One of the policies in question was a law enacted in 2014 during the tenure of Mr. Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio. As part of the commitment to make sure no city resources will be used to help the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with deportation, the law shut down the ICE offices that had operated across city facilities and orders the city’s police and correction departments to not honor any detainer requests from ICE that’s not specifically accompanied by a warrant signed by a federal judge.

A detainer request is a notification to local law enforcement to hold a certain person for the purpose of future deportation. Under the 2014 law, New York City agencies will ignore such requests, unless they involve individuals who are on federal terrorist watch list or have been convicted of a serious or violent crime.

Another de Blasio-era policy, issued in 2018 in the form of citywide guidance, goes further by demanding that any requests for help from federal immigration officers must be first reviewed by “senior city agency officials” to determine that they were not made to assist with deportation.

Speaking at his weekly press briefing, Mr. Adams complained about the current version of “sanctuary city” laws as being so lax that they become problematic amid rising concerns over crimes involving illegal immigrants.

“We should be communicating with ICE. And if ICE makes the determination of deporting, then they should,” he said.

The Democrat mayor also indicated that he prefers standards from the era of Michael Bloomberg and before.

“I want to go back to the standards of the previous mayors [whom] I believe subscribed to my belief that people who are suspected of committing serious crimes in this city should be held accountable,” he told reporters.

New York City’s “sanctuary” policy dates back to the mayoralty of Ed Koch, whose executive order in 1989 mandates that no city employee should share information about illegal immigrants with ICE without the immigrant’s written permission or unless the immigrant was suspected—not convicted—of committing a crime.

That order was reissued by succeeding mayors, including Rudy Guiliani, who now advocates a tougher stance on handling those who entered the United States illegally.

At Tuesday’s briefing, Mr. Adams also pointed to a recent bust of a phone robbery ring in the Bronx. The criminal group allegedly consisted of migrants and was run by a Venezuelan national, whom the mayor said could have already been removed from the country if his previous criminal history was shared with the feds.

“This person was a menace,” Mr. Adams said of the alleged robbery ring leader. “You want to leave him here, have him have two years before he’s actually convicted and continuing to do his criminal behavior? I just philosophically disagree with that.”

“The mere fact we cannot share with ICE that this person has committed three robberies, that this person is part of an organized gang crew, [the] mere fact that we can’t say that, and can’t communicate with that, is problematic for me,” he added.

The mayor’s newly found push for changes, which almost certainly will anger the progressives in the city council, won him rare cheers from conservative voices on social media.

“Wow! Mayor Adams is asking for a change in New York City’s sanctuary city law. Good for him,” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA wrote on X. “Now he needs to go all the way and move to abolish it.”

“Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. Where’s the client list?” Ramaswamy wrote Friday on Twitter in response to a news article about Deutsche Bank agreeing to pay $75 million to settle a lawsuit filed by alleged sexual abuse victims of Epstein.

“Release it now. I’ll do it as President,” he wrote.

The promise comes amid renewed public interest in the identity of those associated with Epstein, a well-connected billionaire and convicted sex offender charged with multiple counts of child sex trafficking.

Before his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell, ruled a suicide by hanging, Epstein ran in high-society circles and established connections with many prominent figures.

According to reports, Thursday’s $75 million settlement resolves a class-action suit filed by two unnamed women, who accused Deutsche Bank of enabling Epstein to traffic his victims.

Specifically, they claimed that the bank “knowingly benefited from participating in a sex-trafficking venture,” “obstructed enforcement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act,” and “negligently failed to exercise reasonable care to prevent physical harm.”

Attorneys representing the women who brought the case, said that once the judge approves the settlement agreement, the $75 million will be made available to more than 125 victims of Epstein.

‘Blind Eye’

JPMorgan Chase is facing a similar lawsuit filed last December by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The government alleges that the bank “turned a blind eye” to Epstein’s crimes for more than 10 years “because of the deals and clients that Epstein brought and promised to bring to the bank.”

Recent reports from The Wall Street Journal have revealed a number of additional prominent people who had ties with Epstein. These people did not appear in Epstein’s infamous black book or the flight logs of his private jet but were mentioned in his private schedule.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Epstein’s schedule for Sept. 8, 2014, suggests that he planned to meet on that day with four very wealthy men: Bill Gates, Leon Black, Thomas Pritzker, and Mortimer Zuckerman. Some other files obtained by the Journal showed that Epstein had met with CIA Director William Burns and former MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

Campaign Promises

Ramaswamy is not the only candidate to promise to publicize files of high public interest. Former President Donald Trump, the nation’s top Republican and presidential forerunner, said this week that he would release all files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“I released a lot, as you know. And I will release everything else,” Trump said in an interview with The Messenger, referring to the JFK records.

When Trump was in office, he ordered a batch of more than 2,800 uncensored documents to be posted to the National Archives website. But
his administration held onto a few hundred others, saying that “certain information should continue to be redacted because of identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”

“I agree with the Archivist’s recommendation that the continued withholdings are necessary to protect against identifiable harm to national security, law enforcement, or foreign affairs that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure. I am also ordering agencies to re-review each of those redactions over the next 3 years,” Trump’s office said in 2018.

When asked by The Messenger whether there should be anything the public should be worried about in the JFK records, Trump replied that he didn’t want to talk about that.

“Well, I don’t want to comment on that,” he said. “But I will tell you that I have released a lot. I will release the remaining portion very early in my term.”

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

“If Congress fails to do that, it really impairs our credit rating. We have to default on some obligation, whether it’s Treasuries or payments to Social Security recipients,” Yellen said on Friday in an interview with Bloomberg.

“That’s something America hasn’t done since 1789,” she continued, referring to a time when the new-born United States failed to pay back money it borrowed to finance the war against the British Empire. “And we shouldn’t start now. So we’ve not discussed what to do.”

When asked about the speculation that her department would prioritize payments of interest and principal on Treasury securities in a default scenario, Yellen said the White House has never reviewed or approved such a plan.

“My understanding—I was at the Fed in 2011—is that this plan was never presented to the president and never approved,” Yellen told Bloomberg. In 2011, she was serving as vice chair of the Federal Reverse.

When asked if she would now present that plan to prioritize Treasuries to the president, Yellen replied, “We are working full time to work with Congress to raise the debt ceiling. That’s where our focus is.”

Yellen Warns of Credit Downgrade

The remarks comes after she argued that a U.S. government default might trigger a downgrade of its credit rating and weaken consumer confidence, similar to what happened in 2011.

“A default would threaten the gains that we’ve worked so hard to make over the past few years in our pandemic recovery. And it would spark a global downturn that would set us back much further,” Yellen said Thursday in Japan, where she was attending a meeting of finance chiefs and central bankers of G7 countries.

“It would also risk undermining U.S. global economic leadership and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests,” she added.

Yellen pointed to the 2011 debt ceiling crisis that prompted Standard & Poor’s to lower the United States’ long-held top-notch AAA sovereign credit rating to AA-plus. She warned that another downgrade would drive up interest rates for consumers and companies seeking loans.

“We could see a rise in interest rates drive up payments on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. We are already seeing spikes in interest rates for debt due around the date that the debt limit may bind,” she said.

“The U.S. Congress has raised or suspended the debt limit about 80 times since 1960. I urge it to act quickly to do so once again.”

Democrats, Republicans Blame Each Other

Yellen’s comments echo those of President Joe Biden, who criticized Republican members of Congress for wanting to tie the debt limit increase to deficit-savings measures.

“They’re literally—not figuratively—holding the economy hostage by threatening to default on our nation’s debt,” Biden said Wednesday of what he called “extreme MAGA Republicans.”

Although the Biden administration insists that Congress pass a “clean” debt ceiling increase, almost every major debt ceiling agreement in the past 30 years had at least some kind of deficit-reduction law attached to it, including the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act under the Clinton administration, and the 2010 Pay-As-You-Go Act and the 2011 Budget Control Act under the Obama administration.

Republican congressional leaders remain cautious on defaulting national debt, as the nation’s top Republican, former President Donald Trump suggested that it’s better to let the U.S. government default than passing a budget that doesn’t include spending cuts.

“I say to the Republicans out there—Congressmen, Senators—if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” Trump said Wednesday during a town hall event hosted by CNN in New Hampshire.

“I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen,” he told an undeclared voter in the audience. “But it’s better than what we’re doing right now, because we’re spending money like drunken sailors.”

Speaking the day after the Trump town hall, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said his party is working to avoid a default, while Democrats are pushing the nation closer to one.

“The only thing I see right now is that the Republicans made sure default is not on the table. We’ve raised the debt limit,” he said, reported The Hill.

“The only person talking about default right now is President Biden. His actions, he’s ignored this problem, just like he’s ignored the border, that means more Americans are gonna die from fentanyl. You had 11,000 people just yesterday come across.”

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image via Mark Warner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.