The Adams administration’s move to put federal immigration authorities on Rikers Island is on pause, with a judge ruling the administration can’t take any steps towards a formal agreement until a court hearing later this week.
This temporary restraining order delays the feds from moving onto the island at least until a Friday hearing, a pause agreed to by the mayor. The ruling also blocks the administration from negotiating an agreement, or memorandum of understanding, until then.
The mayor’s executive order, signed by his top deputy Randy Mastro earlier this month, was intended to bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as well as other federal agencies, into the jail complex.
The City Council sued over the move last week.
“City Hall and all other New York City government officials, officers, personnel, and agencies are prohibited from taking any steps toward negotiating, signing, or implementing any Memorandum of Understanding with the federal government regarding federal law enforcement presence on Department of Correction property,” Manhattan Supreme Justice Mary Rosado wrote in her order.
The mayor’s side had previously pledged that they would not “execute” any memorandum of understanding until Friday’s hearing, “so there will be no federal law enforcement permitted in office space on Rikers Island before then,” a lawyer for the mayor’s side wrote in a Thursday email.
“We are grateful that the court agreed with us to delay the hearing until April 25. As we committed to the court last week, we are not executing an MOU prior to the hearing,” Kayla Mamelak, the mayor’s press secretary, said in a statement.
ICE previously had a Rikers office, until 2014, when the city passed sanctuary city laws. The city says its plan is to allow criminal, but not civil enforcement when ICE returns to Rikers.
“We appreciate Judge Rosado’s decision to prevent any negotiation or execution on an agreement between the administration and federal agencies until this Friday’s hearing to ensure communities are protected,” Julia Agos, a spokesperson for Speaker Adrienne Adams, said in a statement.
“We look forward to the hearing and will continue outlining why this executive order is unlawful and bad for public safety in our city.”
Mastro, a controversial Giuliani administration alum who became first deputy earlier this month, has been empowered to take point on drafting the memo with ICE, the sources said.
While typically, multiple teams at City Hall or from other agencies might be involved in an issue with policy overlap between immigration and public safety, the work on the executive order and memorandum of understanding has been largely confined to Mastro’s team at City Hall, according to sources familiar with the matter.
This work on the memo is consistent with the mayor’s delegated the work on the order to him, Mamelak said.
Before Mastro issued the long-awaited executive order this month, other top officials in Adams’ administration indicated they had been kept out of the loop on the issue of letting ICE operate on the island. The commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs testified in early March that his office had been kept in the dark on the order.
The executive order came weeks after the mayor initially told border czar Tom Homan that he’d bring the authorities onto Rikers.
Rosado was also the judge in the Adams administration’s $700 million lawsuit against Texas bus companies that brought migrants up from the southern border. She dismissed that suit, writing the case was based on an “antiquated” and “unconstitutional” law.
