The real victims of Eric Adams’ NYC corrupt bargain might go to Gitmo

The shocking saga — even amid all the chaos of the Trump 47 regime — of New York City’s allegedly crooked Mayor Eric Adams and his immoral bargain with the new president’s U.S. Justice Department has been all over the news, and why wouldn’t it be?

Even in a nation where the rich, famous, and powerful getting away with their crimes is a tale as old as time, the overt brazenness of a scheme to drop serious corruption charges against the mayor of America’s largest city in return for political favors is stunning. What’s more, this is a story with not just villains but a gaggle of heroes in the seven top Justice Department attorneys who resigned rather than sell their souls.

And yet, we’re not paying nearly enough attention to the real victims of Donald Trump’s lawyers’ indecent proposal, and Adams’ narcissistic willingness to go along with it. When I think of political rot that’s eating away the Big Apple, I see people like Isabel Miranda, a 39-year-old recent refugee from Colombia who lives in a Midtown Manhattan shelter with her two young children and is scared her family could be ripped apart by the next knock from Trump’s federal “mass deportation” cops.

“It makes you desperate; you go out, and they look at us as if we were delinquents who came here to destroy the country, and that’s not the case,” Miranda told NBC News in her native Spanish recently. “We contribute, too, because we work hard and we do the tough work … The only thing I ask for is that my children remain safe because I can’t go back to Colombia.”

The same reporter caught up with an 8-year-old boy named Ihan Forero, originally from Colombia who was returning with his mother to the shelter in the Roosevelt Hotel from school. Ihan’s reaction to the start of Trump’s presidency was “fear … He has a cold heart.”

And these words came before lawyers for a Justice Department now run by zealous Trump loyalists cut a deal with a down-and-out mayor that treated mothers like Miranda and little children like Ihan not as human beings — desperate to make it there, in old New York — but as pawns who can be moved around in a political power play.

The nonaggression pact seemingly worked out between the president’s former personal lawyer, Emil Bove, now ensconced as the No. 2 official in a Trumpified Justice Department, and Team Adams in New York has included the mayor calling for greatly increased cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — despite city laws promising a safe haven for refugees.

Thus, the deal that aims to drop all criminal charges — as well as an ongoing federal probe uncovering even more graft during Adams’ three years in City Hall — also increases the odds agents could enter an 8-year-old’s school and send his family back to Colombia, or worse.

“We’ve been hearing from everyone about this deep sense of fear … and rightful concern — that students are not going to school because they’re scared that their parents will get picked up by ICE at the drop-off or pickup,” Murad Awawdeh, the CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, told me on Friday, “or that people are not going to their doctor’s appointments or getting their treatment because we’re scared that ICE will pick them up. And we are seeing people not showing up to work.”

Indeed, statistics suggest that thousands of New York City’s estimated 915,000 public school kids stayed home in the days immediately after an ICE-led raid that surged agents into an immigrant-laden Bronx neighborhood and was widely publicized, including a made-for-TV appearance by new Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who donned a “POLICE” jacket to accompany the agents. (The city Department of Education said overall daily attendance plunged from 90% to the mid-80s after the raid, then rebounded but not fully — and then it stopped releasing numbers.)

If New York’s migrant kids and their parents were anxious at the dawn of Trump’s presidency, they should now be terrorized by the cowardly complicity of the mayor of their adopted hometown. Even before POTUS 47 took office, Adams — with those felony federal charges looming over his head — was signaling through memos and demands of his department heads that a longtime sanctuary city for immigrants was now willing to play ball with Trump’s deportation regime.

» READ MORE: Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ reality TV show is both fake and incredibly dangerous | Will Bunch

Soon, the details of the shameless quid pro quo at the center of the negotiations between Adams’ lawyers and Trump’s politicized prosecutors — which centered not on the legal merits of the mayor’s indictment, but his willingness to give immigration cops free rein over New York — weren’t even hidden, but laid bare in legal filings and a blistering resignation note from Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon.

The Justice Department’s formal request to dismiss the indictment seeks to also retain the right to reinstate the charges — essentially holding the mayor hostage to Trump’s political demands. Within hours after the arrangement went public, Adams met with the president’s immigration czar, Tom Homan, prepared an executive order seeking to skirt a city law that blocks ICE agents from city jails, and even did a joint appearance with Homan on Trump’s favorite show, Fox and Friends.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch,” Homan told the Fox hosts as an emasculated Adams laughed awkwardly. “I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Let’s be clear: This sordid narrative exists because of the rank hypocrisy of arguably the most corrupt mayor in the long, unseemly history of the city that gave us rogues such as Boss Tweed and Jimmy Walker. Adams is an ex-police captain with the audacity to run as a “law-and-order” candidate even as he was already under criminal investigation at the time of his 2021 election.

It’s no surprise a man allegedly willing to sell his office to Turkey’s strongman leader for $100,000 in luxury trips and illegal campaign donations didn’t think twice about a deal with America’s strongman leader that will allow him to continue swaggering into Manhattan nightclubs as a free man. Even as that deal means trading away the liberty of some everyday New Yorkers, some of whom Trump’s deportation army would probably frog-march to Guantánamo Bay for the Fox News cameras.

How lucky for such an amoral pol as Adams that he witnessed the second coming of a President Trump hell-bent on political retribution and warping the Justice Department to that mission. It’s taken just days for Trump, new Attorney General Pam Bondi, Bove, and the rest of their posse to crush the values of independent law enforcement and create a dictatorial tool for rewarding the president’s friends, including more than 1,000 pardoned Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists, to threaten his political enemies with prosecution for nonexistent crimes, and use their powers for maximum leverage by using a case like Adams’ as fodder for the art of a corrupt deal.

The unholy and arguably unlawful quid pro quo with the mayor is so outrageous that it sparked a remarkable event dubbed the Thursday Afternoon Massacre, as eventually seven federal prosecutors, beginning with Sassoon, resigned rather than aid in dropping the charges against Adams as Bove demanded of them. That’s a huge development, and all Americans should hail the heroism of Sassoon and colleagues like lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten, who also quit on Friday, as sterling examples of what citizens must do to resist dictatorship.

But while this drama plays out among Ivy League-educated lawyers, I’m still worried we won’t fight hard enough to defend the essential workers who fill potholes or clean hotel rooms and are trying to give their innocent 8-year-olds a better life — whom Adams, Trump, and their willing henchmen see merely as collateral damage.

Awawdeh, the immigration advocate, told me that much of Adams' planned cooperation with Homan and ICE appears in direct conflict with New York’s established sanctuary laws and can be blocked in the courts. He said the mayor “didn’t realize that he didn’t have the power to undo a lot of things that he was offering them.”

Let’s hope so because the willingness of America’s increasingly compromised and antidemocratic leaders to abuse the human rights of immigrants — some desperately fleeing criminal gangs or abject poverty in their native lands, others who’ve planted hardworking, taxpaying roots in the United States for years — isn’t just a New York City problem.

Facing the reality that the promised top priority of hardened criminals is a small minority of the millions Trump promised his rage-soaked 2024 voters he would deport, the new administration has turned its supposed “mass deportation” regime into a reality TV show of cruelty-is-the-point treatment of the thousands ensnared so far, featuring the harsh American military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay on the tip of Cuba.

“My brother is not a criminal,” a weeping Yajaira Castillo told the New York Times after seeing a photo of her brother, Luis, being led into Gitmo in handcuffs by U.S. troops. “This is all discrimination and xenophobia, just because he’s Venezuelan.” She said Luis Castillo is not a gang member but was singled out by U.S. authorities merely for having a tattoo.

Barring intervention, some immigrants who today walk freely, if nervously, on the sidewalks of New York might soon be joining Castillo in the notorious American lockup. Some poor dream-dashed refugee will soon be wearing the orange prison garb that should have been tailored for New York’s mayor, who instead will keep his designer threads while raising an after-hours Champagne glass to toast the absurd joke of what passes for justice in America in the 21st century.

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