An ex-Biden aide who additionally lobbied to ban the time period “unlawful immigrant” whereas serving in Invoice de Blasio’s administration was tapped by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to audit metropolis businesses just like the NYPD for sanctuary regulation violations, sources confirmed.
Bitta Mostofi — previously a senior official for President Joe Biden’s US Citizenship and Immigration Providers — was chosen to guide an audit of six metropolis businesses, with a objective of figuring out potential loopholes and shutting them up, sources advised The Submit.
Mostafi will function a particular adviser to Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, as she runs the audit, which was introduced simply weeks after President Trump vowed to withhold billions in federal funding from cities that refuse to desert sanctuary insurance policies.
“The directive is for people to advocate to the mayor modifications to insurance policies and protocols, and that may be every little thing from the method, to accountability, to transparency and so forth,” Mostafi advised Politico, which first reported her appointment on Monday.
Companies within the audit crosshairs embody the NYPD, the Division of Correction, the Administration for Youngsters’s Providers, and the departments of probation and well being and social companies, all of which have been chosen for his or her probability to take care of federal immigration brokers.
Staff on the NYPD and DOC, underneath former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, have been discovered to have run afoul of the sanctuary insurance policies — which bar municipal cooperation with federal immigration officers like ICE — by slipping the feds details about migrant inmates that allowed them to be detained for deportation.
Mostofi accused Adams of weakening metropolis sanctuary insurance policies throughout his tenure, including that the audit would handle “any lingering form of questions and confusion or grey space.”
“What we witnessed within the final mayoral administration was frankly an undermining of those legal guidelines,” she advised Politico.
The audit requires a report on how every of the town businesses concerned deal with sanctuary insurance policies, and for options to shut any loopholes that might permit the feds to work round them, sources stated. That report is due on Mamdani’s desk on Might 7.
Mostofi was de Blasio’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Workplace of Immigrant Affairs, serving to the town battle immigration initiatives throughout Trump’s first time period, earlier than becoming a member of the Biden administration.
She referred to as a 2019 White Home effort to disclaim inexperienced playing cards to immigrants more likely to find yourself on state welfare an “assault on the healthcare and well-being” of immigrants. She additionally supported a 2020 Metropolis Council invoice to ban the phrases “alien,” “unlawful alien” and “unlawful immigrant” from official use by municipal employees — calling every an “offensive and dehumanizing time period.”
Mamdani’s audit plan, which Mostofi will helm, emerged on Feb. 6 as a part of a broader government order by the mayor meant to “strengthen protections and accountability” of the town’s longstanding sanctuary insurance policies.
He signed the order after a fiery speech lambasting Trump’s sweeping crackdown on unlawful immigration, which has seen ICE brokers deploying into metropolis’s throughout the nation to conduct sweeping deportation raids.
“Day after day we bear witness to cruelty that staggers the conscience,” Mamdani stated whereas talking on the Interfaith Breakfast on the New York Public Library.
“We’ll make it clear as soon as once more ICE won’t be able to enter New York Metropolis property with out a judicial warrant. Which means our colleges, our shelters and our hospitals,” he stated of the order.
Trump vowed in January to revoke federal funding for sanctuary cities throughout the nation, saying in a Detroit speech that they “do every little thing potential to guard criminals on the expense of Americans.”
“It breeds fraud and crime and all the different issues that come. So we’re not making any cost to anyone that helps sanctuary cities,” he stated.
