NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tapped a former Biden administration official to audit six municipal agencies for violations of local sanctuary laws — an effort aimed at defending the city against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdowns.
Bitta Mostofi, who served as a senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Joe Biden, will spearhead the audits in her new role as a special adviser to Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, according to two people with knowledge of the initiative who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters.
In addition to identifying loopholes in compliance protocols, Mostofi is not ruling out that the audits may involve crafting new, more severe penalties for city workers who violate sanctuary regulations.
“The directive is for folks to recommend to the mayor changes to policies and protocols, and that can be everything from the process, to accountability, to transparency and so forth,” she told POLITICO in an interview last week.
Mamdani’s push to shore up compliance with sanctuary laws comes as the Trump administration continues to use increasingly aggressive tactics to make good on the president’s pledge to deport millions of immigrants from the U.S. Since their chummy White House meeting in November, Mamdani and Trump have largely avoided publicly sparring with each other. But in beefing up the city government’s immigrant protections, the democratic socialist mayor risks drawing the ire of Trump, who has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in funding from sanctuary jurisdictions around the country.
Still, Mostofi said there’s a pressing need to closely examine city agencies after former Mayor Eric Adams fostered a dynamic that kneecapped sanctuary laws. The audits, she noted, will seek to weed out “any lingering sort of questions and confusion or gray area” left behind by Adams.
“What we witnessed in the last mayoral administration was frankly an undermining of these laws,” she said.
Under Adams, New York City’s Department of Investigation found employees of the NYPD and the Department of Correction — two of the agencies now facing audits — violated sanctuary laws by sharing information with federal officials about immigrants. The findings came after Adams sought to let ICE set up an office on Rikers Island — a move ultimately blocked in court after City Council attorneys argued it violated sanctuary restrictions.
New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, hundreds of thousands of them undocumented. Sanctuary laws can make it more difficult for ICE and other federal agencies to conduct civil immigration enforcement. For instance, the laws, which date back decades, bar city employees from letting federal immigrant authorities onto municipal property, like schools, unless they have judicial warrants for a particular person’s arrest.
Murad Awawdeh, a Mamdani transition team adviser who leads the New York Immigration Coalition, said the mayor’s audits mark “the first step in creating a new culture of accountability and transparency for compliance with our critical sanctuary laws.”
Mamdani first ordered the so-called “public safety audits” Feb. 6 without identifying who would lead them.
In addition to the NYPD and the DOC, Mostofi will oversee sanctuary compliance audits at the departments of probation, social services and health as well as at the Administration for Children’s Services, according to the order.
The agencies selected for audits are the ones considered most likely to interact with federal immigration authorities. There’s also concern within the Mamdani administration that the six agencies may still operate within a framework that prevailed under Adams. They fear those residual dynamics could give employees the impression that sanctuary law violations aren’t taken seriously, said one of the people.
Mamdani’s audit directive was folded into a broader executive order affirming the city’s sanctuary laws. Hours after Mamdani unveiled the order, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security issued a statement blasting it for making New Yorkers “less safe," signaling the administration is paying close attention.
Unlike the other provisions of Mamdani’s executive action, the audits stand out as a change in city policy that could come with significant consequences, especially if Mostofi advocates for stricter penalty protocols.
The audits should screen “all internal policies, guidelines and protocols” for sanctuary law lapses, and a report on the findings at each agency must then be submitted to Mamdani by May 7, the order notes. One of the people who spoke with POLITICO said the administration expects reports to not merely identify loopholes, but also to spell out how they can be addressed.
Once the reports are submitted, City Hall will then use the findings to enact new training protocols to strengthen sanctuary law compliance at each agency, according to the order.
As a former federal immigration official, Mostofi said she has a broad perspective she intends to apply to the new training plans. “I understand both the experiences of people within those systems as well as people on the outside of them,” she said.
An official at one of the six agencies targeted by the order said the city government already conducts regular compliance audits and voiced suspicion about the actual purpose of the City Hall-led probes.
“This recent executive order only raises more questions as to what specific policy the administration is pursuing and what the expectations are for the employees responsible for enforcing it,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
By contrast, Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry, whose union represents the NYPD’s tens of thousands of rank-and-file officers, did not immediately push back on the prospect of additional sanctuary law training.
“Police officers do not make laws or policies, and the NYPD’s policies in this area have been in place for a long time,” he said. “We are always in favor of more training for our members.”
With additional reporting by Gelila Negesse
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