If President Trump’s border czar was going to meet the goals of his boss’s ambitious deportation program in New York City, he would need an ally on the ground.
So the border czar, Tom Homan, asked that a top police official with a close relationship to the mayor be named as his liaison to City Hall.
In the weeks that followed, Mayor Eric Adams elevated that official, Kaz Daughtry, to the post of deputy mayor for public safety, one of the most powerful roles in city government.
From that perch, Mr. Daughtry, 46, has continued to act as Mr. Homan’s main point of contact in City Hall. He has laid the groundwork for Mr. Homan’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to operate in the Rikers Island jail complex and played an important role in planning massive raids on city-funded hotels housing thousands of migrants in Midtown Manhattan, only to see them aborted at the last minute. And he is slated to play a starring role in a new, city-approved reality show focused in part on the Police Department.
The Trump administration has already been accused of abandoning a federal corruption case against Mr. Adams in exchange for his cooperation with the White House’s immigration crackdown, something both the administration and the mayor have denied.
Still Mr. Adams has appeared eager to please the president. Now, with Mr. Trump vowing on social media to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens” in New York and other major cities, Mr. Daughtry is positioned to play a central role in any such effort.
Mr. Daughtry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
This account of how he came to be the bridge between the Trump administration and America’s largest sanctuary city is based on interviews with 17 current and former city government officials who were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about sensitive matters.
The relationship between City Hall and Mr. Homan might never have been formed without the intervention of a most unlikely broker, a booster of the president’s immigration policies and of Mr. Homan — Dr. Phil.
In December, the celebrity psychologist and television personality was on a private jet for a trip to the southern border with Mr. Homan when he introduced the border czar to Mr. Adams on a FaceTime call. That was followed by an in-person meeting in New York and, eventually, Mr. Homan’s push for Mr. Daughtry to be his liaison.
The details of Mr. Homan’s coordination with Mr. Daughtry specifically, including how often they meet and what they discuss, remain unclear. But both men have portrayed themselves as tough, no-nonsense cops who are willing to push the envelope to get things done, and both have gravitated toward television cameras.
“Cops should be working with cops,” Mr. Homan has said. “I never ask New York City N.Y.P.D. to be an immigration officer. I ask them to help us — be cops working with cops to remove public safety threats and national security threats.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Daughtry helped to lay the groundwork for the border czar’s agents to operate on Rikers Island. That would give them direct access to the city’s jails and the immigrants held there, a significant step in Mr. Adams’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
The City Council sued to stop the agents from working on the island. A judge has barred the agents for now.
In early March, days before he left the Police Department for his new position at City Hall, Mr. Daughtry helped Mr. Homan and other federal officials plan the coordinated raids targeting immigrants living in at least two large city-funded hotels. The police commissioner, Jessica S. Tisch, blocked the effort once she learned of it because it violated the law.
New York’s sanctuary laws bar city officials, including police officers, from helping to arrest migrants whose only infraction is illegally crossing the border. Those laws, however, do not bar officers from engaging in regular law enforcement activity with federal authorities, including agents from the Homeland Security Department.
Multiple city officials said that the raids were originally planned to target noncitizens who were wanted for arrest. Commissioner Tisch halted her department’s involvement once it became clear that hundreds of ICE agents would take part, seeking to detain anyone based solely on their immigration status.
The hotels, the Roosevelt and the Row, both in Midtown, each have more than a thousand rooms. The planned roundups, which have not been previously reported, would have taken place on March 11 and involved several hundred police officers. Those officers would have been under the command of the commissioner, with whom Mr. Daughtry has a fraught relationship.
Had the raids gone forward, they would have represented a stunning escalation of immigration enforcement in a city whose residents are roughly 40 percent foreign-born. And they would have taken place just days before Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as the legal justification for deporting planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.
A person close to the mayor argued that the fact that the raids did not in fact move forward could be a testament to the value of having a functional relationship with the Trump administration.
“Deputy Mayor Daughtry and his team are key members of our public safety apparatus, and part of that work includes working with the federal government to target and take down violent transnational gangs,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor. “We have produced real results — with operations resulting in arrests from Tren de Aragua, Los Diablos and the 18th Street gangs. But let’s be clear, as Mayor Adams has stated repeatedly, we follow local laws and do not work with the federal government on civil immigration enforcement.”
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, issued a statement describing the relationship in similar terms.
“The Trump Administration works with state and local officials from across the country to promote public safety in our communities and to keep President Trump’s promise to Make America Safe Again,” Ms. Jackson said.
As Mr. Trump has continued to rail against the Democratic leaders of sanctuary cities like New York, Mr. Daughtry has promoted his ties to the White House. Earlier this month, he posted pictures of an outing at which he and the Police Department’s top uniformed official, John Chell, posed with Mr. Trump at his New Jersey golf club.
That week, Mr. Daughtry and Chief Chell appeared at a news conference with the mayor and Ms. Tisch in which they warned New Yorkers not to let immigration protests get out of hand.
“We will not allow violence and lawlessness,” Mr. Adams said, flanked by the president’s golf club visitors. “The escalation of protests in Los Angeles over the last couple of days is unacceptable. It will not be tolerated if attempted in our city.”
Mr. Daughtry’s coordination with Mr. Homan underscores the unusually close collaboration between New York’s Democratic mayor — a retired police captain — and the Republican presidential administration.
It is a collaboration that may have roots in Mr. Adams’s legal problems. The mayor was scheduled to go to trial on federal bribery and fraud charges in April, just weeks before he was to face voters in the Democratic mayoral primary.
But toward the end of last year, he began to aggressively ingratiate himself with Mr. Trump, whose Justice Department, in an extraordinary move, ultimately abandoned the charges against the mayor.
Mr. Adams has denied offering his help in exchange for the administration’s abandonment of the indictment. But the judge who oversaw the case wrote in April that “everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
In January, even before his case was dismissed, Mr. Adams declared that he would not criticize Mr. Trump in public. And he has repeatedly emphasized his enthusiasm for cooperating with federal immigration enforcement where possible.
The day that Justice Department officials moved to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams, Mr. Homan and the mayor made a joint appearance on “Fox and Friends,” during which Mr. Adams pledged his cooperation.
“I want ICE to deliver,” he said. Mr. Homan, in turn, promised to be “up his butt” should Mr. Adams not follow through.
In late April, after the mayor’s case was dismissed and more than a month after the aborted hotel raids, that cooperation was on full display when a virtual army of police and federal agents gathered before dawn in Upper Manhattan to begin arresting 27 accused gang members. In their midst was Dr. Phil, whose full name is Phillip C. McGraw, with camera crew in tow.
His presence — and that of the video crew — was not well received by some federal officials involved in the operation, which the authorities said focused on dangerous gang members. But Mr. Daughtry and Chief Chell appeared to welcome Dr. Phil, who conducted a lengthy interview of Mr. Daughtry.
Mr. Daughtry has an unusually close relationship with the mayor, and he has rocketed through the Police Department’s ranks after Mr. Adams’s election in 2021, eventually tripling his salary. That relationship has given him extraordinary free rein, which many in the department believe has led to tension with Ms. Tisch, both before and after his promotion to deputy mayor.
Their discord has been fueled by what Mr. Daughtry’s detractors say is a pattern of directly engaging with police officials and officers at all levels under Ms. Tisch’s command, behind her back. The pattern began when Mr. Daughtry was a police official and continued after Mr. Adams appointed him to the civilian position of deputy mayor for public safety, a role in which he has no authority over the Police Department. The mayor has complained to aides that the commissioner has not shown Mr. Daughtry the proper respect.
Showing Mr. Daughtry respect has not been an issue for Dr. Phil.
The celebrity psychologist recently reached a formal agreement with City Hall — detailed in a memorandum of understanding — to produce “Behind the Badge,” a reality television show on his MeritTV network that will focus on the accomplishments of the Police Department and select top officials, including Mr. Daughtry and Chief Chell. A spokesman for Dr. Phil, Jerry Sharell, said that Mr. Daughtry was featured because the former police official was “an excellent example of the dedication of the men and women of the N.Y.P.D.” and was “very well respected.”
Mr. Daughtry’s influence was on display on Tuesday, when Mr. Adams faced questions from reporters about what, if anything, he knew about Mr. Trump’s plans for large-scale immigration raids in New York City.
“Deputy Mayor Kaz Daughtry,” he replied, “is speaking with our federal partners to get an understanding.”
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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