Donald Trump’s campaign promise to launch a mass-deportation program — complete with detention camps, large-scale raids, and use of the military — is one of the most urgent issues facing the crowd of politicians fighting for control of the city in next year’s elections. The president-elect will be constrained by a wide range of political, logistical, economic, and legal barriers, but experts I spoke to say he can easily do vast damage to immigrant families and communities along the way. Our next mayor, whether it’s Eric Adams or one of his many challengers, is morally and politically obligated to resist and repair the wreckage.
What’s needed — now, not later — is clear language from all the candidates for mayor, including Adams, that they are prepared to engage the Trump administration and define the limits of where and how New York will talk about immigrants’ rights. That means all the candidates must get up to speed on the dizzying range of immigrant rights, laws, and policies at play here, including the right to seek asylum.
The mayor has been sending mixed messages on how the city will respond to Trump’s plans. On the day after the election, he affirmed that New York is a sanctuary city but sidestepped reporters’ questions about whether he would actively resist federal deportation efforts. At that same press conference, his immigration affairs commissioner, Manuel Castro, went further, telling reporters in Spanish that city agencies “will not be following the instructions of the federal government in cases of mass deportations.”
A week later, Adams sounded conciliatory, suggesting he could assist the Trump administration: “I believe we can be very helpful in how we address this issue in a very real way,” he told reporters. The mayor’s shifting rhetoric, always carefully avoiding criticism of Trump, may be related to his legal situation; he remains under federal indictment and may be cozying up to Trump in hopes of getting a dismissal of U.S. v. Eric Adams or even a presidential pardon.
Beyond managing White House politics, Adams and his rivals must also decide whether to fight for passage of the New York for All Act, a proposed state law that would limit the ability of ICE to search non-public spaces without a court warrant and flatly prohibit state and local law enforcement from carrying out federal immigration policy.
It’s tempting to assume that there’s a lot of bluster and bull behind Trump’s threats, like his vow, a day after winning the election, to spare no expense in chasing down immigrants who have committed violent crimes. “It’s not a question of a price tag. Really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
The next Congress, which must approve major spending by Trump, is controlled by Republicans — including some fiscal conservatives — who aren’t likely to go along with “no price tag” on a deportation campaign that could cost $88 billion a year for more than a decade in direct removal expenses, with additional losses in tax revenue tied to a massive contraction of economic activity. We might find that Trump’s deportation saber-rattling is similar to the talk during his first term of building a border wall and having Mexico pay for it. (In the end, Trump added a paltry 52 miles of new border barriers, for which American taxpayers footed the bill.)
But even if Trump doesn’t deport millions of people, a national hunt for immigrants could be devastating to New York.
“The truth is that the immigration laws are very harsh. And the only thing that keeps immigration from hitting on families who may have committed no crimes, who were working or paying taxes, is the humane discretion of presidents, whether Democratic or Republican,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrant Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “If he starts sending ICE officers into all these neighborhoods looking to round up people, we may have challenges if there’s profiling, if there’s Fourth Amendment violations. But it’s not per se illegal to be harsh with enforcement measures.”
Immigration attorney Luis Gomez Alfaro, who has handled hundreds of cases, says many New Yorkers are already on edge. “Some clients are very afraid that their day-to-day life will be disturbed, that they will no longer be safe to go to work, take their children to school. That’s actually the biggest fear, a disruption of everyday life,” he told me. “I am preparing for a scenario that doubles or triples the number of detentions. That is a capability that would take a lot of effort, a lot of resources to develop. Currently, there are around 45,000 beds for ICE. That’s where they would detain people, assuming they can triple that to around 150,000 or 200,000.”
Trump has vowed to use the military — it’s unclear whether he means the Army or the National Guard — to round people up, claiming he has the power to do so under the Alien Enemies Act, a statute from the 18th century. Columbia Law School professor Elora Mukherjee disagrees.
“The 1798 Act is a law that applies only in wartime. That is clear from the language of the statute that was passed by Congress. It has only been invoked by presidents during times of declared war,” Mukherjee told me. “There is no basis for extending application of that act to the drug cartels that President Trump has talked about. And the U.S. Supreme Court has ratified use of that law only three times, and only in times of war.”
What about Trump’s vow to pressure local law-enforcement agencies to help round up immigrants. Could he force the NYPD to help find and deport undocumented New Yorkers?
“Absolutely not,” said Mukherjee. “Localities and states cannot be forced to carry out federal immigration priorities. There is a principle of constitutionalism that’s called anti-commandeering. The federal government cannot commandeer localities, municipalities, states to carry out federal immigration priorities or other priorities.”
Gelernt agreed. “Here in New York City, I don’t think we’ll see any law enforcement being deputized. I think New York will push back and so will a lot of places,” he said. “But in other places, I think they will enter into agreements with the federal government to deputize their local police officers to start looking for immigrants. And I think we’re going to see tons of profiling if that happens.”
Our city’s not-so-small army of civil-rights lawyers are prepared to battle against federal overreach, in fights that will likely end up at the Supreme Court. But Alfaro, the street lawyer, warns that real people’s lives would be turned upside down in the process.
“If an immigrant is held in detention during this fight, as opposed to being released on bond or on their own recognizance, many of them will not put up the same fight. Many of them may not be willing to stay two or three or four years in detention,” he told me. “They would rather be deported. So they will agree to go to an administrative removal order. That’s actually one of the biggest worries.”
Alfaro predicts that Trump’s efforts will be the worst of both worlds: disruptive to countless families without actually fixing America’s broken border system.
“I foresee more immigrants than ever at the end of the Donald Trump administration in the United States, but also a greater number of orders of removal issued,” he told me. “I believe this will be a paper tiger, just one made of millions of deportation orders that will have a negative impact in the long-term aspirations of immigrant families and mixed families.”
That’s what New York’s next mayor has to avoid. Nobody wants a city where hundreds of thousands of our neighbors fear their lives could be turned upside down at any moment.
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