ANDREW CUOMO HAS a
glaring conflict of interest when it comes to the politics
of abolishing ICE. Luxury landlords across the state collect millions in
rent from the agency — money they have turned around and funneled to Cuomo’s
political campaigns, according to a new report by the New York-based watchdog
group Public Accountability
Initiative.
Cuomo, meanwhile, hasn’t
joined other New York politicians — from likely incoming Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to 2020 hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — in calling to dismantle
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instead telling NY1
recently that the agency “should be a bona fide law enforcement
organization that prudently and diligently enforces the law.”
Looking largely at publicly
available data from the General Services external lease database, PAI
researchers have documented extensive financial ties from Cuomo donors and
members of his inner circle to ICE and Customs and Border Protection — the
main agencies tasked with carrying out America’s increasingly
brutal immigration policies. Since his first run for governor in 2011, PAI
found that Cuomo has accepted at least $807,483 from companies, individuals,
and the relatives of people who rent space to federal immigration authorities,
and furnished many of them with positions in state government.
Rob Galbraith, PAI’s senior
research analyst, told me by phone, “We saw that a lot of people were
investigating the private-sector actors benefiting from immigration policy. We
found that there is a significant overlap [between] those actors and the
landlords and real estate interests that have close ties to the Cuomo
administration.”
Cuomo’s primary challenger,
Cynthia Nixon, who has called for abolishing ICE, wrote in an emailed statement
that “while its reprehensible that Governor Cuomo has profited from ICE’s
existence, it’s hardly surprising. … Many have been bewildered by the
Governor’s continued support for ICE as its atrocities mount and so many other
New York leaders have called for ICE’s abolition. Now we have an explanation:
the Governor won’t call to abolish Trump’s rogue deportation force because his
donors don’t want him to.”
In Manhattan, the iconic
Starrett-Lehigh Building — co-owned by RXR Realty and Blackstone Group — has
for 16 years been home to an ICE Homeland
Security Investigation field office, which pays $12.4 million a year to
lease part of the sprawling property overlooking the Hudson River, which bills itself
as “a place to create, to influence and to succeed.” ICE’s fellow Starrett-Lehigh
tenants include period-proof underwear brand Thinx and the
offices of Martha Stewart’s multifaceted
lifestyle brand.
The agency that handles
leasing for federal agencies is the U.S. General Services Administration. Asked
about standard procedures for federal agency leasing, GSA Regional Public
Affairs officer Alison Kohler said over email that GSA “leases space from
private entities when it is the best solution to meet the space requirements of
GSA’s federal agency customers.”
In the case of the
Starrett-Lehigh Building, GSA — using eminent domain or “condemnation” —
relocated federal immigration enforcement offices there after 9/11, when the
World Trade Center offices of several agencies that would eventually be
consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security were destroyed. “GSA
used its condemnation authority for immediate occupancy, and then executed a
10-year lease in November 2002 with renewal options. GSA exercised one option
in 2013,” Kohler said.
Top executives at both RXR
Realty and Blackstone, which acquired its stake in the building in 2015, have
close ties to the Governor’s Mansion.
The chair and CEO of RXR
Realty is Scott Rechler, whose family has donated at least $613,000 to Cuomo’s
various runs for office. In exchange, Cuomo appointed Rechler to the board of
the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a post he held from 2011 to
2016. In 2017, Cuomo tapped him
again, this time for a seat on the board of the notoriously dysfunctional
Metropolitan Transportation Authority that he still holds. A New
York Times investigation found that Rechler and several other Cuomo
appointees continued to give to the governor after taking their state jobs,
despite a 2007 executive order from former Gov. Eliot Spitzer that sought to
prohibit such arrangements. On top of his government posts, Rechler is also a
member of the Real Estate Board of New York, an influential trade lobby for
developers in the city whose other
members have also given generously to Cuomo.
In a statement over email,
Rechler said, “While I have the utmost respect for the career professionals at
the Department of Homeland Security and within ICE, as an American, I do find
certain federal policies set by the current Administration relating to
immigration, including family separation, to be disturbing and inhumane. It is
my hope that we rethink our nation’s approach to immigrants and immigration
more broadly.”
PRIVATE EQUITY GIANT Blackstone
Group is helmed by Trump booster Stephen
Schwarzman, but the company has a bipartisan workforce. Senior Blackstone
advisor William Mulrow, who does not work in the company’s Real Estate
division, helped
form a PAC to raise money for former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s
prospective foray into national politics in 1987, and in the early 2000s,
served as vice chair and chair of the New York State Democratic Party. In the midst
of a lucrative career on Wall Street, he left Blackstone in 2015 to serve as
Andrew Cuomo’s secretary and top adviser. He returned to the private equity
firm in April 2017 after leaving his job at the governor’s office, and is now
chair of Cuomo’s re-election campaign, responsible mainly largely for courting
new, big-dollar donors.
Mulrow was featured in a New
York Magazine profile of
his Wall Street fraternity, Kappa Beta Phi, performing one-half of what author
Kevin Roose calls a “bizarre two-man comedy skit,” in which he was “dressed in
raggedy, tie-dye clothes to play the part of a liberal radical,” with his
counterpart “playing the part of a wealthy baron. They exchanged lines as if
staging a debate between the 99 percent and the 1 percent.” In 2012,
Cuomo appointed Mulrow
as chair of the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the State of New York
Mortgage Agency, just after his stint from 2005 to 2011 as a senior executive
at Citibank Inc., one of the architects of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Mulrow’s office did not agree
to provide a statement on the record.
Upstate in Buffalo, 726
Exchange Street houses offices and a Port of Entry for CBP, which pays $1.42
million each year for the roof over its head to a shell company (an LLC) of
Western New York real estate mogul Howard Zemsky’s Larkin Development Group.
Zemsky and his wife, Lesley, have
given $125,000 to Cuomo. In 2015, Cuomo nominated him to be the
CEO of Empire State Development and commissioner of the New York State
Department of Economic Development, making a total salary from the state
of $1
a year. Kohler says that CBP — via GSA — had a prior lease with the
Zemsky-owned LLC, and that GSA then “executed a follow-on lease through the Other than
Full and Open Competition procurement method,” as opposed to a
competitive bidding process. That lease became effective in 2015.
According to the New
York Times, all of Lesley Zemsky’s $95,000 in donations to Cuomo were given
after her husband’s appointments. Zemsky himself stopped donating to Cuomo
after taking those positions, though that didn’t stop Cuomo from bringing
him along to an at least $1,000-a-seat fundraiser for his campaign
last summer, attendees to which very likely included executives at companies
that Zemsky has the power to award contracts and tax breaks to through
his controversial
upstate development plans. To fortify the pair’s friendship, Zemsky
paid an estimated
$5,000 last summer to charter a private plane for Cuomo to and from
Buffalo to officiate his daughter Kayla’s wedding. “Obviously, I am not going
to ask him to come across the state at taxpayer expense, so I provided
transportation,” Zemsky told the New York Daily News.
After publication, Jason
Conwall, spokesperson for Empire State Development, emailed the following
statement:
The CBP lease dates back more
than a dozen years and the location was selected through the General Services
Administration’s standard procurement process. The CBP is one of more than 20
tenants in the same building in Larkin Square, an area of Buffalo that has
experienced an incredible economic turnaround because of Mr. Zemsky’s
redevelopment efforts. Mr. Zemsky’s record and ethics are beyond reproach, and
for the past four years he has served as a public servant for the salary of one
dollar. To allege or insinuate any impropriety would be categorically false and
irresponsible to print.
On whether Zemsky and Cuomo
have spoken about immigration policy, Conwall wrote, “Mr. Zemsky serves as the
Governor’s chief economic advisor.”
Another Western New York
landlord, Uniland Development, collects $1.95 million per year from ICE and
$562,756 from CBP in rent, in Buffalo and Cheektowaga, respectively. Uniland
and the family that controls it, the Montates, have altogether donated at
least $39,500 to Cuomo’s campaigns. Both of these properties, GSA writes, were
obtained via a competitive bidding process for a federal contract that Uniland
won.
The PAI report goes on to list
several other ICE and CBP lessors that have given to Cuomo in smaller amounts.
Researchers also note that Cuomo attended a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser in a
private box at Mets stadium for the lobbying firm Constantinople & Vallone,
which represents private prison and immigration detention center contractor GEO
Group.
Staff from Cuomo’s offices did
not return The Intercept’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for ICE refused
to comment on leasing, directing us to submit a FOIA request. A spokesperson
from CBP referred us to GSA.
AS NATIONAL ATTENTION has gravitated toward the southern border, Cuomo has ramped up his rhetoric around immigration. In a New York Times op-ed, he called the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” and family separation policies “a human tragedy and a threat to our values,” stating that “New York will not remain silent. Our state has always served as a beacon of liberty and opportunity for the world.” He also mentioned his announcement earlier in the week that New York would file a multiagency lawsuit for family reunification.
Cuomo’s critics say he could
be doing much more — starting with forsaking his conflicts of interest on the
issue. Javier H. Valdés, co-executive director of Make the Road Action, which
organizes in immigrant communities around the state, said Cuomo “should return
these campaign funds immediately.”
“It’s deeply concerning that
while Andrew Cuomo continues to say he stands with immigrants — and even
mistakenly claims he
is an immigrant and undocumented — that he is also continuing to hold
campaign cash from those profiting from ICE and CBP,” referencing a statement
the governor made in April.
As governor, Cuomo has very
little say over the future of ICE, a federal agency. Valdés and other
immigration rights advocates around the state, however, argue that he could
help ensure more undocumented New Yorkers stay out of its facilities.
Among the biggest demands from
immigrant rights’ groups is for the state to pass legislation allowing
undocumented New Yorkers to obtain driver’s licenses — something that 12 other
states already do. The dangers of the policy became apparent last month in the
case of 35-year-old delivery driver Pablo
Villavicencio Calderon. Attempting to deliver a pizza to an Army base at
Fort Hamilton, Calderon presented his IDNYC, meant to provide undocumented city
residents with a form of identification in dealing with various agencies.
Military police at the gates of the base refused to accept the ID and demanded
a driver’s license. Calderon didn’t have one and in response, the officer on
duty called ICE to take him into custody. He now faces deportation.
Driving while undocumented
presents other dangers, as well. Getting pulled over is often a premise for
local law enforcement to call on ICE and trigger deportation proceedings,
something that’s all the more likely when a driver can’t get something as
simple as a new license plate because they don’t have a license. Unlicensed
driving is a particular concern for immigrant communities in rural and suburban
areas, where — absent robust public transportation — cars are one of the only
ways to access work and schools.
It was former Gov. George
Pataki who issued
a 2001 executive order to restrict licenses only to New Yorkers who
could prove they were in the country legally. Cuomo’s critics argue that he
could use the same powers to roll back the decision. “ICE is now routinely
using minor traffic violations as justification to tear apart families. Cuomo
should restore access to driver’s licenses for all New Yorkers, regardless of
status. He has the authority to sign a driver’s licenses executive order today
to immediately protect immigrant communities,” Valdés told The Intercept over email.
Make the Road and other groups
also argue that Cuomo could leverage more political capital to pass the New
York state DREAM Act, which would give undocumented students access to the same
financial aid and in-state tuition available to U.S. citizens. He’s added it as
a line item to the state’s annual budget in the past, but Republican control
over the New York state legislature — thanks to the Independent Democratic
Caucus, a group of rogue Democrats who caucus with Republicans — has left the
measure as one of many progressive priorities that pass through the Assembly
only to languish in the Senate.
For now, the question is
whether Cuomo’s donations from ICE and CBP landlords will continue to languish
in his campaign’s coffers.
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