The Trump administration has attacked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for issuing an executive order that reminds municipal agencies to comply with existing sanctuary laws.

The order from Mamdani’s office, published on Friday, reaffirmed that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may not use city-owned parking lots or property as staging areas for their operations.  

Also mentioned multiple times throughout the document is the fact that ICE agents are required to present a judicial warrant if they want to enter private property to make an arrest.

The order does not create any new laws to prevent local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement agents on deportation efforts. City employees are already barred from doing this in most cases.

The only piece of action six public-facing agencies, including the New York Police Department, are required to take is to have their employees undergo new training courses on the city’s sanctuary restrictions. 

Nonetheless, the Department of Homeland Security has said the order will lead to public safety concerns.

‘Mamdani will make New Yorkers less safe as a direct result of this policy,’ DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Politico.

McLaughlin added that the mayor should ‘agree to release criminals in New York City’s custody to ICE before they are released back onto the Big Apple’s streets to victimize and prey on more Americans’.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put out an executive order on Friday reaffirming the city’s existing sanctuary policies

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Mamdani’s order would ‘make New Yorkers less safe’

Asked about McLaughlin’s characterization of the order on Friday, Mamdani defended it and said sanctuary policies actually keep Americans safe.

‘These are policies that keep New Yorkers safe,’ he said of his executive order. ‘These are policies that are motivated by delivering public safety, not in spite of public safety.’

The Daily Mail has approached Mamdani’s office and DHS for comment. 

The blistering statement from DHS came after President Donald Trump threatened to cut ‘significant’ federal spending going to sanctuary cities like New York.

‘They do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens. And it breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come,’ Trump said on January 13 during a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. ‘So we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities.’ 

The Department of Justice published a lengthy list of sanctuary states, cities and counties in August. 

New York, both the city and state, were included. Also on the list were many municipalities where massive numbers of federal agents were eventually sent.

Among them were Los Angeles, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; and a dozen others.

President Donald Trump has threatened to yank federal funding from sanctuary cities, something he has not followed through out on as of now

There are notable exceptions to New York City’s sanctuary law. Illegal immigrants who are on a federal terrorism watchlist or have been convicted of a serious or violent crime within the last five years can be deported with the help of local law enforcement (Pictured: ICE agents detain man in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 27)

Without specifying which federal funds he’d freeze for cities, Trump imposed a February 1 deadline to revoke their sanctuary statuses. That deadline has since come and gone, with no discernible consequences for New York or any other city.

Defenders of sanctuary policies often say they boost public safety because illegal immigrants are free to report crimes and serve as witnesses in criminal cases without the fear of getting deported.

New York’s sanctuary laws do have exceptions. When an illegal immigrant has been convicted of a serious or violent crime in the last five years, local law enforcement agencies are permitted to share information with ICE, but only if a judicial warrant is presented.

If an illegal immigrant exists on the federal terrorism database and ICE presents a warrant signed by a judge attesting to that, New York City police would be able to cooperate in that scenario as well.