Over the past two years, Mayor Eric Adams has made no secret of his frustrations with New York City’s migrant crisis. But after President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory, the mayor’s criticism has taken a sharper turn to the right.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, declared last week that migrants accused of crimes should not be entitled to due process under the Constitution.
Over the weekend, he said for the first time that he was exploring whether he had the power to alter so-called sanctuary laws and allow the city to collaborate more closely with federal authorities to detain “dangerous” immigrants — potentially using an executive order to bypass the Democratic-led City Council.
And later this week, he is scheduled to meet with Thomas Homan, Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” to hear how the administration’s immigration plans would affect New York City and to explore common ground between the city and the Trump administration.
“In the last few weeks, he’s obviously sharpened his rhetoric, sort of moving closer toward the Trump rhetoric,” said George Arzt, a longtime political and communications consultant. “He was like this on law-and-order rhetoric, and so now he’s sort of melded the law-and-order with migrants.”
The question is why.
Mr. Adams, a former police officer who made crime the bedrock of his campaign, has insisted that his stance on immigration, like much of his overall mayoral platform, is driven by his concern for public safety.
“People are saying, OK, after the president-elect is coming in, Eric is now saying different things,” he said in a television interview with WCBS on Sunday. “No, I was saying this prior to the election. I was saying those who are committing crimes in our city must be addressed.”
But political operatives have speculated that the mayor’s shift toward a Trump-friendly immigration strategy may be tied to his indictment on federal corruption charges in September.
Some have questioned whether Mr. Adams is angling for a presidential pardon by striking a more conciliatory approach toward Mr. Trump. Mr. Adams has denied having any personal motivation, but he surprised political observers when he did not rule out running as a Republican last week. (On Monday, however, he insisted he would run as a Democrat in next year’s mayoral election).
Former Gov. David Paterson, a moderate Democrat, said the mayor was “fighting to maintain his job and his innocence,” and was most likely hoping that his nonconfrontational strategy with Mr. Trump could potentially benefit the city, himself, or both.
“Some of the things he said about immigration would be music to the ears of the president-elect,” he said. “Given everything that is going on, it might not be the best political thing for him to do in the city, but it might be one of the best political things to do for himself.”
In many ways, the mayor’s rhetoric on immigration has evolved as the number of migrants has soared to more than 220,000. As the crisis grew, so did the city’s costs — more than $6 billion since 2022 — as did Mr. Adams’s frustration with the Biden administration for its lack of sufficient financial support and a comprehensive border plan.
When the first buses from Texas arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in August 2022, Mr. Adams personally welcomed the asylum seekers. By the next summer, he was warning that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York City,” as migrants strained the shelter system.
By 2024, as a series of high-profile crimes committed by recent migrants grabbed headlines, Mr. Adams began speaking more forcefully and frequently about the need to deport migrant criminals.
His focus on removing migrants who commit crimes was not substantively different from the views of other moderate Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Biden, whose administration has prioritized the deportation of noncitizens deemed a threat to public safety.
But to his liberal critics, Mr. Adams has often lacked tact in expressing those points, with his language sometimes disparaging the city’s 400,000 undocumented immigrants at a time of heightened uncertainty.
His comments suggesting that migrants charged with crimes should not be entitled to due process under the Constitution — which guarantees due process and equal treatment under the law to all people, regardless of immigration status — drew particular ire.
“Americans have certain rights,” Mr. Adams said last week, drawing a distinction between his personal rights as a criminal defendant and the rights of immigrants accused of serious crimes, like shooting a police officer. “The Constitution is for Americans, and I’m not a person that snuck into this country.”
Christine Quinn, a former Democratic City Council speaker and the head of WIN, a homeless shelter provider housing migrants, said the mayor’s comments reflected a “misunderstanding of the Constitution and a misunderstanding of how due process and rights work.”
“When someone’s here,” she added, “they’re innocent until proven guilty.”
The city’s most recent sanctuary laws, passed in 2014 and 2017 under Mayor Bill de Blasio, strictly prohibit the Police Department and other agencies from helping and communicating with federal immigration authorities. They were designed to make undocumented victims or witnesses feel safe to report crimes to the police without fear of being deported.
The laws have exceptions for serious offenses: The police are required to turn over migrants convicted of one of more than 170 serious crimes — including homicide, rape and robbery — within the last five years.
But Mr. Adams has voiced his desire to loosen the city’s sanctuary laws to help federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents detain migrants charged with crimes, not just those who are convicted.
“No one in the city should be the victim of a violent crime,” he said on Monday.
His push to reconsider the city’s sanctuary laws is opposed by the City Council, which leans to his left and would need to approve any changes. Over the past few days, however, Mr. Adams disclosed that his lawyers were examining whether he could make changes via executive order or if he had legal standing to sue and overturn the sanctuary laws.
Any unilateral move by the mayor could set up a clash with the speaker of the City Council, Adrienne Adams, who has repeatedly said that her Democratic members had no intention of revisiting the sanctuary laws.
“The Council will not support actions to help the incoming presidential administration attempt to separate families and upend communities across our city,” said Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for the speaker. “We will defend local law and reject attempts by the mayoral administration to engage in further overreach to circumvent city law.”
Mr. Adams has insisted that a large swath of the electorate seemingly agrees with his harder-line approach on immigration, pointing to Mr. Trump’s victory in November and increased vote count in New York City, where Mr. Trump gained 95,000 more votes than he received in 2020.
At the same time, the mayor has sought to soften some of his rhetoric, often stressing that most migrants are law-abiding and attributing cases of violence to a small group of recent arrivals. He has said he is against mass deportations. And in the same news conference where he claimed that migrants were not entitled to constitutional protections, Mr. Adams also said that longtime peaceful immigrants should not be targeted.
“Those people should not be rounded up in the middle of the night,” he said. “You know, these are people who love our country, and they’re participating in our country.”
Mr. Paterson, the former governor, said the mayor’s comments should not always be taken at face value, even as he described Mr. Adams as a “thoughtful person.”
“He shoots from the hip,” Mr. Paterson said. “He doesn’t schedule his comments, so they’re going to sound a little extreme, but, in the end, I don’t think that’s how he’s operating.”
As Mr. Adams airs his grievances in public, City Hall officials have been privately bracing for Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
They have met to discuss guidance for how schools and shelters should respond if I.C.E. officers show up to detain people in those locations. (Currently, I.C.E. officers are required to have judicial warrants for specific individuals to access shelters.)
The Adams administration is also considering closing a giant tent shelter housing migrant families on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, which is on federal land, to get ahead of any move by Trump to cancel the lease or carry out immigration raids there.
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