NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said on Thursday that the department is not reconsidering its cooperation with federal law enforcement entities on criminal investigations as the Trump istration radically amps up immigration enforcement inside of New York City.

Tisch made the comments at a City Council hearing on the NYPD’s budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1, and comes after media reports on a number of incidents raised questions about how that cooperation might be impacting noncitizens.

“Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE. The short, straight answer to this is no,” she testified. 

“Working with our federal partners on criminal matters is crucial to the safety of our city,” Tisch added. “The only way these investigations are successful is by NYPD detectives working seamlessly with federal agents on a daily basis. Interfering with that work would be disastrous for the people of New York City.”

Earlier this month, THE CITY and Documented reported that two Venezuelan immigrants who were arrested by the NYPD in The Bronx on Feb. 24 ended up imprisoned in a notorious prison for alleged terrorists in El Salvador. 

The two men, 19-year-old Merwil Gutiérrez Flores and 22-year-old Angel Blanco-Marin, were hit with gun possession and other charges but were never prosecuted by the Bronx District Attorney or convicted of any crimes. 

Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams have repeatedly said that the NYPD does not cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil deportation matters, which is forbidden by a so-called city “sanctuary” law. The NYPD can cooperate with federal law enforcement in cases where noncitizens have been convicted of certain serious or violent crimes, and it also works on a number of t task forces with the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and other federal partners on longer-term criminal probes.

It’s the work of those task forces that has come under recent scrutiny in light of the Trump istration’s push to have other federal law enforcement agencies work closely with ICE to dramatically increase the total number of deportations.

Asked earlier this week about the arrest of Gutiérrez Flores, Mayor Eric Adams said that what the federal government does after the NYPD arrests criminal suspects is up to them. 

“I trust my police officers. They arrested you for carrying a gun. They did their job. If the federal authorities want to do something else, that’s up to them,” he told a reporter at a press conference Tuesday.

He added of Gutiérrez Flores, despite the lack of a prosecution or a conviction, “He should not have been carrying a gun.”

Both the NYPD and the Bronx District Attorney’s office have declined to provide details on how the men went from the custody of police at the 52nd precinct in The Bronx to that of the FBI and ICE within 24 hours. The police department said the arrests were part of the work of a t task force with the FBI but provided few other details

Spokespeople for ICE and the FBI also declined to comment on the sequence of events that ended with the feds putting the men on a plane to CECOT on March 15 with hundreds of others who the feds claim, often without offering public evidence, are of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

The CBS news show “60 Minutes” has reported that 75% of the Venezuelans imprisoned at the Salvadoran mega-prison have no criminal records, despite claims by the federal government otherwise.

In another instance of NYPD actions being used in immigration enforcement, the NYPD shared information with the feds about a Palestinian woman who was arrested last year at a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University, whose arrest was sealed after the charges were dismissed, the Associated Press reported earlier this month 

The NYPD shared information about that incident and other records about the woman, 32-year-old Leqaa Kordia, with Homeland Security Investigations — which Tisch later told reporters was provided in the course of a  federal “money laundering investigation.”

ICE is seeking to deport Kordia for allowing her student visa to expire, and has introduced her arrest record as evidence in the case. 

Tisch said the department acted appropriately in sharing information for a criminal probe, but that it would investigate why the sealed arrest record was included among the information shared. 

An attorney for Kordia, Arthur Ago, previously told THE CITY that Tisch’s comments regarding a money laundering probe were the first his team had heard of it. He said Kordia had sent money to a relative in Palestine once in 2022, which came up in the HSI probe, but that was it.

“The Department of Homeland Security has never communicated to us or indicated in court that Ms. Kordia is under investigation for money laundering,” he said. “The allegation comes as a complete surprise, is entirely unfounded, and we categorically deny it.”

In her testimony at City Council on Thursday, Tisch said that if she learned federal agencies were asking for information from the NYPD under false pretenses, that would cause her to reconsider the city’s relationship with those entities. She did not make any reference to a specific case.

“If we were to find that a federal agency had not been honest with us, if we were told that a records request was for a criminal investigation but in fact that was not true, then that would be a tremendous breach of our trust,” she said. “And we would need to reconsider how we do business with that federal agency.”

But she emphasized that her experience has been just the opposite since Adams named her commissioner in November.

“We have an incredibly good relationship with our federal partners — a relationship built on mutual respect and trust,” she said.

Peter Markowitz, an attorney and professor at Cardozo School of Law who helped craft New York City’s sanctuary protections — which set its limits on cooperating with the feds on civil immigration enforcement — said there are steps the NYPD should take to ensure its cooperation isn’t being misused, particularly given concerns about ICE’s integrity under the Trump istration.

“It is incumbent upon the NYPD to do more than take ICE at its word,” he told THE CITY. “It needs some documentation to ensure that the information being shared is genuinely part of an ongoing criminal investigation, and I think there’s a lot that the NYPD could do in of new protocols to ensure compliance with the city sanctuary laws.”