Opinion: The City Council Must Protect NYC’s Sanctuary Laws 

“With as much urgency as possible, the City Council must pass Intro. 214 to ensure that city agencies face consequences for conspiring with ICE. Anything less will result in historic levels of unwarranted expulsions of immigrant New Yorkers.”

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams outlined a vision for making New York City the safest and best place to raise a family. Conspicuously absent from his remarks was any proposal to allay the fears that thousands of immigrant families have about his willingness to cooperate with Trump in executing a mass deportation agenda.

Mayor Adams has not hidden his disdain for the city’s sanctuary laws, going so far as to say that being accused of a crime alone is enough reason to deport someone.

Considering this dangerous state of affairs, the City Council’s oversight hearing on Thursday on how to protect immigrant New Yorkers is timely. But the hearing will take place over the urgent sounds of a ticking clock. The Council already held an oversight hearing on this subject two years ago, where it found instances of collusion with ICE, in violation of the law, and disturbing anti-immigrant sentiment within one city agency.

The City Council already knows, therefore, that Mayor Adams doesn’t have to roll back sanctuary laws to defy them, though he will certainly try. What the City Council must do then, especially when further violations come to light on Thursday, is to strengthen the modest protections that sanctuary laws provide by passing Intro. 214, which would allow New Yorkers to sue city agencies when they illegally collude with ICE. 

New York City’s sanctuary laws are not special privileges extended to undeserving New Yorkers. They are critical to ensuring the city’s overall safety and prosperity. Before these laws were passed, immigrants were terrified of interacting with city agencies, even if they had legal status of some kind. Potholes, fires, accidents, landlord abuse, wage theft, and incidents on the subways or streets went unreported, lest any interaction with a city agency lead to arrest and deportation. 

And with almost half of all New York City residents being foreign born, critical services like business and legal support went unused, hindering the city’s economic growth. All that was needed was a simple promise, enshrined in law, that the city would not arrest, detain, or transfer someone to ICE without a judicial warrant. Slowly but surely, starting with Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s, New York City put in place minimal due process protections for immigrants that separate the function of city agencies from the whims of federal immigration enforcement.

But history is being forgotten. Like Mayor Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul seems intent on peddling the fiction that sanctuary laws pose a danger to public safety. Two months ago, Hochul said she would be “the first to call up ICE” to deport an immigrant convicted of a crime. Trying to seem principled without making herself a target of the incoming federal administration, Hochul is perpetuating the illusion that a fair, discerning campaign of mass expulsion that only targets bad, criminal immigrants is possible. 

But it should be clear to anyone familiar with our flawed criminal legal system that no such thing is possible. In fact, just one year ago, Gov. Hochul mistakenly called for the detention and deportation of Kelvin Servita-Arocha, an immigrant falsely accused of being a gang member and assaulting a police officer.

As a result of a hysteric rush to judgment and likely illegal collusion between the NYPD and ICE, Kelvin’s family was placed under house arrest even though they committed no crime. And though exonerated of assault, Kelvin cannot seek accountability for his unfair arrest, and continues to sit in an ICE detention center to this day. As usual, the criminal and immigration legal systems intertwined to make a mess of Kelvin’s life, and a mockery of the idea that we can straightforwardly carve out categories of people who are unworthy of calling New York home. 

Immigrants aren’t just subject to the same flaws in the criminal legal system as everyone else. In many ways, they have it worse. Even with sanctuary laws, immigrants can be detained indefinitely—regardless of what they’re being charged with or whether they’re being charged at all. They can even be detained if they already served time for a criminal offense, effectively making them subject to a system of double punishment. Immigration judges aren’t even independent judges. They’re employees of the Executive Branch, inseparable from the enforcement system they supposedly check. 

This bleak reality, hardly remedied but slightly alleviated by sanctuary laws, is already known to us. Nothing that comes to light at Thursday’s hearing will change the fact that Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams are embarrassing themselves and endangering our communities if they think it’s possible to cooperate with or conduct a “discerning” campaign of mass deportation.

With as much urgency as possible, the City Council must pass Intro. 214 to ensure that city agencies face consequences for conspiring with ICE. Anything less will result in historic levels of unwarranted expulsions of immigrant New Yorkers. That means entire communities emptied out of the families, workers, and neighbors that bring them to life. That means economic devastation for our city. That means a shameful, wholly preventable chapter in New York City’s history.

Karla Ostolaza is the managing director of The Bronx Defenders’ Immigration Practice. Rosa Cohen-Cruz is the director of policy of The Bronx Defenders Immigration Practice.