An ex-Biden aide who also lobbied to ban the term “illegal immigrant” while serving in Bill de Blasio’s administration was tapped by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to audit city agencies like the NYPD for sanctuary law violations, sources confirmed.
Bitta Mostofi — formerly a senior official for President Joe Biden’s US Citizenship and Immigration Services — was selected to lead an audit of six city agencies, with a goal of identifying potential loopholes and closing them up, sources told The Post.
Mostafi will serve as a special adviser to Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, as she runs the audit, which was announced just weeks after President Trump vowed to withhold billions in federal funding from cities that refuse to abandon sanctuary policies.
“The directive is for folks to recommend to the mayor changes to policies and protocols, and that can be everything from the process, to accountability, to transparency and so forth,” Mostafi told Politico, which first reported her appointment on Monday.
Agencies in the audit crosshairs include the NYPD, the Department of Correction, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the departments of probation and health and social services, all of which were selected for their likelihood to deal with federal immigration agents.
Employees at the NYPD and DOC, under former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, were found to have run afoul of the sanctuary policies — which bar municipal cooperation with federal immigration officials like ICE — by slipping the feds information about migrant inmates that allowed them to be detained for deportation.
Mostofi accused Adams of weakening city sanctuary policies during his tenure, adding that the audit would address “any lingering sort of questions and confusion or gray area.”
“What we witnessed in the last mayoral administration was frankly an undermining of these laws,” she told Politico.
The audit calls for a report on how each of the city agencies involved handle sanctuary policies, and for solutions to close any loopholes that could allow the feds to work around them, sources said. That report is due on Mamdani’s desk on May 7.
Mostofi was de Blasio’s commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, helping the city battle immigration initiatives during Trump’s first term, before joining the Biden administration.
She called a 2019 White House effort to deny green cards to immigrants likely to end up on state welfare an “assault on the healthcare and well-being” of immigrants. She also supported a 2020 City Council bill to ban the words “alien,” “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” from official use by municipal workers — calling each an “offensive and dehumanizing term.”
Mamdani’s audit plan, which Mostofi will helm, emerged on Feb. 6 as part of a broader executive order by the mayor intended to “strengthen protections and accountability” of the city’s longstanding sanctuary policies.
He signed the order after a fiery speech lambasting Trump’s sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, which has seen ICE agents deploying into city’s across the country to conduct sweeping deportation raids.
“Day after day we bear witness to cruelty that staggers the conscience,” Mamdani said while speaking at the Interfaith Breakfast at the New York Public Library.
“We will make it clear once again ICE will not be able to enter New York City property without a judicial warrant. That means our schools, our shelters and our hospitals,” he said of the order.
Trump vowed in January to revoke federal funding for sanctuary cities across the country, saying in a Detroit speech that they “do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens.”
“It breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come. So we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities,” he said.