New York is quietly preparing for a Donald Trump takeover of the country’s largest city.
A wide range of New York’s most prominent civic leaders have for weeks been meeting behind the scenes to plan for the possibility of Trump sending in the National Guard or any other federal agents into New York City, according to multiple top elected officials.
Alarmed at what Trump may do in response to Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor, Gov. Kathy Hochul has devised a virtual war room and convened a series of conversations with law enforcement, business officials and activist groups to stop or at least mitigate any federal incursion. More meetings are being scheduled, including with New York’s leading clergy and veterans groups, some of whom will be gathering around Veterans Day next week.
“The goal is to prevent, and if we can’t prevent, then hopefully we can delay,” said Jackie Bray, the state’s homeland security and emergency services director, who’s Hochul’s point person on the preparations. “And if something happens, we then have to manage. All three scenarios have real planning behind them.”
The extent of the planning and coalition-building, which has not previously been reported, is meant to deny Trump any pretext to dispatch the National Guard or active-duty troops to the city.
New York leaders have for months been watching Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, ICE agents and uniformed military into other cities and braced for similar efforts in the president’s hometown. Hochul has developed an on-and-off rapport with Trump, who takes an intense interest in New York, but has told people she is concerned about the president using Mamdani’s election as his opening to effectively federalize the city.
Last month, the governor invited a broad range of activist and labor groups — including the ACLU, the powerhouse local SEIU and grassroots network Indivisible — to her Manhattan office. At the meeting, she pleaded with them to work constructively with one another and New York officials to avoid the sort of violence or vandalism that could spur Trump to send in federal troops, as he did in Los Angeles this summer, according to officials present.
Hochul assured the groups that any protests they staged would be protected by state and city law enforcement, but she said they had to try to maintain control and keep people from provoking police and effectively clearing the way for Trump’s intervention.
The governor also organized a meeting of business leaders late last month, and is planning another next week, with a related objective: forging a united front across ideological lines to prevent a Trump takeover from happening at all.
Bray has been leading an array of state officials and coordinating with outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ administration — most notably police commissioner Jessica Tisch, with whom she’s close and whom Mamdani has pledged to retain.
Tisch sounded the first notes of what will soon be a public campaign earlier this fall, when she said she was “revolted by the idea of the militarization of our streets” and, alluding to the New York Police Department, said “we’ve got this.”
Hochul and Tisch have repeatedly emphasized New York City’s plummeting crime rates in a sort of show-don’t-tell effort to convey that a federal takeover isn’t needed.
Subway crime dropped in October: It was as low as the same month during the Covid year of 2020 — which was one of the lowest-crime months in the transit system’s history — and the first 10 months of this year saw historic lows of shootings citywide.
“With strategic investments in public safety and targeted interventions, crimes across our subway system have officially reached record lows,” said Hochul.
But Hochul and her allies recognize they have to act even more aggressively on the PR front now that Mamdani has been elected.
They’re planning an expansive push in November and December to keep federal agents out of the city, an effort that will also include the voices of clergy and veterans.
“Those who have served understand how deeply wrong and unconstitutional it is to deploy troops against U.S. citizens,” Rep. Pat Ryan, an upstate New York Democrat and Army veteran who has been involved with the planning, told me. “We want to make sure New Yorkers hear from those who have served.”
Ryan also emphasized America’s founding tradition of not being made to quarter troops, calling such efforts “un-American” and vowing to issue a “patriotic call” ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
The planners have also begun to engage faith leaders and will step that effort up this month, I’m told by Hochul aides. Ryan has already spoken to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was enthusiastic about a preemptive campaign and suggested holding a message event at the Statue of Liberty.
“We are very much concerned about what Trump will do after the (Mamdani) inauguration,” Sharpton told me.
The longtime civil rights activist said he was already speaking to clergy across religious and denominational lines and that they’d present “a moral appeal: don’t make New York Los Angeles.”
But, along with Hochul, Sharpton is also in touch with the city’s business titans and is working to enlist them to argue that a federal takeover would hurt the financial capital — much as San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie had technology executives nudge Trump away from deploying troops there.
“Our plan before the first of the year is to show the diversity and the depth of New Yorkers who don’t think this is a good idea for New York and to also show that we got this,” Bray told me.
She emphasized that Hochul is willing to use the state guard — recalling that the governor dispatched them to the New York City subway for a time last year — but that she wants to do it of her own volition. “If we need to deploy our guard, we will deploy our guard,” said Bray.
But rather than confront that question, New York officials would prefer to preempt Trump and win the public relations battle.
That means “prebunking some stuff,” as Bray put it. “We’re going to show New Yorkers what’s happened in other cities, talk to New Yorkers about what the Trump administration is saying and what’s reality.”
It’s what happened this summer in other cities, namely Trump sending Marines into Los Angeles, that first prompted Hochul to act.
The governor directed Bray to engage with her California counterparts and ask them what they wish they would have known in the weeks before Trump’s incursion. Then, once ICE stepped up its detention of suspected illegal migrants in Chicago, Hochul officials stepped up their planning. They set up a virtual war room in which aides across state departments in Albany and New York have daily discussions and then began reaching out to non-governmental officials.
What’s less clear is the role Mamdani will play, particularly closer to his inauguration on January 1. Hochul officials have had initial conversations with the mayor-elect’s transition team but have largely been coordinating with the city’s police and emergency leaders, who are still technically part of the Adams administration.
Unlike New York’s two leading congressional Democrats — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — Hochul reached a détente with Mamdani and campaigned with him in the general election. The governor pressed Mamdani to pledge to retain Tisch as police commissioner and privately, I’m told, urged him to resist his most expansive ambitions in 2026, when she’s on the ballot and a number of New York House races could determine control of Congress.
Mamdani did vow to keep Tisch — who’s more likely to stay in her post if the city is forced into a Trump-created crisis — but his fiery victory speech Tuesday has raised doubts about just how much he’ll temper his progressive agenda.
The president has threatened to send less federal money to Mamdani’s New York but has so far resisted the aggressive ICE deployment he’s unleashed on Chicago.
City and state officials, however, were jolted by the ICE raid on Manhattan’s Canal Street last month, when migrants who’ve long sold their wares on a busy downtown thoroughfare were rounded up.
It was a test of how the city, its leaders, law enforcement and citizens, would react. And it likely was only the first test.
