Mayor Eric Adams wants more power to remove undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. The City Council has other ideas.
In the early morning hours on the Sunday before Christmas, a man set a homeless woman on fire and killed her inside an idling F train at a Coney Island subway station.
Police arrested a suspect, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, later that day and prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and arson.
Zapeta-Calil is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said that he had been deported in 2018 but re-entered the United States. Once he was charged, ICE officials would send a request to New York authorities to move him into their custody so he could be deported once more.
The episode occurred at a volatile time in the debate over immigration in New York — and the debate over Zaepta-Calil’s fate crystallizes the fight among Democrats who universally purport to revile President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to “mass deport” undocumented immigrants.
After grappling with one of the largest immigration influxes in city history, Mayor Eric Adams in particular has attempted to walk a fine line between cracking down on migrant crime and assuring the city’s immigrant community he will protect them from a president bent on ejecting millions of people from the country. Thus, he wants to cooperate with the feds on removing people arrested for violent crimes.
At a press conference in early December, Adams dared the public to “cancel” him for arguing that any undocumented immigrant charged with a serious crime does not have a right to be in the city.
“Cancel me because I’m going to protect the people of the city,” he said. “And if you come into this country in this city and think you’re going to harm innocent New Yorkers and innocent migrants and asylum seekers, this is not the mayor you want to be in the city under.”
Adams said that in his view, Dreamers — people brought to the United States as undocumented children — and other law-abiding immigrants should not be rounded up by ICE officers. But he also said the city’s sanctuary laws “went too far” and he would confer with President-elect Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to discuss how to cooperate with ICE on repeat offenders and those accused of violent crimes. He asserted that immigrants relinquish their due process rights when they allegedly commit a violent crime. (That is legally not true.)
“Americans have certain rights,” he said. “The Constitution is for Americans. And I’m not a person that snuck into this country. My ancestors have been here for a long time, for a long time.”
How do deportations work in New York?
What’s this big battle in the larger immigration war all about? The city’s sanctuary laws are at the heart of a power struggle over the flow and presence of an estimated 225,000 migrants who have settled in New York, according to city estimates, and hundreds of thousands of other undocumented immigrants already here.
Federal immigration officials have extraordinary powers to make unannounced visits to worksites and homes to detain undocumented immigrants and begin removal proceedings; 38,863 people are in ICE detention nationwide as of Nov. 3, and 60% have no criminal record, according to TRAC Immigration. These raids could become much more prevalent next year after Trump is sworn in. He has also made noises about potentially deploying the military to assist with deportations across the country, but if he tries that, it’s highly uncertain how that would play out after inevitable court challenges.
New York City is not like most of the rest of America. In most cases, local sanctuary laws here prohibit the NYPD, the Department of Corrections and Department of Probation from communicating with ICE and honoring their requests to transfer defendants into federal custody.
Elsewhere in the country, whenever an individual gets arrested on criminal charges and fingerprinted, information about the arrest gets sent to state and federal databases, including the National Crime Information Center Database, to which ICE has access. Once ICE officers establish probable cause that a noncitizen could be removed, such as having a prior criminal conviction, agents can send an immigration detainer notice asking a local law enforcement agency to keep holding that person in custody for another 48 hours and tell the feds when they are being released so ICE agents can intercept them, detain them and start a lengthy process that could result in deportation. (If an individual is on a terrorism watch list or was previously removed and has since re-entered the country, they can be transferred to ICE as well.)
As in a number of other big cities, New York City’s law enforcement agencies don’t reflexively hand over their defendants to ICE whenever the feds ask for someone. Rather, they consider each request on a case-by-case basis and work with ICE to facilitate a transfer if the individual has a prior conviction of one of 177 felonies within the past five years and the ICE request includes a warrant signed by a federal judge.
“There isn’t this sweeping prohibition against honoring an ICE detainer, there are guidelines in place about what can be done, how it can be done, and exceptions to the rule,” one immigration advocate said.
A quick history
New York’s sanctuary laws trace back to 35 years ago, when then-Mayor Ed Koch signed an executive order prohibiting City officials from sharing data about immigrants unless it involved a criminal matter. In 2011, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a law by a 44-4 vote that directed the Department of Correction to stop routinely giving ICE names of people when they were arrested for committing a crime, making it far harder for the federal agency to take undocumented immigrants into custody.
Three years later, Mayor de Blasio and the Council strengthened that law further to specify that police and correctional officers cannot comply with ICE detention requests when someone is arrested for a low-level crime, unless a judicial warrant had been issued and the individual had been convicted of a serious or violent felony within the past five years. They also removed ICE offices from Rikers Island and other city jails.
ICE isn’t powerless to remove immigrants from New York City — the agency says 661 were removed in FY 2024 — but it is severely restricted.
Mayor Adams acknowledges that New York is a sanctuary city, but he has complained several times this year that rules prohibiting law enforcement agencies from coordinating with ICE in most cases are too restrictive. Those should be rolled back, he says, and migrants who are merely arrested for serious crimes should be turned over to ICE. Adams has already directed his team to look at issuing an executive order that would bypass the Council and reform the law and discussed how to collaborate with Trump’s border czar.
“I’m going to try to attempt to use my executive orders to go after dangerous people who are committing violent acts against migrants and asylum seekers and long-term New Yorkers and undocumented immigrants,” Adams said at a Dec. 12 press conference following his meeting. We need to unravel all of these rules and procedures and laws and get clarity on what we could do and what we can’t do.”
What can Adams change?
How far could Adams go to rewrite the rules? The mayor could declare a state of emergency and issue an order to defy city law, City Hall sources said. But it’s unclear what grounds would justify an emergency, and the Council would likely sue to stop him. The Council hasn’t been shy about challenging the mayor’s power grabs; members recently filed a lawsuit forcing him to follow the law banning solitary confinement in city jails.
“There needs to be a justification for an emergency order, and there’s requirements for that,” one City Hall source said. “You have to say there’s some sort of disaster or public emergency. Is he going to say that immigrants are an emergency?”
The Council has other options too. Two pending bills would clarify some of the language surrounding the city’s laws: Intro 395 would limit the time police can detain an individual, while Intro 396 would prohibit corrections officers from communicating with ICE regarding anyone in their custody, after a Council hearing last year found that the Department of Correction regularly contacted federal immigration officers to schedule release times, facilitate pickups and share information speeding up removals of undocumented immigrants in city jails. Another proposal, Intro 214, would allow individuals harmed by a violation of the city’s detainer discretion laws to file a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, state legislators have their own immigration package they want to pass next year. Lawmakers have been mobilizing support for the New York For All Act, which would prohibit state and local governmental agencies from sharing information, personnel, and resources with ICE, and the Dignity Not Detention Act, which would prevent the state from contracting with private companies establishing immigrant detention facilities.
Both bills stalled last year, but Brooklyn State Senator Andrew Gounardes believes the state must take precautionary measures to protect those who risk being swept up in federal raids.
“The entire immigrant community is living in fear,” Gounardes, who co-sponsored the New York For All Act, said. “They don’t know if there will be a knock on their door at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m., or at a parent-teacher conference at school, and that could lead to their family being torn apart. They need to know that New York is not going to turn them over to Trump’s immigration machine.”
But a majority of New York voters, 54%, believe the state should allow the Trump administration to deport migrants living here illegally, while 35% oppose working with the White House, according to a December Siena College poll.
Hochul’s role
Gov. Kathy Hochul seems broadly aligned with the public — and with Adams — here, saying she would put together a list of crimes that would compel state agencies to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement authorities if an undocumented immigrant were convicted of committing them.
“Serious crimes. I’m talking about crimes where you are harming individuals, stealing property,” Hochul said. “We have a whole list.”
A state executive order that Gov. Cuomo signed in 2017 prohibits state agencies from asking about someone’s immigration status, but Hochul said she would unveil a new approach to guide the state’s coordination with ICE in the beginning of the new year.
This is the struggle among New York Democrats right now: Adams, Hochul and much of the public wants to cooperate more with Trump on deportations. Democrats in the Council and the state Legislature want to cement New York’s status as a sanctuary and protect undocumented immigrants unless and until they are convicted of serious crimes. More pressure will likely be coming from Washington, after the House passed a bill on January 7 that would require federal officials to detain any undocumented immigrant charged with less violent crimes such as burglary, larceny, or theft.
It remains to be seen whether both sides hunker down for a fight or whether the first wave of Trump-ordered deportations shifts politics and public sentiment.