‘Time for Him to Go’: New Yorkers Sour on Eric Adams

As Gov. Kathy Hochul weighs removing Mayor Eric Adams from office, Mr. Adams not only appears to be running out of allies, options and, perhaps, time. Dozens of interviews around New York City this week suggest that he is also rapidly losing support among New Yorkers, including many who voted for him.

Dustin Meighan, 38, a surveyor, looks at Mr. Adams and sees a pawn of President Trump.

“There are people pulling strings — he’s the Pinocchio mayor,” Mr. Meighan of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said as he waited for his morning sandwich at a deli in Park Slope. “It seems as if he’s just doing what he’s told because he’s in a criminal situation.”

Over by the soda case, Trevor Smith, a deliveryman for Red Bull, said he did not see how Mr. Adams could continue governing. “Right now I think he needs to step away,” said Mr. Smith, 39. He said he needed a mayor who could “protect me from what’s going on in Washington.” Instead, he said, Mr. Adams is “selling us out so that he cannot be held accountable for his actions.”

The pileup of distressing news — Mr. Adams’s indictment on federal corruption charges, his apparent agreement with the White House to help the president’s immigration crackdown if the charges were dropped, and most recently, the planned resignations of four deputy mayors — has become too much for voters to stomach, the interviews suggested.

“Eric Adams is a traitor,” declared Cheryl Grant, 67, a home health aide in the South Bronx.

“100 percent compromised,” Kadeem Sinclair, 28, said over a cheeseburger and fries at a Wendy’s in Sunnyside, Queens. “ I’d say it’s better for him to step down.”

“Time for him to go,” said Michelle White, 64, of Harlem, who worked under Mr. Adams for the city’s Human Resources Administration until she retired last year.

Still, Mr. Adams has his supporters. Tommy Holliday, a volunteer at a church in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, where Mr. Adams spoke on Monday, applauded the push by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department to dismiss the charges against the mayor.

“I think it’s a good thing Trump did, because I really think Adams is doing a lot for the community, and he didn’t deserve that,” said Mr. Holliday, 64.

He said he did not believe Mr. Adams had bargained away his independence. “Eric Adams was helped by Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean he’s got to do what Donald Trump says,” Mr. Holliday said.

And some New Yorkers who were troubled by the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants to the city and who backed Mr. Trump’s mass deportation plans had no problem with the arrangement.

“The deal between Trump and Adams means a better deal for everybody on immigration,” said John DeRoss, 58, owner of the Bella Beans Cafe in the Rosebank neighborhood of Staten Island, near where protests against migrant shelters were held in 2023.

Even some New Yorkers who have supported deportations, though, said that the situation required more finesse than a compromised mayor could bring to the table.

Eddy Diaz, 66, a Bolivian immigrant who runs a soccer supply store along a busy stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, was relieved last year when the police shut down a brothel that had opened next to his storefront. He said he welcomed deportations of criminals who have made the neighborhood feel seedy.

But Mr. Diaz, who has lived in New York for more than 30 years, said that fear of mass deportations was hurting legitimate businesses in his community.

To make his criminal case go away, the mayor “will punish a whole community, a community of mostly hard-working immigrants,” Mr. Diaz said. “He has offered his hand to Trump in order to get a pardon, and that is not moral.”

In Soundview in the Bronx, Aracelis Lucero, 42, who runs the Mexican American Students’ Alliance, an educational nonprofit, said that she was deeply troubled by what the mayor’s cozying up to the president meant for the city’s immigrant communities.

“I think that it’s important that we have transparency and that we don’t have someone who is colluding with federal immigration authorities and with the federal government,” she said. “His job is to primarily protect New Yorkers, and that should be his only job.”

As to whether the governor, who has the power to remove Mr. Adams under the State Constitution, should do so, New Yorkers were more divided.

Carlos Rodriguez, 77, of Little Neck, Queens, a sales manager, said that Ms. Hochul should not get ahead of the criminal justice system. The Justice Department has said it might restart the criminal case against Mr. Adams after the November mayoral election.

“I think he should stay until the charges get reinstated, or don’t,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “I don’t think she should fire him. That creates even more of a problem, because you’re not guilty of anything until you’re proven guilty.” (Mr. Rodriguez said he did not doubt that Mr. Adams was corrupt, but then again, “they’re all corrupt, every single one of them.”)

Kathy Spinner, who runs a catering supply company in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, said that removing a duly elected mayor would be a difficult decision. “But if I was the governor, I would cut him loose,” she said. The disorder at City Hall is “just too distracting, and he’s not going to get anything done.”

Even as she roots for Mr. Adams’s ouster, Ms. Spinner said she feared what might come next. If Mr. Adams leaves office before the end of his term, his temporary replacement would be Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate and a progressive.

“He’s just seems like a grandstander to me,” she said.

At the Annadale Terrace diner on Staten Island’s largely Republican South Shore, Marie Sidoti, 60, a teacher who supports Mr. Trump, was feeling similar concerns. “I’m nervous about Williams,” she said.

Trevor Greene, 65, a retired paramedic from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said that if Ms. Hochul removed the mayor, Adams supporters and Republicans alike would be up in arms.

“If the governor puts him out, they’re going to cry and say, ‘Oh, this is the political system that did it,’” he said.

That function was best left to voters, he said.

“Let us put him out,” he said. Then, he said, “Trump and all of them can’t say ‘Oh, it was corrupt.’ Let the people vote him out, because he ain’t going to survive.”

Wesley Parnell, Olivia Bensimon, Shayla Colon, Mark Bonamo, Eryn Davis and Juan B. Garcia contributed reporting.