The Adams administration is working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to circumvent New York City’s strict sanctuary city laws, which ICE officials say hinder the federal agency’s efforts to deport violent criminals.
Ken Gennaro, a Brooklyn-born field director for the bureau’s New York office, has for months fought city policies that bar local officials from cooperating with his staff of 360.
After years of facing hostile treatment from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, Gennaro said the department was “thrown away from the negotiating table,” but appears to have found a more collaborative partner in Mayor Eric Adams.
“I’ve worked with the mayor’s office and had a dialogue,” Gennaro told The Washington Post in an exclusive interview this week. “I commend them. There was absolutely no dialogue under the previous de Blasio administration.”
“We’ve had multiple conversations with Mayor Adams’ office,” he continued, “and at the very least, we’re back at the table and talking to each other again.”
A City Council source confirmed this, telling The Post on Sunday that the two sides discussed the possibility of amending city laws that prevent any coordination between local and federal law enforcement agencies.
“Under Mayor de Blasio, the law has gone from ‘we welcome illegal immigrants’ to ‘we protect violent criminals,’ in the same way that progressivism has changed from compassion for the poor to an obsession with Cocoa Puffs,” one City Council official said.
Asked if there had been any progress in negotiations with city officials, Gennaro said there had been but declined to provide details.
“I wish progress had been made faster,” he said, “but at least we can say progress has been made.”
Neither the mayor’s office nor city council representatives immediately responded to requests for comment Sunday.
NYC’s sanctuary laws undermine public safety: director
His comments come as some local lawmakers, including Adams himself, have been warming to the idea that the city’s sanctuary laws may need to be changed to make it easier to deport immigrants suspected of crimes.
In 2014, Mayor de Blasio signed a law that largely banned the NYPD from working with federal immigration authorities.
Four years later, he went further, issuing citywide guidelines and NYPD rules that codified the Big Apple’s policy of not cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Gennaro, a decades-long ICE veteran who oversees deportation operations in New York City, throughout Long Island and the seven-county lower Hudson River region, said he would like to see that change by having the city honor ICE detention requests, which are issued when ICE asks local authorities to detain aliens they have arrested.
Detentions are especially important for criminal suspects because ICE can only deport people in its direct custody, he said.
“We cannot begin removal proceedings until we have arrested that individual,” Gennaro said.
“When you see people being arrested in New York City… [ICE] We want to get them into custody as soon as possible,” he added.
The New York City Police Department and Department of Corrections, at the behest of the city’s elected officials, have been ignoring such detentions for years.
This puts ICE in an extremely disadvantageous position, Gennaro said.
The agency keeps track of when illegal immigrants are arrested. It has its own database and keeps track of when they are arrested.
But this is not a real-time notification, Gennaro said.
If a New York court releases a suspect, officers have to start from scratch if they want to pursue that person, he said.
“They are released back into the community,” Gennaro said, “and then my staff has to go and arrest them.”
“If we don’t find them quickly, we’re already in trouble,” he said. “A lot of times, these people change their address, they move, they change their name, they might go to another state.”
If local authorities respect detention orders, federal agents can hold suspects in safe, secure environments, he said.
“Basically, all of this can be solved by arresting and releasing people at Rikers Island,” Gennaro said, adding that the department once had a unit based in the city’s jails “that detained hundreds of people every day.”
“Now all of these people have been released back into society,” he said, “and, you know, there’s a high recidivism rate for these people.”
Because the sanctuary law prohibits all cooperation with ICE, the agency sometimes has to find suspects through roundabout means, such as newspaper and television reports.
“A lot of times, we get our leads and information through you guys in the media,” Gennaro said.
Once ICE arrests a suspect, the agency is required by law to begin deportation proceedings, the director added.
“You can’t hold someone in a federal immigration detention facility for the purposes of prosecuting them at the state or local level,” he said.
However, ICE will not detain illegal immigrants before their local trials, but will contact local district attorneys and offer to extradite suspects, as long as local authorities promise to return them to ICE later.
“We give them that authority,” Gennaro said, “but unless it’s a high-profile case or a violent case, in most cases the district attorney will be like, ‘Go ahead and proceed with the eviction.'”
“They probably don’t want this case to be closed because there are a lot of cases that are going to be charged with misdemeanors,” he said.
Adams, meanwhile, appears to be changing his mind.
In March, the mayor said his administration was exploring its legal options after his attempt to change New York City’s sanctuary policies was rejected by the City Council.
“We’re not going back and forth. I’ve stated my position, they’ve stated their position, and our legal team is now evaluating what options we have,” Hizzoner said in an interview at the time. Fox 5’s Good Day New York.
But the City Council doesn’t seem keen to budge. City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in late February that Adams’ proposal was “harmful” and that council members had no plans to make any changes.
“We’re not considering changing the laws,” she stated bluntly. “These laws have been in place for decades.”
Nonetheless, Gennaro insisted he would like to see local and federal police start sharing information again, citing the 9/11 attacks as an example of what could happen if they don’t.
“I was actually there on 9/11, deployed to Ground Zero,” Gennaro said. “I never want to see anything like that again.
“When law enforcement isn’t cooperating, I just wish there was something that could change people’s minds so nothing happens,” he said. [like that] That will never happen again.”
