Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now for our regular Wednesday check in on the city's political beat with two reporters who've been following the mayoral campaign, Bridget Bergen, our senior political correspondent for WNYC and Gothamist, and Elizabeth Kim, also, of course, a reporter for WNYC and Gothamist who's been joining us every Wednesday for quite a while now, first as our lead Eric Adams reporter and now that's morphed into her beat following the campaign today. They're here to walk us through several political headlines in the city and to take your calls. There's a new wave of outdoor-focused proposals for Mayor Adams, including plans to buy land for new parks and deploy drones to prevent drownings at city beaches. Also, a public school student was arrested by ICE in the Bronx-- if you haven't heard that yet- sparking concern from immigrant advocates and a muted response from the mayor. We'll also hear a clip from City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who's running in the Democratic primary, who recently spoke out against Andrew Cuomo's Covid-era leadership in deeply personal terms, even as he's reportedly being investigated by the Trump Justice Department now for related things. Check in on how the Democratic primary candidates are positioning themselves generally, financially, rhetorically, ideologically. Hi, Bridget. Hi, Liz, happy Wednesday.

Elizabeth Kim: Happy Wednesday.

Bridget Bergen: Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, I want to start with the arrest of a Bronx public school student by ICE. What do we know about how this unfolded and what triggered federal involvement with respect to this student?

Elizabeth Kim: This was a very significant incident, Brian, because this is the only public school student that's known-- at least to the city- to have been arrested by ICE. The lawyer is only providing the individual's first name. Dylan. He's 20 years old. He was attending Ellis Academy in the Bronx, which serves older immigrant students. What happened according to his lawyer, was he was arrested inside an immigration courthouse. He was arrested in the lobby after he had attended a deportation hearing in which his case was dismissed. My colleague Aria Sundaram wrote the story, and she tells me that this is highly unusual.

On Monday, we got a statement from the school's chancellor about this and this was Chancellor Melissa Avilas Ramos. She put out a statement saying that, "The New York City Public Schools stands firmly with our students, including immigrant students, and that schools will always be safe spaces for them." Whenever we have these kinds of flashpoints, especially involving ICE, involving the city's sanctuary status, they're ultimately a test for the mayor and how he will respond. The mayor was asked about this case multiple times because unlike the school's chancelor, he did not put out a statement. At his press conference, I counted at least three times he was asked on how he was going to respond to this.

Brian Lehrer: Here's, I guess, the third time. The first voice we will hear from yesterday's news conference is reporter Craig McCarthy of the New York Post.

Craig McCarthy: Circle back on Marsha and Josie's question, so you've said you supported the sanctuary city laws because it will allow people, undocumented or what have you, to come forward to deal with police and go to court and do those things. Do you fear this kind of deportation or detaining of the school kid who was doing the proper thing, going through the court system? Do you think this will motivate them or push them to not go through the proper channels?

Eric Adams: First, the sanctuary city is not a law. It's a concept. You're in the city, you have the right to get the things that your tax dollars pay for. When someone buys a loaf of bread, they pay taxes, so with those tax dollars, they should have a right to have their child educated. They should have a right to go to the hospital if they're sick and all the other things that I've stated over and over again. Your question is, do you think I think it would discourage? No, I don't. We don't know what happened in court, what caused this action, and you have to speak to the federal authorities. I don't know how it could be any clearer.

Federal authorities handle ICE. I don't control the borders. I must make sure people who are in this city receive the services that they tax dollars pay for. That's what we do every day.

Brian Lehrer: That was quite an answer. Let me pick up on a couple of things within that. At the beginning of the answer, he said, "First, the sanctuary city is not a law, it's a concept.

I wish we still had the law professor from the last segment here, but isn't sanctuary city a law in New York?

Elizabeth Kim: It is, in fact, a law. The reporters pressed his spokesperson about this after the press conference and the answer that he gave was what the mayor meant was that there's actually no mention of the word sanctuary city. I'm not sure what the mayor meant by that. What's interesting about what he said was he was using this idea that undocumented New Yorkers pay taxes and that entitles them to these services, of going to school, of going to the hospital, of being able to report crimes. That is an argument, but the real motivation for this set of rules and protections that we refer to as sanctuary laws, which came up beginning with Koch, through Giuliani, through Bloomberg, was the idea that we need to install these protections so that people do not live in the shadows.

Not having these people live in the shadows is not only to protect them, but it's to protect all of New Yorkers. Like the common example that's often given is suppose someone has some kind of illness, suppose it's a public health threat. You want that person to feel confident enough to go and seek help. That protects the broader community.

Brian Lehrer: The mayor did cite that in his answer, they should have a right to go to the hospital if they're sick. They should have a right to have their child educated, meaning without fear of them being detained as a result.

Elizabeth Kim: Right, exactly. He was being pressed on this because he's always being asked. These are essentially, like I said, tests. How far will he take his rhetoric about the sanctuary city's rules in speaking up for undocumented immigrants. You see that he's very careful about this. He tows a line. He's essentially saying, "This has nothing to do with me. You need to speak to ICE."

Brian Lehrer: The federal government.

Elizabeth Kim: This did not happen in schools. He was asked repeatedly, this will essentially make undocumented immigrants afraid of sending their children to schools. He was saying, "Well, it didn't happen in a school," but it did happen in a courthouse, which is unusual.

Brian Lehrer: That was really the question that ultimately he contradicted himself by saying, "They should have a right to go to the hospital. They should have a right to be educated without worrying about it," but the question was really,"Will this discourage immigrants from going through the normal legal immigration court proceeding challenge?" We remember one of the Columbia students, who was detained and who has since been released, was in the same position. He was going to a citizenship application hearing, if I've got the precise hearing correctly or not hearing, but just a meeting with immigration officials. They detained him at that point while he was going through the normal channels.

Apparently, reportedly, that's what happened with this student, and yet the mayor says, as if he knows,"Do I think it would discourage other people? No, I don't." Okay, so that stands as a contradiction. I don't know if there's anything more we can say about it.

Elizabeth Kim: I mean, this poses a real challenge for the city, right, because how does the city preserve these sanctuary city laws if there are these chilling effects that are sent by federal immigration authorities by arresting undocumented immigrants in public places? The mayor didn't have anything to say to that, but that is essentially the question going forward. How does he ensure that these undocumented people will continue to feel safe, to go to a hospital, to report a crime that's been committed?

Brian Lehrer: I know it's such a conundrum for many immigrants right now who are going through various points of the process of when they're supposed to check in with immigration officials. They're afraid if they do check in with this campaign to deport a lot of people, that they'll be pinched at that time and deported, but if they don't go to the scheduled meeting, then they'll be discovered, the government would say, "You're not showing up at your meeting, so we're going to deport you."

It's a real conundrum for many immigrants in the city right now. All right, Bridget Bergen, you've been very patient while we went through all of that, so next story. You were at a recent campaign event, I see, where City Council Adrienne Adams, who is also running for mayor in the Democratic primary, was present, which means one of her opponents is Andrew Cuomo. She accused Cuomo of delaying vaccine shipments to her community, saying it contributed to her father's death early in the pandemic. Here's 24 seconds.

Adrienne Adams: I remember begging then-Governor Cuomo, begging his office to send life-saving vaccines to my community. For weeks and months, our request was denied, no matter what we said, because the site where the vaccines were supposed to go was run by then-Mayor de Blasio, the former governor's political enemy.

Brian Lehrer: That's quite an accusation, Bridget. We were talking in the previous segment about Donald Trump trying to punish people and places out of political retribution. She's making that argument about Governor Cuomo, and therefore, there were no vaccines for her father in a de Blasio stronghold.

Bridget Bergen: Yes, I think it's important, Brian, to set the whole context for that speech because there was a lot going on. She was acknowledging the five-year anniversary of her father's death, and she was trying to make several different points that all slammed together and made it a little bit tough to follow. Certainly, I will say, from the top, the Cuomo campaign has disputed vigorously. The first point was that her father contracted COVID very early in the pandemic. He lived in an apartment by himself in Jackson Heights, which is very close to Elmhurst Hospita, but because, as we all remember, Elmhurst really became the epicenter of the pandemic here in New York City, it was slammed.

When she and her sister went to check on him because he wasn't answering his phones-- and they finally got a super to let him let them into the apartment- they found him sitting on his bed, struggling to put on his shirt. He didn't want to answer the door without having a shirt on, she said. He just was struggling to breathe, so when the paramedics came, they said, "He needs to go to a hospital, but you can't take him to Elmhurst. They're not going to be able to admit him." Then she and her sister told them, "Look, okay, let's go to a hospital." They went to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, which is in Long Island. Essentially, she had to say goodbye to her father in the parking lot. That was the last place she saw him alive. It was a really gut-wrenching speech, and you could tell that the speaker was struggling to deliver it. Now, also in that speech, although not necessarily directly connected to his death because he did later die at that hospital, she also talked about she was a city council member at the time and how in her district, she and other elected officials were trying to get a vaccine and testing site and get the supplies they needed there. Her assertion is that there were delays getting vaccines to that site.

Politico did some reporting earlier in the campaign cycle, talking about how there had been some tug of war about getting vaccines to a site at Citi Field and then, delays opening a site at Yankee Stadium. Some of that has been attributed to delays from the federal government. The Cuomo campaign again vigorously denies that they withheld anything or would prevent access to any life-saving supplies, but her speech also seemed to suggest that cuts to funding to hospitals like Elmhurst could have exacerbated the situation during the pandemic. That was a claim that I wanted to have someone outside of the campaigns really kick the tires on. I reached out to Bill Hammond at the Empire Center. It's a think tank. They've done a lot of reporting on health care.

His view was that you really couldn't make a direct connection between any reduction in hospital funding and deaths connected to Covid. That if hospital funding was the barometer that you would evaluate some of these deaths, then New York City should never have been the epicenter because hospitals here, even though they have lost funding in different places, are still better funded than a lot of other places. While it was a incredibly emotional speech and I think there was a lot to unpack there, there were some claims that others outside of the campaigns viewed as questionable.

Brian Lehrer: Staying, Bridget, on Adrienne Adams for just a minute. Does she have a signature proposal in her campaign? If people want to say this candidate is running on this, that candidate is running on that, does Adrienne Adams have a signature proposal?

Bridget Bergen: Similar to a lot of the candidates, she's unveiling proposals one at a time. She has a housing proposal that is coming out this week. She's talked about some programs that she has launched within the purview of the speaker's office that she envisions expanding. There's an aid program for homeless children and mothers that she's talked about as a guaranteed income program that she has talked about as a way to keep people off the streets and out of shelters. I think the overarching theme of her campaign, beyond just the policy, is this idea of someone who has experience in City Hall with the budget process for going on eight years and who doesn't bring the drama or baggage of the current mayor or the current frontrunner. That has been something that she has really emphasized throughout the campaign. Probably above and beyond anything single policy proposal, it's a management style that is collaborative, that brings people to the table. That's not about necessarily making herself the star of what the outcome is, but getting the work done.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to Cuomo and the fact that Adrienne Adams is running against him based on his pandemic record, which for many people, at least for a while, was seen as one of his great strengths when he seemed to be standing so much in opposition to Trump, who was trying to downplay the pandemic in the beginning. He was trying to manage it and was seen as a compassionate as well as practical voice. Then, of course, came the issue of all the nursing home deaths after his Must Admit policy, as it was called, taking COVID patients back into nursing homes from hospitals when there is a desperate shortage of hospital beds. Now there's, according to the New York Times, a federal Justice Department investigation to see whether he lied to Congress about how he handled the nursing home deaths.

I want to play a couple of clips relevant to that. Liz, I'm going to ask you about this. We've heard Cuomo defend his record repeatedly, but he testified before Congress in September. Here he is answering harsh questioning from New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Elise Stefanik: You are culpable for this. My question to you is when are you negotiating for your multimillion dollar advance deal for your book as seniors were dying in nursing homes? That is the question in front of you.

Andrew Cuomo: You can't make up facts, Congresswoman.

Elise Stefanik: You're the one making up facts. You're the one who undercounted nursing home deaths.

Andrew Cuomo: It was actually the Trump administration, the CMS and CDC, that first said in early March that COVID-positive people could go from hospitals to nursing homes even if they were still infectious. That was your ruling.

Brian Lehrer: Cuomo, in that September hearing, and here's another short bite. This is Democratic Congressman Raul Ruiz of California on the nursing home policy.

Raul Ruiz: Did you direct your staff to make the number of nursing home-related fatalities lower than they actually were?

Andrew Cuomo: No, we said these are the numbers without the out of facility death numbers.

Brian Lehrer: So the question about whether he lied to Congress and whether that might be a criminal violation is whether he was personally involved in the New York State report that undercounted the nursing home deaths in 2020. As the news site City and State describes the allegation, "Cuomo testified to Congress that he didn't remember seeing that report and that he was struggling to remember events from that many years ago." That sounds like a frequent dodge that people in investigations and legal proceedings use. "Oh, I don't remember," but Republican Congress members later alleged that that was a lie, citing testimony in emails that they argued proved he had been involved as City and State described it. Liz, politically for you, as a political reporter, what it really goes to, I think is that something that was once seen as a great strength and something that recommends Andrew Cuomo as a leader is being attacked on multiple fronts now that he's running for mayor.

Elizabeth Kim: That's right, Brian. Absolutely. Those two clips get exactly at the questions about how he managed the pandemic. Now, the first answer he gave about following CDC guidance, that is something that he has been consistent about and he does have a point there. If you remember, Brian, this was a period in which the guidance was evolving. The governor as well as the mayor, they were in a situation where they had hospitals that were running out of beds. They needed to create more room in these hospitals, so they faced a choice. They relied on CDC guidance that said that they could allow these still infectious nursing home patients to return to the nursing home, thus alleviating some of the burden on these much needed hospitals.

Now, you can argue whether or not that was the right call. There were a lot of experts in this period that were opining on this, even at the time, as to whether this was right or wrong. The thing about the reporting, I would say, is I think everybody knew that these numbers were going to be highly politicized and that I think there is a real question as to whether was it really right for him if, let's say, his administration tried to measure the deaths differently by saying that if they died in the hospital, I'm sorry, that it would not be counted as a nursing home death, per se. Were they playing with that number? I think that that is a fair question.

Brian Lehrer: Bridget, moving on.

Bridget Bergen: Just one point on that, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, please.

Bridget Bergen: I will say that despite the fact that this feels like this moment where now Cuomo is facing heightened scrutiny over his record during COVID, his campaign, upon initial reports that he was facing this potential criminal investigation, they dropped not only one, but two commercials last week. The first touted his record during the pandemic, talked about those press conferences, showed clips of those press conferences you were just talking about, where he was the voice of reason. Then the next day, they were out with one that essentially chalked up this potential investigation into what they call 'lawfare,' politicization of the Justice Department. In some ways, was about showing that Cuomo was going to be tough enough to stand up in the face of this attack. They saw it as an opportunity for their campaign, if nothing else.

Literally, as we are speaking right now, he is at an event with 1199 SEIU, the Union of Health Care Workers, which I think we anticipate he will be picking up additional union endorsements. I think it's very telling that within that community, he is likely picking up what is probably going to be a very substantive and substantial endorsement given the political arm of that organization and their ability to turn out votes.

Brian Lehrer: I see, Liz, that he's also pitching a $ 20-an-hour minimum wage in New York City by 2027. Any quick thought on how that positions him ideologically compared to other Democratic contenders. Certainly, Zoran Mamdani is running centrally for anyone who's seen his flyers and his commercials on taming the cost of living in New York City.

Elizabeth Kim: I think it's very interesting that he's making this policy announcement a week after the campaign finance disclosures came out and the big headlines were Cuomo backed by billionaires, right. Now he's pivoting and he's introducing this policy that should be very popular with New Yorkers who are feeling an affordability crisis, but you're right, Brian. He's not the only one to do it. Mamdani has come out with something more aggressive. He wants to get to a $30 minimum wage by 2030. I will also say that State Senator Jessica Ramos has a bill in place to get New York city to over $21 by 2027, but I think this will make a splash. $20 by January 20, 2027, and he can't do it unilaterally.

He does need the governor to sign this, but he can put pressure. As Bill de Blasio did during the fight for $15, if you remember, and that was something that Governor Cuomo did sign into law. I should also say that currently the minimum wage is $16.50 in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: We just have a minute left in the segment. Bridget, I was at somebody's apartment over the weekend who had just received their absentee ballot in the mail. This is not somebody who's been following politics really closely. They opened the absentee ballot and they looked at the list of it's 11 candidates for mayor on the Democratic primary ballot.

Bridget Bergen: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: They said, "I don't know any of these people except Cuomo and Brad Lander and Scott Stringer." They said, "What do I do?" Well, I see the Working Families Party, for those who want to vote on the progressive end of that list, is expected to rank its endorsements soon. You covered their recent tele town hall. Do you think we should expect a number one ranking, only a number one through five ranking? What do you think the Working Families Party-- for people who care about that endorsement- is going to come down with? We have 30 seconds.

Bridget Bergen: I will say Liz has been very close to the Working Families Party coverage, so I'm going to let Liz take this. but I will say, Brian, your friend is among about 63,000 New Yorkers who have already received their absentee ballots, so the voting is happening now.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, the Working Families Party is expected to vote on Friday. Their members will have to decide on a first rank choice. They've already come out with the slate, which includes Mamdani Lander, Adrienne Adams, and Zelnor Miri. The talk is that the first choice is very much between Brad Lander and Zoran Mamdani. This will probably be something that their members debate. Brad Lander has very long standing ties to the Working Families Party, but he hasn't been able to bring the kind of polling and also the kind of enthusiasm that Mamdani has. Mamdani is younger. He has a much shorter track record with the Working Families Party, but based on his polling and the strength of his donations, his supporters are going to bring a very strong case that progressives should unite around him as the candidate who can defeat Andrew Cuomo.

Brian Lehrer: On the mayoral politics beat WNYC's Bridget Bergen and Liz Kim. Talk to you next Wednesday. You, at least, Liz, maybe Bridget, you'll join again, and maybe before next Wednesday, depending on what breaks. Thanks both.

Bridget Bergen: Thank you.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

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