Adams’ Abdication Has New York City at Trump’s Mercy

What’s happening inside one building in lower Manhattan is building toward a potential federal occupation of New York City. That may sound like hyperbole, but it has already begun in and around federal properties here, more or less with the blessing of Mayor Eric Adams, who keeps saying — when he’s forced to say anything at all about the administration of the president who got the criminal charges against him dropped — that he’s powerless to do anything about any of this. 

Mostly, he’s simply ignored those officers wearing masks inside the halls of a federal building containing an immigration courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza, who are roughly arresting people in the halls as they show up to court appearances and removing them to a makeshift new jail of locked office rooms on the 10th floor. 

Adams has consistently supported the concept of a sanctuary city, meaning a city that protects otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants from deportation, but he also regularly complains that the city’s specific laws limiting cooperation with ICE’s civil immigration enforcement help protect violent criminals — without saying how exactly he’d like them changed. So perhaps Trump’s Justice Department provided him another assist with Thursday’s federal lawsuit challenging the city’s policies. The suit gives Hizzoner the opportunity to distance himself from Trump, at least on paper, which he needs to do while running a longshot bid for a second term, while also setting him up with an alibi for complying and doing what Washington wants or at least staying out of ICE’s way.

Every day, this bizarre, grotesque scene in lower Manhattan — a Soviet Russia joke where the conviction comes before the trial — becomes less of a news story, since that’s what ICE has been doing the day before that and the day before that. The frog keeps boiling as the Trump administration promotes its cruelty, gleefully tweeting about shipping immigrants it often calls “terrorists” and “invaders” — without evidence, let alone trials — willy-nilly to jails like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and deporting people to countries they have no ties to — including South Sudan, where there hardly is a state in the middle of a brutal civil war, and the infamous CEECOT hellhole in El Salvador.  

Over recent weeks, when Adams has been pressured to address ICE’s new unofficial jail in his city, he’s insisted that he — and New York City by extension — were powerless to do anything about an office space in Manhattan. On Wednesday, the day before the Trump administration sued the city, he was shamed into writing a letter to the federal agency that controls real estate demanding that they do something — never mind that the agency had said weeks ago that it’s also powerless to oversee Department of Homeland Security facilities. 

Who watches the watchmen? No one, as far as New York City’s mayor is concerned, and certainly not him. There are no easy answers here, of course, but passing the buck entirely is an abdication. 

Democratic members of Congress who’ve tried to visit the lockup here in Manhattan — as federal lawmakers are entitled by law to do anywhere that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining people — have been barred from entering. Republicans would presumably be rejected, too, though none have bothered trying, as the Department of Homeland Security insists there’s no jail there, never mind the people in cuffs and cells. 

My colleagues at THE CITY published video earlier this week giving the first public glimpse inside the office rooms that, months ago, were converted into makeshift jail cells where people are locked up — most of them presumably the same ones who were arrested after showing up at their civil court dates in the same building. They’re sleeping on the floor, with no privacy or showers, and limited food or access to medicine. The number of people imprisoned there and the length of the average stay are both rapidly rising, according to THE CITY’s analysis of the federal data. On May 1, just one person out of the seven being detained there had been held for 24 hours. By June 25, 34 of the 160 people there had been locked up on the site for at least that long.

Trump insists these are all violent criminals, but the government’s own numbers show a rapidly rising share of people arrested whose only crime is their immigration status. And since many have open court cases, it’s not even clear that many of them are illegal immigrants, let alone immigrants who are committing other crimes. That’s not a justice system.

It’s also not a jail, according to the feds who seem to be channeling, with no humor, the immortal words of Chico Marx: “Who are you going to believe: Me or your lying eyes?” 

There’s nothing funny about this, even as the scenes get increasingly surreal. The masked agents are mocking members of the press and taking selfies with a male reporter they surrounded as if they were about to arrest him. One told a female reporter she should smile more. That was the same agent, said the reporter, who hours earlier had body-slammed a middle-aged, no more than five-foot-tall woman he was arresting and escorting away, presumably to the 10th floor. 

Back to Adams: He vowed not to publicly criticize the Trump administration after it dropped the criminal charges against him, in a deal that the judge in his case wrote “smacks of a bargain” meant to give the feds free rein on immigration enforcement in New York City. While he’s said precious little about the scenes inside 26 Federal Plaza, the mayor did weigh in after Comptroller (and, at the time, mayoral candidate) Brad Lander was arrested there while escorting immigrants to and from their court hearings, mocking the arrest as a stunt. 

DHS, for its part, gloated that “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”

Hours later, Lander was released without charges since footage showed clearly he’d assaulted no one. 

These people — the Trump administration and its half-ally-half-hostage in City Hall — are not people to take at their word about anything. Their enemies will always be terrorists and criminals. 

Consider this tweet from DHS Thursday afternoon about an “illegal alien” and his “assault” on “brave” law enforcement officers who “saved” other detainees:

🚨UNHINGED ILLEGAL ALIEN RELEASED INTO AMERICA UNDER BIDEN ATTEMPTED TO STAB ICE OFFICERS

Bass Ndiaye, an illegal alien from Senegal, attempted to stab ICE officers and about one dozen other detainees with a pair of scissors while awaiting processing.

Thankfully, our brave… pic.twitter.com/iKS8kxSssK

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 24, 2025

This is how these liars and lunatics describe a middle-aged guy with no criminal record, locked up in a packed office room with other prisoners and stabbing himself with the scissors that were there to open food. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are now trying to imprison this man here for as long as 20 years for supposedly then charging at and “assaulting federal officers,” before presumably moving to deport him. Those details come from the government’s own account. Keep him in mind along with Brad Lander when the feds put out wild numbers about how assaults on ICE officers are supposedly through the roof.

This is crazy and cruel stuff, from trolls with cuffs and an ever-tightening grip on the state’s monopoly on violence, now reserved for the new federal cops and those local authorities that comply with them. Never mind the rule of law; this is the law of who rules.

President Trump just had ICE officers in military garb ride in formation on horseback through MacArthur Park — not to enforce the law, but rather, as leaked planning documents show, to “demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area (JOA).” That sounds an awful lot like the military planning documents showing our supposed paths to victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, the forever war on terror Trump claims credit for ending coming home to roost — if the president can get there before his poll numbers give in.

Stand by, Sunset Park.

Adams is still hoping to somehow win a second term as an independent, despite being the second least popular political figure in the city, just ahead of Trump. He’s been punching left at Democratic nominee and avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, while the president and his people are musing about deporting Mamdani or somehow taking over the city. They’re not doing it yet, but they’re not joking, and this crew will simply up the pressure, using every opportunity to frame New York City as a “shithole” and insist the answer is giving masked federal cops free rein. 

Of course, Trump’s insults and incursions will almost surely ramp up no matter who’s mayor. Remarkably, Adams’ main appeal at this point might be that his corrupt cop friends who go golfing with the president, accompanied by their public security details and on Dr. Phil’s dime, might be the last thing standing between New York City and an armed federal occupation.  

That’s probably not a winning pitch in this election, but it’s not necessarily wrong. Notably, after his arrest, Lander avoided using the phrase “civil disobedience.” His ally Mamdani has taken a similar approach, while also dodging specific answers to questions about how his NYPD would work with, or against, ICE, and how it would handle anti-ICE protesters or pro-Palestinian protesters who, say, try to block vans from leaving 26 Federal Plaza or bust into a train car to declare it a Zionist-free zone. 

It’s hard to focus on the open questions about Mamdani, though, when the president who stepped in to save the current mayor from a criminal trial is now threatening the mayoral frontrunner with deportation, and threatening New York City voters with a federal takeover if they elect him — while also holding the possibility of criminal charges over the candidate closest to Mamdani in the polls, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 

This endless pressure test from Washington is very real, and just ramping up. Whoever’s mayor next year, New Yorkers are in for a rough ride as Trump aims to assert his dominance, and make the city comply.