By Michael V. Cusenza
The City Council on Tuesday filed a lawsuit requesting a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against Mayor Eric Adams’ Executive Order 50 to invite U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to operate an office on Rikers Island, which was issued by First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro on April 8.
The lawsuit contends that the executive order is unlawful, tainted by the conflict of interest created by the corrupt bargain the mayor entered into—his personal freedom in exchange for an ICE office. The law is clear, the suit claims, that the mayor is unable to cure that conflict of interest simply by delegating his authority to open an ICE office to Mastro.
In September, Adams was indicted in federal court, accused of taking bribes and soliciting illegal campaign contributions. The Justice Department in March suddenly dropped the charges. Earlier this month, a federal judge permanently dismissed the indictment.
On the same day that the DOJ ordered the Manhattan U.S. Attorney to drop the charges against Adams, the mayor met with President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and expressed his intention to invite ICE onto Rikers Island via executive order. The political intervention in the corruption case led several top federal prosecutors to resign and assert the actions amounted to a quid pro quo, the council noted. The Hon. Judge Dale Ho, who declined to immediately dismiss the case and sought independent arguments, indicated that “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
““Executive Order 50 is the poisoned fruit of Mayor Adams’s deal with the Trump Administration: if the Mayor cooperated with the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities, including by permitting ICE to operate on Rikers, the charges against him would be dismissed,” the council wrote in its petition to the court. “Although it purports to be the product of Mastro’s ‘independent assessment, whether and under what circumstances to permit federal law enforcement authorities to have a presence on Rikers Island,’ all available evidence confirms that the issuance of Executive Order 50 was the outcome demanded by the resolution of the Mayor’s criminal case, rather than the product of any ‘independent assessment’ by Mastro.
Additionally, according to the suit, “Neither the Mayor nor Mastro claim that the Mayor was walled off from the decision-making process in any manner. To the contrary, when asked, the Mayor explicitly denied that he was ‘recused’ from the decision.”
“The mayor has compromised our city’s sovereignty and is now threatening the safety of all New Yorkers, which is why we are filing this lawsuit to halt his illegal order that he shamelessly previewed on the Fox News couch with Tom Homan,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement. “When New Yorkers are afraid of cooperating with our city’s own police and discouraged from reporting crime and seeking help, it makes everyone in our city less safe. This is a naked attempt by Eric Adams to fulfill his end of the bargain for special treatment he received from the Trump administration. New York cannot afford its mayor colluding with the Trump administration to violate the law, and this lawsuit looks to the court to uphold the basic standard of democracy, even if our mayor won’t.”
