption case.
The mayor’s flirtation with the MAGA world saw him promise to issue an executive order reopening the ICE office after meeting with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, who colorfully threatened to be “up his butt” if Adams didn’t help with immigration.
When Trump’s Department of Justice stepped in to get Adams’ criminal charges dropped, many progressives and council members claimed it was proof the mayor had cut a deal selling out the city’s immigrant community to avoid prosecution.
“Your intentions to work with the Trump administration on reckless immigration enforcement are crystal clear, and denials that this is a quid pro quo to release from federal criminal charges are meaningless – even the federal judge overseeing the case stated that ‘everything here smacks of a bargain,’” the lawmakers’ letter states. “New Yorkers see a Mayor that does not care to serve New Yorkers, only to protect himself.”
Mastro claimed that no council members wanted to meet with the Adams administration on the executive order when it was finished after a months-long wait.
A City Council spokesperson denied Mastro’s account.
— Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy