Mayor Eric Adams on Monday urged a gathering of high-ranking New York City officials to refrain from publicly criticizing the Trump administration over concerns that such criticism could endanger federal funding for the city’s priorities.
The mayor convened the morning meeting with his deputy mayors, agency heads and legal counsels to allow them to air their concerns about how the city has responded to President Trump’s policies, including on immigration, according to three officials who attended the meeting.
Agency heads were looking for guidance on what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers showed up at public buildings.
Mr. Adams, who has said he would not publicly criticize Mr. Trump, told his staff that he had a responsibility to continue to work with the president, according to the officials, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the private meeting. The meeting was first reported by The City, an online news organization.
The mayor said that if he were to comment on social media about Trump administration immigration policies, for example, it would not help the city get funds for public housing or schools and could put at risk $2 billion worth of infrastructure projects, two of the officials said.
The meeting followed uproar last week over a one-page memo that the city’s Law Department, which is overseen by the mayor, sent to city agencies detailing how city workers should respond if ICE officers showed up at city premises.
The memo said that workers should record the federal officers’ information and ask if they had a warrant, but it also advised workers to let the officers in if they felt threatened or feared for their safety.
City Hall officials argued that the memo had been crafted with the safety of frontline city workers in mind, especially amid heightened anxiety over immigration raids in the city — a point that the mayor stressed during the meeting on Monday. But the guidance received significant pushback from some unions representing those workers, as well as from immigration lawyers and others who said that it could effectively allow ICE into shelters, schools and hospitals without a warrant.
During the meeting, city officials unveiled a flow chart that the Adams administration hoped would clarify the steps city employees should take if confronted by federal immigration authorities.
Mr. Adams has said he wants to work with the president to go after immigrants who have committed crimes. To do so, he has said he wants to change the city’s sanctuary laws, a posture that has put him at odds with many Democratic elected officials in the city.
The mayor’s approach comes as the Trump administration has moved to prosecute state and local officials, including in Illinois last week, that it argues are obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Yet his muted rhetoric has drawn intense criticism from immigration activists and political opponents who have speculated that the mayor is undermining the city’s sanctuary status to get into Mr. Trump’s good graces for personal gain. The Trump administration has been considering in recent days whether to drop the federal corruption indictment that Mr. Adams faces as he seeks re-election.
At a news conference on Monday, Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor, accused Mr. Adams of instructing senior officials to “aid and abet his efforts to win a pardon” from President Trump.
Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams, said the mayor often speaks with agency heads and high-ranking officials to hear about what they are seeing on the ground.
“As he has said publicly many times, the mayor wants to find ways to work with the federal administration, not war with them,” Ms. Mamelak Altus said in a statement. “Tweets do not solve problems, which is why addressing issues on the streets is what this administration is going to do.”
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