A good friend introduces you to their circle, especially if they think you’ll all get along—and by that metric, Dr. Phil has been a great friend to Eric Adams. In December 2024, Dr. Phil FaceTimed the mayor to make a very important connection, introducing Adams to Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s “border czar” and the “father” of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy. That call, brokered by Dr. Phil, was the start of a transactional friendship that unfolded against the backdrop of Adams’s federal corruption case and the mayor’s desperate cozying up to Donald Trump, recently victorious in the presidential election and with the mayor’s fate essentially in his hands. 

Since then, as Eric Adams has continued his ascent into Trumpworld and the right-wing mediasphere and wriggled out of federal prosecution by allegedly making a deal with the White House over immigration enforcement, Dr. Phil has been right beside him, inviting the mayor to appear on his eponymous entertainment platforms. In return, Dr. Phil has continued to get rare access to the NYPD’s inner sanctum as Adams’s top cops crack down on immigrant New Yorkers, in order to slake his audience’s appetite for the narrative that Democratic cities are overrun by criminals and undocumented immigrants.

Dr. Phil, born Philip McGraw in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, began his career as a trial consultant, advising attorneys on what kind of theater to use to win their cases. It was through that work that he connected with Oprah Winfrey, and he eventually became a regular guest on her show in the late ’90s, dispensing folksy wisdom thinly masking a deeply conservative and punitive worldview. Obviously, a large segment of the American public ate that shit up, and by 2002, Dr. Phil had his own spinoff talk show, the aptly named “Dr. Phil.”

After more than 20 years as a celebrity psychologist and TV host, garnering accusations of unethical conduct from Britney Spears’s family to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill to Bhad Bhabie along the way, Dr. Phil launched his current media company, Merit Street Media, in 2023. The company’s website describes its offerings—which include all of Dr. Phil’s self-titled shows, along with “The Island with Bear Grylls,” “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace,” and something just called “Jail”—as “family entertainment and unbiased news coverage that respects your intelligence.”

At the same time that he launched Merit Street Media, Dr. Phil became more and more vocally pro-ICE, spending much of 2024 ranting about the “border crisis”; he spoke in support of Trump at his rally at Madison Square Garden in October, enmeshing himself squarely in Trump’s orbit and becoming particularly close with Homan. 

Since making that fateful FaceTime with Homan and Adams happen, Dr. Phil has been regularly accompanying ICE agents on raids in major cities with his camera crew in tow, and has made his support for Mayor Adams increasingly public. Dr. Phil and Adams appeared together for the first time on an episode of “Dr. Phil Primetime,” less than a week after the mayor and Homan’s digital linkup. In part one of a wide-ranging two-part interview, Dr. Phil and Adams tackle homelessness, crime, sanctuary city laws, border control, and Adams’s indictment. “The American public is not aware of how I believe we have really abused our criminal justice system,” Adams said when talking about his federal corruption case.

The second episode begins with Adams guiding Dr. Phil on a tour through New York City’s subway system before pivoting to an illuminating interview between Homan and Dr. Phil in which Homan thanks Dr. Phil for setting up a meeting between him and Adams. “How’d the meeting go?” Dr. Phil asks Homan. “Well, you’re the first person I’m talking to about it—it went very well,” Homan replies. “It went better than I expected. Mayor Adams…he understands the politics of immigration enforcement.” Homan continues: “I’m a career law enforcement officer, he’s a career law enforcement officer. That wasn’t a meeting between a cop and a politician; that was a meeting between two cops, and I was happy to see that.” The episode then cuts back to Dr. Phil and Adams on the subway, and Dr. Phil shares the good news. “He said, ‘I was so impressed with that man,” Dr. Phil gushes to Adams. “You know, mutual, mutual,” Adams says, nodding. “I always use the fractions—if the common denominators are right, you can add together.” 

Over the next few months, that warm, “mutual” feeling apparently continued to bloom. In February 2025, after months of Adams groveling at Trump’s feet and indicating he was fine with throwing New York City’s immigrants under the bus in order to salvage his own political career, the Trump Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop the mayor’s corruption charges. (“The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime,” sentient thumb Emil Bove wrote in a memo.) That memo prompted the acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who was overseeing Adams’s case, to quit in protest, but not before she described a “quid pro quo” between Adams and the DOJ’s Bove in a resignation letter. 

Shortly after, Homan appeared on “Fox & Friends” to publicly pressure the mayor to allow ICE to reopen their office on Rikers Island, which was booted out of the jail complex in 2015 after the City Council passed a series of laws limiting the City’s collaboration with ICE. “If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, “I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'” 

The whole sorry scheme was so hamfisted and obvious that the judge who eventually dropped Adams’s corruption charges called it out in his decision to dismiss the case against Adams. “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Federal Judge Dale Ho wrote in April 2025. 

Beginning in May, reports emerged that ICE had come to collect on that alleged “bargain” between Adams and the Trump administration, swarming into Manhattan’s immigration courts to detain immigrants attending prescheduled immigration court appointments in an unprecedented show of cruelty and callousness. 

Thanks to a lawsuit by the City Council, ICE has yet to gain access to Rikers Island, but NYPD arrest records have been used to deport people, including a New Jersey woman who was arrested at a Columbia University pro-Palestine protest and two Venezuelan men who were arrested in the Bronx and then shipped out to CECOT in El Salvador without ever having been convicted of a crime. 

But Homan’s fingerprints are nonetheless all over immigration enforcement in New York City, thanks, apparently, to his friends in the police department. In June 2025, the Times described  Kaz Daughtry as one of Homan’s key allies in City Hall, instrumental in ICE’s attempts to reestablish a presence on Rikers Island. In fact, the Times noted, Daughtry was promoted to his current role as deputy mayor for public safety after Homan “asked that a top police official with a close relationship to the mayor be named as [Homan’s] liaison to City Hall.”

If Homan is running the show, Dr. Phil has been documenting it. In June 2025, the Times reported that Dr. Phil was invited to an NYPD sting of accused gang members in April that also involved federal law enforcement, during which he conducted a lengthy interview with Daughtry. 

Dr. Phil’s relationship with the Adams administration and in particular, the NYPD stretches back even further. He also spent another day with Daughtry and then-Chief of Patrol John Chell in April 2024 for an episode of “Dr. Phil Primetime,” titled “Inside the NYPD: Officers On The Front Lines.” (Chell, who has since been promoted, also made a solo appearance on “Dr. Phil Primetime” in a segment titled “Spotlight: Migrant Crime in America.”) In the “Front Lines” episode, Chell and Daughtry walk a wide-eyed Dr. Phil on a tour through One Police Plaza and take him on an objectively uneventful ride-along into the Bronx that features the trio teeing up each others’ talking points on bail reform, quality of life enforcement, ghost plates, and the cop-hating media.  

After their initial conversation at the end of 2024, Adams has appeared on McGraw’s podcast four more times, including a June 2025 appearance in which he was accompanied by Daughtry, titled “Reclaiming Gotham’s Glory: From the Streets to City Hall.” (“We need to be Batman,” Adams says at one point.)

In June, as Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani inched closer to winning the Democratic nomination in the 2025 mayoral race, McGraw and Adams partnered again, headlining “Never Again Is Now,” a special episode of “Dr. Phil Primetime” dedicated to combatting antisemitism that featured both men wearing yarmulkes. “This is a shameless plug, and I don’t mean to embarrass you,” McGraw said to the audience, gesturing to Adams, “but there is one candidate that I see in this race that is not a Johnny Come Lately, who from the time he was a street cop in the borough has stood with the Jewish community, and it’s coming down, now, to you’re either going to have an antisemitic mayor or you’re going to have a brother that stands with you in your faith.”
But whomever the next mayor is, it won’t be Adams‚ which means the Gotham content spigot is about to dry up for Dr. Phil, and fast. But on the other hand, Adams is reportedly cruising towards a new gig. Maybe Merit TV needs someone to kill airtime between Steve Harvey and Nancy Grace.