The City Council has filed a lawsuit to block Mayor Eric Adams from allowing federal immigration authorities to open an office on Rikers Island.

The suit, lodged in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday, accuses the mayor of engaging in a “quid pro quo” with the Trump administration.

Adams, it claims, promised to let U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement back onto Rikers to get his federal corruption case dismissed.

The mayor is named as a defendant, along with recently-appointed First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro and the city Department of Correction, which operates the jail complex.

“The mayor has compromised our city’s sovereignty and is now threatening the safety of all New Yorkers, which is why we are filing this lawsuit to halt his illegal order that he shamelessly previewed on the Fox News couch with Tom Homan,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running for mayor, said in a statement.

“When New Yorkers are afraid of cooperating with our city’s own police and discouraged from reporting crime and seeking help, it makes everyone in our city less safe,” she added. “This is a naked attempt by Eric Adams to fulfill his end of the bargain for special treatment he received from the Trump administration.”

The mayor and Homan, Trump’s so-called “border czar,” touted plans for the city to work with ICE in a joint appearance on “Fox and Friends” in February.

The interview came a day after Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor and several high-ranking Justice Department officials resigned, refusing an agency order to drop corruption charges against the mayor.

A judge ultimately dismissed the mayor’s case at the beginning of April. A week later, Mastro signed an executive order permitting ICE to establish an office on Rikers, saying its office would “allow our correctional intelligence bureau to better coordinate on criminal investigations — in particular, those focused on violent transnational criminal gangs — and make our city safer.”

Speaking with Spectrum Noticias last week, the mayor defended the move.

“When you have our current laws that state, if someone is in Rikers Island, they have been charged with a crime, we can’t turn them over to ICE,” he said. “Would that be an easier way to do it instead of going into communities where innocent people are? I think it would be.”

The City Council’s lawsuit, which calls the executive order “the poisoned fruit of Mayor Adams’ deal with the Trump administration,” claims ICE will use its office on Rikers “to fuel the administration’s illegal mass deportation agenda, despite unequivocal New York City sanctuary laws that forbid the use of City property for civil immigration enforcement.”

The city pushed the agency off of the island in 2015, after the City Council passed a pair of sanctuary laws.

The suit also maintains ICE "has long been notorious for sweeping unintended targets into its enforcement activities, meaning that allowing ICE back onto Rikers for the purpose of criminal investigation purposes is only a short and slippery slope to civil immigration enforcement.”

“In fact, ICE routinely arrests immigrants who simply happen to be in the vicinity of its intended target, despite lacking a warrant or even probable cause with respect to those ‘collateral’ arrestees,” it says. “And it continues to do so in violation of a federal court order that limited this practice in 2022, but which it has flagrantly disregarded.”

The lawsuit asks a judge to declare Mastro’s executive order illegal and stop the city from facilitating ICE’s return to Rikers.

In a statement, the mayor’s press secretary, Kayla Mamelak Altus, said City Hall would review the suit, but added that it “seems baseless and contrary to the public interest in protecting New Yorkers from violent crime.” 

“The first deputy mayor conducted a thorough and independent assessment — which included multiple visits to Rikers Island, conversations with federal law enforcement and our own Department of Correction officers, and more — and he independently concluded that a federal presence at Rikers to conduct federal criminal investigations is in New York City’s best interest and protects public safety, particularly in our ongoing efforts to target violent transnational gangs now present in our city, including those designated as terrorist organizations,” she said, in part.