No Backing Down: A Civil Rights Agenda for the 2026 New York City Council

Immigrants’ Rights

The Trump administration’s threats to immigrant communities have not gone away, but the previous Council left several critical measures on the table that would shore up local protections for immigrant New Yorkers. The City Council must strengthen New York City’s sanctuary protections so that the city takes every legal step possible to prevent the use of any city resources to fuel Trump’s deportation machine or perpetrate its notorious abuses.

Strengthen Protections for Immigrant New Yorkers

For decades, New York City has had strong laws and policies that restrict local law enforcement and other city employees from colluding with immigration authorities. A centerpiece of our city’s sanctuary commitments are local laws that broadly prohibit city police and corrections officers from turning people in their custody over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to immigration detainers. These laws contain unfortunate loopholes that the city has interpreted as allowing officers to transfer people into ICE custody. Because of these loopholes, people are sometimes transferred to ICE based on their prior contact with the criminal legal system or their inclusion on a dubious government watchlist.

As the Trump administration escalates its assault on immigrant communities and attempts to collapse the distinctions between immigration enforcement and criminal law enforcement, the city must not cling to misguided interpretations of the law to justify colluding with ICE. The Council must pass legislation to remove carveouts from our sanctuary laws and draw a bright line that prohibits turning people over to ICE.

Ensure Accountability in Our City’s Sanctuary Laws

New York City’s longstanding sanctuary laws are critical to ensuring that the millions of noncitizens who call the city their home can live their lives in public without fear that city employees will turn them over to ICE. Yet when the officials charged with upholding these laws deliberately or unwittingly violate them and people are unlawfully funneled into the deportation pipeline, those who suffer the consequences of such violations have no obvious way to hold the city accountable.

To provide meaningful protection, our city sanctuary laws must have teeth. The Council must act to pass the New York City Trust Act, which would create an express private right of action to allow people who are harmed by sanctuary law violations to sue the city in court for damages. Doing so would not only give individuals and their families a way to seek justice, but will also serve as an important deterrent for bad actors and help ensure that our local laws are followed.

Keep ICE Off Rikers Island for Good

When the Council amended New York City’s detainer laws more than a decade ago, it included a provision intended to bar immigration authorities from maintaining an office on Rikers Island. Prior to then, ICE had maintained a trailer office on Rikers to facilitate transfers of people leaving the jail into its custody. That practice ended in 2014. Yet as part of former Mayor Adams’s underhanded dealings with the Trump administration, the Adams administration issued an executive order that would have allowed ICE officers to reestablish an office on Rikers—a move that was promptly blocked in court.

While the prior mayor’s attempt to let ICE open up shop on city-controlled property was unsuccessful, it illustrated how ambiguities and loosely drafted exceptions in our local laws can be exploited by those seeking to undermine the Council’s legislative intent. The prior Council passed legislation making clear that ICE is not permitted to maintain an office on Department of Correction land for any purpose, which the former mayor vetoed as one of his final acts before leaving office. The new Council must override this veto and ensure that this measure becomes law.

Policing

The City Council has a critical role to play in overseeing the operations of the largest municipal police force in the country. Under the most recent mayoral administration, the New York Police Department aggressively pursued broken windows policing tactics, leading to increases in stop-and-frisk, summonses and arrests, and complaints of misconduct. In addition to its oversight role in examining and demanding the Department account for its tactics, the Council can also advance measures that increase protections for New Yorkers against abusive policing tactics and surveillance tools and that provide a stronger framework for holding law enforcement accountable for misconduct.

Protect the Right to Protest

With the federal government stoking fears over protests as a rationale for deploying military personnel to cities, it is essential that NYC do everything in its power to protect the right to protest—a core democratic right. But the NYPD’s policing of protest has long been a source of criticism and litigation for the threats its tactics have posed to that core right. For nearly a decade, the Strategic Response Group (SRG) has been the notoriously violent face of an overly aggressive and abusive response to protests and demonstrations. New Yorkers need to know that their right to protest in this city—including and especially in response to threats from the Trump administration—is sacrosanct. That is why the City Council must pass the Communities United to Reject Brutality (CURB) Act. This legislation will protect the right to protest by reining in the NYPD’s most abusive tactics. It will prohibit the SRG’s deployment to protests and ban the unit’s most notorious and unwarranted tactics from being used by any NYPD officer at protests going forward.

Delete the Racially Biased Gang Database

The NYPD’s gang database is vast, unaccountable, and used to surveil members of traditionally marginalized communities. The database includes thousands of people who the NYPD claims are members of gangs. However, while the NYPD claims this is an evidence-based tool, the criteria for including someone in the database are vague and ripe for abuse. These flawed practices have led to a database that is 99 percent Black and Latinx boys and men and that subjects them to a heightened risk of surveillance and profiling. And—notwithstanding New York’s sanctuary protections—the database represents an attractive target for an overreaching federal government. The City Council must pass legislation to eliminate the database and to put an end to the harms and threats that the gang database’s continued existence poses to New Yorkers.

Deliver on Transparency for Police Misconduct

The 2020 repeal of section 50-a had the potential to usher in a new era of police transparency, lifting the veil of secrecy from police discipline and misconduct records and making them available to the public—provided they have the means and patience to pursue often lengthy Freedom of Information Law requests. The NYPD could remove this burden from the public by providing information on officer discipline and misconduct on its own, a step the Department promised to take in 2021 when it unveiled its own personnel dashboard. That dashboard, however, is severely limited to a narrow slice of discipline records in only the most serious cases of misconduct and makes it difficult to assess whether the Department is doing enough to investigate abuse and hold officers accountable. The City Council can step in to deliver on this unrealized promise of transparency. The Council should pass legislation to require a comprehensive accounting of all misconduct complaints and outcomes and to ensure that the NYPD’s database is truly comprehensive.

Criminal Legal System

New York City jails have long been plagued by inhumane conditions, but the current conditions reflect a humanitarian crisis. Since 2020, the incarcerated population has nearly doubled, and at least 70 people have died in NYC jails. It is well past time for New York City to protect New Yorkers behind bars by ensuring that they have access to medical and mental health care, rehabilitative programming, and social services upon release. With the August 2027 legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers quickly approaching, the City Council must prioritize decarceration. The Council must also enact legislation that recognizes the humanity of incarcerated people and their loved ones.

Take Necessary Steps to Shut Down Rikers

Rikers is a human rights catastrophe and must be closed. For the city to take meaningful steps to meet the August 2027 closure deadline, immediate steps must be taken to reduce the population, which has swelled from below 4,000 in 2020 to over 7,000 today.

Closing Rikers demands decarceration, and the City Council can help achieve this by expanding release programs for incarcerated people, particularly focusing on those who are most at risk, such as people with medical or mental health needs, pregnant people, or caregivers. Additionally, expanding the use of release mechanisms will help prevent overcrowding, which is necessary to ensure that any new jails are not plagued by the dire conditions that have persisted on Rikers.

Ensure Humane Conditions

When a New Yorker is incarcerated, their life is heavily controlled and surveilled. On Rikers, even phone calls with loved ones are recorded. The New York City Department of Correction contracts for phone services with Securus, a company infamous for illegally recording privileged attorney-client calls and tracking locations and voices.

The End Correctional Community Surveillance Act would prohibit the non-consensual recording and surveillance of phone calls between people detained at Rikers and their loved ones. It would encourage those who are detained at Rikers, many of whom are detained pretrial and there because they cannot afford bail, to more freely communicate. Strong ties between incarcerated people and their loved ones assist people in making informed decisions about their pending criminal cases and are likely to ease reentry.

Privacy

New and invasive surveillance technologies can pose a serious risk to our civil rights and liberties, especially in the face of a federal administration looking to expand access to personal information to fuel its campaign against immigrants and other vulnerable populations. The City Council can act to safeguard New Yorkers’ privacy by restricting the use of dangerous surveillance tools in the first place. And the Council can also take steps to empower all New Yorkers with access to the connectivity they need to close the digital divide without trading off any privacy protections.

Ban Biometric Surveillance

Biometric surveillance technologies—which include face, voice, and gait recognition—enable the power to track who you are, where you go, and who you meet. New York City has seen a rise in the use of such technologies by police, in housing, and in public accommodations.

Biometric surveillance presents an unprecedented threat to our privacy and civil liberties. Worse, in addition to their invasive nature, biometric technologies are notoriously inaccurate and racially biased. Numerous studies have shown that face recognition technologies are particularly inaccurate for women and people of color. In addition, many biometric technologies rely on the remote monitoring and collection of individuals’ biological characteristics without consent or knowledge. Unlike a password or credit card number, this information cannot be changed if it is compromised or stolen.

The New York City Council must pass prohibitions on biometric surveillance by law enforcement and in other areas where our fundamental rights are at stake, including in residential buildings and public accommodations.

Provide Internet Access to People in Shelters

Lack of internet access severely disadvantages homeless people across nearly all aspects of life. Without connectivity, they cannot effectively search for jobs or permanent housing, participate in remote education or complete homework, access government benefits and services, or get health care and legal services.

The Council must work to provide reliable, privacy-preserving, high-speed internet access to all people in temporary housing. Access to broadband internet should be a universal right, not a privilege.

Gender Justice

Every New Yorker deserves the freedom to be themselves and to pursue our dreams. But the Trump administration is hellbent on denying these rights to certain groups of people. Trump and his backers pose an existential threat to reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, women, and families. They seek to deny us the health care we need, divide us by race and gender, and even decide who we can be. New York City has an opportunity—and an obligation—to lead the way in investing in and developing policies that support broad, inclusive gender justice.

Support Transgender, Gender-Nonconforming, Nonbinary, and Intersex New Yorkers

New York City must continue to see and honor trans people’s identities. Identity documents are required for people to participate in society – to rent an apartment, access public benefits, open a bank account, enroll a child in school, or drive a vehicle. As the Trump administration seeks to deny trans people accurate IDs, the New York City Council must advance legislation that requires all city agencies to offer X gender markers and that ensures that every agency that collects gender or sex information offers an X designation. It must also pass legislation creating a pathway for correct gender markers on death certificates.

Further, the city must respect and protect trans people in jails by passing legislation that requires that city jails house people consistently with their gender identities and that staff respect people’s gender identities.

Support New York City Families

Reproductive and gender justice requires that parents be able to raise their children in safe and affordable communities. Yet half of working-age households in New York City earn incomes insufficient to meet their basic needs. The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) too often targets and investigates families experiencing economic hardship—disproportionately Black families—subjecting these families to stressful and traumatic investigations, without being required to inform families of their rights. Children are too frequently removed from their homes because of poverty-related conditions, like food and housing insecurity or lack of access to childcare. The City Council must urgently pass legislation requiring ACS to inform families of their rights at the outset of child protective investigations.

The City Council must prioritize policies that support families’ ability to survive and thrive. The Council should pass legislation that guarantees access to affordable, high-quality childcare for all New York families, regardless of immigration status (as such care continues to be out of reach for over 80 percent of the city’s families), and that requires living wages for the childcare workforce, the majority of whom are women of color and a quarter of whom live in poverty. Further, ACS currently is responsible for both child protective services and the childcare delivery infrastructure in our city. The Council must take steps to disentangle childcare from ACS, as a truly accessible universal childcare program cannot require families to trust the same agency that is responsible for investigating and separating them with caring for their children.

Provide Pay Transparency

New York’s affordability crisis is not just about the price of groceries, housing, and childcare, it is also about how much people are paid. Latinas, Native women, and Black women make only 51 cents, 46 cents, and 63 cents, respectively, for every dollar white, non-Hispanic men make. Among other factors, pay secrecy thwarts pay equity by allowing employers to insert gender and racial biases, whether unconscious or not, into the salary setting process. The City Council should close loopholes in the city’s existing pay transparency law.