


‘I don’t know nothing about his criminal case,’ Homan said of Adams’s bribery indictment, which the Justice Department ordered SDNY prosecutors to dismiss.
Oxon Hill, Md. — President Donald Trump’s border czar is hesitant to give blue-state officials any credit for cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) until he sees concrete follow-through on the federal immigration enforcement front. “They can talk the talk,” he told National Review in a wide-ranging interview last weekend at the Conservative Political Conference just outside of Washington, D.C. “But I want them to walk the walk.”
And yet there appears to be one exception to that rule: New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “I think Mayor Adams wants to help,” Homan told NR of the Big Apple’s controversial chief executive, who granted ICE agents access to the Rikers Island jail complex earlier this month in a stunning shift in the city’s sanctuary immigration policy. “He says he wants to help. I believe he wants to help.”
Earlier this month, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to dismiss without prejudice a corruption indictment against Adams on campaign finance, wire fraud, conspiracy, and bribery charges. Speaking with National Review last weekend, Homan maintained that his consultation with Adams on federal immigration enforcement matters is unrelated to the Justice Department’s indictment dismissal order.
“I don’t know nothing about his criminal case,” Homan told National Review of the embattled cop turned mayor, who is running for reelection amid public scrutiny over his federal corruption case. “I started speaking to the mayor in November, long before this other thing was even an issue. I don’t think his criminal case and dismissal charges has anything to do with his cooperation.”
“He was cooperating with me in November, four months ago, before all this other stuff happened,” Homan continued, rejecting insinuation from critics that the cooperation constitutes a quid pro quo. “They’re just finding an excuse to get rid of a law-and-order mayor that wants to work with ICE to protect the community.”
In recent days, Adams and the Justice Department have attracted scrutiny from critics about why, exactly, the Trump administration ordered SDNY prosecutors to drop the case. Acting AG Emil Bove’s February 10 memo to SDNY prosecutors has only fanned the flames.
“The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the US Attorney’s office at this time,” Bove wrote in the memo, which also characterized Adams as a longtime critic of Biden-era immigration policies. Bove continued that “the pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”
Another eyebrow-raising tidbit from the memo is Bove’s order to dismiss the case without prejudice. As National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy observed earlier this month, “the deal is structured to give the Trump administration leverage to extort cooperation from the chief executive of a major city by threatening to reinstate charges against him.”
Adams has denied allegations that the Justice Department’s dismissal of his case constitutes a quid pro quo for his cooperation with ICE. And yet Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned from her post in reaction to Bove’s memo, insisting in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.”
For now, Homan counts Adams as an ally on federal immigration enforcement and maintains that he was in no way involved in the Justice Department’s decision to order a dismissal of his federal corruption case.
“He wants to be a law-and-order mayor, and I truly believe that’s what he wants to do, and he’s trying to do it,” Homan said. He added that members of the Big Apple’s left-leaning city council have “lost their minds” and the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, has been unhelpful on the immigration enforcement front, particularly given New York’s “Green Light Law.”