Mamdani Forms NYC Interagency Team to Counter Trump’s ICE Moves, Five Boroughs Brace

New York braces for a new wave of federal immigration enforcement, testing the limits of sanctuary policy and intergovernmental trust.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was not yet two months into his term when he convened a war-room inside City Hall. The city’s first “Interagency Response Committee,” formed by a late-January executive order, was hastily assembled against the backdrop of a familiar spectre: President Donald Trump’s threats to unleash “federal resources” upon sanctuary cities—New York chief among them. With the memory of ICE raids from past years still relatively fresh, the administration is betting that a prepared city can avoid political panic and policy whiplash.

This new committee, chaired by seasoned City Hall operator Dean Fuleihan and staffed by senior officials such as chief counsel Ramzi Kassem and adviser Bitta Mostofi, is charged with preparing for a possible rapid escalation in immigration enforcement. It will coordinate city agencies’ policies, data, and communication to protect New Yorkers—regardless of status—from what is characterized as “aggressive” action by federal agents lacking judicial warrants. The city’s approach, a spokesman said, is both anticipatory and reactive: to offer practical support while working to maintain a baseline of public trust.

The politics are, as ever, fraught. Under local sanctuary policies, city agencies generally avoid cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) except in the case of serious or violent felonies. This position has routinely drawn the ire of Washington. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for its part, has accused the Mamdani administration of harbouring criminals and tying ICE’s hands. Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, claimed on February 9th, “ICE law enforcement wouldn’t have to be in the field in New York City if we had state and local cooperation.”

City officials, meanwhile, argue that federal tactics backfire, deterring immigrants from reporting crime or accessing public services, and thereby corroding public safety. The Interagency Response Committee, in their view, is a means to buffer that chilling effect: responding rapidly to raids or policy lurches, and to prevent the sort of community panic New York witnessed in 2018 and 2020.

For New York’s 3.2 million foreign-born residents—roughly 37% of the population—an abrupt change in federal tactics is more than a bureaucratic headache. It portends real economic, social, and psychological costs. City services, already overburdened, would need to absorb disruptions in everything from school attendance to public health. Police-community trust, which has struggled to recover from pandemic-era tensions, could endure another blow.

Potential spillovers extend to the city’s labour market, not least in construction, hospitality, and home healthcare, which depend on immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. A sudden spike in enforcement, economists have repeatedly found, tends to push workers further underground, eroding both the tax base and worker protections. The cost to employers, too, could be more than fleeting, with shortages in sectors where every pair of hands counts.

Beyond the immediate, the move tests an already fractious intergovernmental relationship. When Los Angeles and Minneapolis recently faced surges in ICE activity, city officials there reported a measurable uptick in social services requests and, curiously, late rent and mortgage payments as families scrambled to devise contingency plans. New York’s scale may amplify those ripples—perhaps even to the point of stoking housing instability in already brittle boroughs.

Sanctuary city or federal outpost?

The broader question is whether New York, as a self-styled sanctuary city, will—or can—hold its ground. Legal precedent, including Manhattan district court findings and Supreme Court dicta, is ambiguous: while federal law prevails over local edict, the Tenth Amendment generally precludes Washington from conscripting state and local officials into enforcing federal law. Previous rounds of policy sparring have, if anything, underscored that neither side is easily cowed nor trounced.

The likely result, if past is prologue, will be more testy stalemates. City leaders touting trust and inclusion, federal officials pressing for sovereignty. The people in the middle—immigrants, their families, employers—will rely on a delicate patchwork of support, legal ambiguity, and, all too often, luck.

The Mamdani administration’s approach, to its credit, attempts to systematise what was previously an ad hoc scramble. Gathering the likes of Mostofi, who handled similar tensions under Mayor de Blasio, and routing authority through a trusted crisis manager in Fuleihan, suggests a grownup attempt at preparedness amid uncertainty. If nothing else, this may mitigate the chaos, both in perception and in practice.

Nationally, the pattern is familiar. Sanctuary cities in California, Illinois, and elsewhere have endured periodic waves of federal pressure, fuelling cable-news soundbites but changing little about flows of people, money, or safety in the long term. What often distinguishes the city that fares best is not ideological purity, but a certain ruthlessness in marshalling resources and messaging—traits New York possesses, albeit with a penchant for drama.

Yet this latest episode speaks to a broader policy laziness in Washington: the chronic refusal to legislate, leaving local governments to play whack-a-mole with enforcement guidances and departmental threats. The real losers are ordinary residents: those relying on schools, clinics, and subways never built to function as immigration estuaries or law-enforcement auxiliaries.

It is tempting to see this as a contest of abstractions—sovereignty, rule of law, local democracy. In fact, it is about the city’s ability to muddle through, balancing principle with pragmatism. We reckon Mamdani’s committee is neither panacea nor provocation, but an expression of classic New York improvisation: patchwork, noisy, and moderately effective.

New York’s resilience may well be tested in the coming months. If history is any guide, the city will meet the challenge—if only because, for its mayors as much as its migrants, survival is the first order of business. ■