New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Sunday said he is looking into bypassing the City Council and figure out whether he can use an executive order to change parts of the city's Sanctuary City designation.
"Well, the City Council made it clear they don't want to change that. They stated they're not willing to change the sanctuary city law. I think they're wrong. I have my teams looking at my power as executive orders," the mayor said on the CBS 2 New York television show The Point with Marcia Kramer.
New York City is designated as a Sanctuary City, where a jurisdiction has passed laws or has an executive order that prohibits their locality from collaborating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or federal enforcement agencies in order to share information about non-citizens.
The mayor said he instructed his corporate counsel to look into what his options are to possibly use an executive order to go after criminals who are non-citizens, ahead of his scheduled meeting with Tom Homan, president-elect Donald Trump's border czar.
"Yes, I want to see. And I want to be able to sit down with the Border czar, and say, here's my concern. And we're looking at ways that I could use my executive power to go after those dangerous, dangerous, violent people," he said on the show.
The mayor declined to answer a question on whether the city would establish detention centers in New York if asked by the new administration.
"I don't want to go into the area of hypotheticals," said Adams. "I want to sit down with the border czar, be able to walk out and tell the public of New York, here's what this administration is planning on doing, and here's what we're going to do. I think there's some common grounds here from what I'm hearing from the border czar. He's concerned about public safety the way I am. And New York is concerned about public safety."
