New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he met with President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, on Thursday to prepare for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to resume operations on Rikers Island, which houses the city’s largest jail.
“Today, I met with ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan and local federal law enforcement officials to discuss how we can work together to remove violent migrant gangs from our city,” Adams said in a statement.
“We are now working on implementing an executive order that will reestablish the ability for ICE agents to operate on Rikers Island — as was the case for 20 years,” he continued.
The ICE office on Rikers Island closed in 2014 after Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a sanctuary city bill. Homan and Adams met in December and discussed their interest in reopening the ICE office, as Trump prepared to execute his mass-deportation campaign promise.
Adams said in his statement that the ICE agents would be focused specifically on “assisting the correctional intelligence bureau in their criminal investigations, in particular those focused on violent criminals and gangs.”
Adams also said he talked to Homan about ways that New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives could be embedded into federal task forces to help address “violent gangs” and crime.
The meeting comes just days after Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against the mayor, who had cozied up to the president in recent months as his bribery trial set for April neared.
Adams was indicted in September on counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery. He has denied any wrongdoing.
In a short memo, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said the DOJ reached the decision to dismiss the counts without assessing the strength of the case and indicated that the attorneys who filed the charges did nothing wrong.
Bove said the case “improperly interfered” with Adams’s 2025 mayoral campaign and alluded to the Trump administration’s efforts to end “weaponization” in the federal government as a reason to wind down the case.
Bove also claimed that the pending prosecution “unduly restricted” Adams’s ability to focus on “the illegal immigration and violent crime that has escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”
In his statement Thursday, Adams reiterated his desire to work with the Trump administration to address illegal immigration.
“As I have always said, immigrants have been crucial in building our city and will continue to be key to our future success, but we must fix our long-broken immigration system,” Adams said. “Since the spring of 2022, New York City has been forced to shoulder the burden of a national humanitarian crisis where more than 230,000 migrants have come to our city seeking support, at a cost of approximately $7 billion, with little help from the previous administration.”
“That is why I have been clear that I want to work with the new federal administration, not war with them, to find common ground and make better the lives of New Yorkers,” he added.
