Will Hochul Fight Trump’s Plan for ‘Mass Deportations’?

Trump is poised to ramp up deportation activity in northern states like New York, which has few statewide policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

A photo illustration showing Governor Kathy Hochul's face and migrants walking down a NYC street.

Images via Marco Postigo Storel; Flickr, Gov. Kathy Hochul; NY Focus

Despite New York’s immigrant-friendly reputation, the state isn’t set up to counter Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign. | Images via Marco Postigo Storel; Flickr, Gov. Kathy Hochul; NY Focus

Chris Gelardi · November 12, 2024

Staying Focused

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President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear: His administration will aggressively pursue “mass deportations.”

States may seem powerless in the face of such an agenda. Immigration is the purview of the federal government, which, in just over two months, will seek to flood communities with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (and perhaps the US military) to detain and deport as many people as possible, whether those communities and their state and local officials like it or not.

But deportations are a logistical game, and state and local governments hold some of the cards. For a removal campaign as massive as what Trump is promising, states can aid ICE’s efforts to find, apprehend, and lock up deportable people. Or they can throw a wrench in the agency’s plans.

Despite New York state’s immigrant-friendly reputation, the jury’s out on which role it will play. The direction it goes depends heavily on whether state lawmakers and Governor Kathy Hochul take quick action.

In the wake of the first Trump presidency, under then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York enacted some policies that restricted federal immigration enforcement in the state. Executive orders and legislation now prohibit immigration arrests at courthouses and within state government facilities, and state agencies are largely barred from coordinating with immigration authorities.

But unlike other blue states — like New Jersey, Illinois, and Oregon — New York hasn’t extended those prohibitions to local and county governments. That means local authorities are mostly free to deal with immigration issues as they see fit, including by helping feds facilitate deportations.

“We don’t have a statewide law that is protecting immigrant New Yorkers, or anybody traveling in New York, no matter where in the state they are,” explained Yasmine Farhang, director of advocacy at the Immigrant Defense Project.

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Legislators have proposed those kinds of laws: namely, the New York for All Act, which was first introduced in 2020 and would prohibit local law enforcement from colluding with ICE. Part of the reason those laws haven’t passed is misconceptions about immigration and public safety, according to Senator Andrew Gounardes, a lead sponsor of New York for All.

US media and politicians on both sides of the aisle frequently associate immigration with crime and violence, even though immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit crimes than US-born citizens. Despite police insinuation otherwise, deportable people go through the same criminal justice system as citizens when charged with a crime, and available research has found that “sanctuary” policies have no effect on reported crime. In fact, sanctuary jurisdictions are associated with lower rates of homicide and assault.

“The truth is that separating families, and sowing fear and chaos in communities, does nothing to ensure public safety or fix our broken immigration system,” Gounardes said. “Local enforcement of immigration wastes resources and distracts police from investigating crimes and responding to emergencies.”

Gounardes called Trump’s plan “a hard-right agenda that would tear apart families.” A Trump presidency makes enacting policies that inhibit aggressive ICE action all the more urgent, he said.

It also complicates those policy efforts, as Trump plans to recruit local law enforcement to help with immigration enforcement, and his allies have threatened to punish state and local governments that resist the mass deportation campaign. During his first term, Trump cut off federal grants and threatened to withhold Covid relief money from localities that refused to cooperate with ICE.

And Project 2025, the political initiative widely viewed as a blueprint for Trump’s second term, has recommended withholding federal disaster relief funding and law enforcement grants from those localities.

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It’s unclear how New York feels about a wave of immigration enforcement in the state, though voters have made clear that they care about immigration as a whole: An Associated Press exit poll clocked it as the second most important issue among Empire State voters.

Trump, who hammered his immigration message on the campaign trail, gained ground in the Democratic stronghold in the recent election. But that was as much a result of decreased Democratic turnout as it was of increased turnout for Trump, a New York Focus analysis of voting data showed.

By far the most pressing immigration-related issue in the state is the influx of some 100,000 asylum seekers over the past two years. A recent Siena College poll found that a plurality of New Yorkers see these people, who fled persecution or violence in their home countries, as more of a burden than a benefit to the state. But asylum seekers aren’t undocumented, and aren’t subject to deportation unless their asylum claims are rejected or they’re convicted of a qualifying crime. Research shows that new refugees are a net economic benefit to communities, though the recent influx has stressed state and local government budgets.

Voter opinions aside, Governor Hochul’s attitude about Trump’s deportation plan is also an open question. In response to Trump’s election victory, she launched an “initiative” to “identify any possible threats” posed by the incoming administration’s policies, including in the realm of immigration, and “protect New Yorkers.” But the governor has allied herself with immigration enforcement in the past.

“The state of New York has the power to work with ICE,” she told CNN in February — distinguishing state policy from that of New York City, which has local laws prohibiting cooperation with immigration authorities.

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Hochul made the remark in response to a scuffle between cops and a group of migrant men in Manhattan. Conservative media latched onto the incident, with the New York Post describing the men as “unruly thugs” who randomly ganged up on and assaulted a cop.

Video released days later showed that it was the cop who initiated the scuffle, grabbing one of the men by his collar as he was trying to leave and ramming him up against the wall; the other men intervened to wrest him from police custody. Hochul followed the tabloid narrative.

“I want them arrested, tried, and if convicted, I want them to spend time in New York jails before they are deported,” she said. “Get them all and send them back.”

The governor’s office did not respond to New York Focus’s request for comment.

Hochul hasn’t experienced a nationwide ICE crackdown as governor. Her time in office has coincided with a rare lull in interior enforcement, with federal focus aimed mostly at the southern border.

Trump’s first administration, before Hochul’s gubernatorial tenure, attempted to ramp up deportations. It scrapped existing federal policy that prioritized deporting those with criminal convictions and gave immigration authorities the green light to remove as many people as possible. While court cases and logistical hurdles prevented Trump-era deportations from reaching the levels they did under Barack Obama — who deported more people than any other US president — immigrants across the country, including in New York, lived in fear that ICE would come knocking on their door.

President Joe Biden, like every US president over the past three decades, is an immigration hawk. He extended a Trump administration policy, then crafted his own, to facilitate the removal of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and other migrants attempting to cross the border from Mexico, where many remained in crisis humanitarian conditions.

But that focus on the border, as well as logistical challenges during the Covid pandemic, led the outgoing president to curtail deportations from the interior US, leaving states like New York freer from ICE actions than they’ve been since the agency’s creation two decades ago.

With his second term, Trump is looking to once again unleash ICE. His top immigration advisor has promised a return to “indiscriminate” enforcement, suggesting a “blitz” to overwhelm uncooperative governments and civil society.

If New York decides that it wants to resist the crackdown, it will have to act fast.

Lawmakers have re-introduced the New York for All Act in every legislative session since the bill’s debut more than four years ago. It has never made it out of committee.

Without that law, there’s little that prevents local governments, particularly law enforcement, from helping to facilitate deportations.

Local deportation assistance takes a variety of forms. The most formal involves a written agreement between ICE and a law enforcement agency. Only one agency in New York has such an agreement with ICE: Since 2018, the Rensselaer County sheriff has signed memoranda that deputize sheriff’s office employees to identify deportable people who enter its jail and flag them for the feds.

Absent a formal agreement, there are other ways local agencies can assist with deportations. If ICE gets word that someone who is deportable ends up at a local jail, it can send the jail a request, known as a “detainer,” asking them to hold the person so federal agents can pick them up. A 2018 state court ruling prohibits New York jails from holding people for ICE past their normal jail release dates — but state policy still allows sheriffs to honor detainers in other ways, like by sharing the person’s case and personal information.

two men walk on the road rolling a suitcase with a bridge in the distance

Migrants leaving the Randall’s Island migrant shelter area on September 24. | Marco Postigo Storel

Law enforcement agencies can also work with immigration authorities on a fully informal, ad hoc basis. Some counties, especially in southern border states, have collaborative relationships with immigration authorities, according to Zach Ahmad, policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They have each other on speed dial,” he said.

The informality of those relationships makes it difficult to track if or how each local agency cooperates with ICE — and whether they’ll expand that cooperation under a Trump administration. Some municipalities, like New York City and Westchester County, have laws and policies preventing much of that collaboration. With others, it’s up to law enforcement officials.

State and local agencies don’t have to actively collude with ICE to assist with deportations. Since the mid-2000s, a patchwork of federal programs have facilitated information-sharing partnerships between ICE and other federal agencies, like the FBI, that receive fingerprints and other data from states and localities for non-immigration purposes. While the full extent of intra-federal information sharing is difficult to pin down, it’s safe to assume that any information that gets shared with the feds can get funneled to ICE.

“Once information is disclosed to anyone, it can be hard to unring that bell,” said Ahmad.

Information-sharing between local, state, and federal police is a mainstay of Hochul’s criminal justice approach, as New York Focus has documented. Through the state budget process, she has expanded New York’s primary fusion center — one of the secretive post-9/11 hubs that aims to facilitate intelligence-sharing among local, state, and federal police — including by giving it new social media surveillance teams. She has expanded similar types of specialized intelligence centers aimed specifically at gun crime and boosted special law enforcement partnership hubs aimed at terrorism surveillance and drug trafficking.

“All of these post-9/11 intelligence-sharing centers — they were built in the name of combating terrorism, but they routinely have been targeted at immigrant communities,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

And the amount of information the state has to share with the federal government is ever-increasing. With Hochul’s blessing, the New York State Police have ramped up data-collecting efforts, embarking on a years-long shopping spree for tech designed to troll the web and their internal data sources to compile intimate profiles of people’s lives.

State lawmakers have introduced over a dozen pieces of legislation to rein in data-collecting in New York. These bills have tried to ban DNA databases, prohibit geolocation searches without a warrant, and place limits on drone surveillance. None have passed.

While not directly targeted at immigrant communities, those kinds of policies are important if New York wants to shield them from ICE crackdowns, said Cahn.

“We need to create a firewall between New York agencies and the incoming Trump administration,” he argued.

A line of migrants waiting outside a church on a block in New York City.

Migrants line up outside the intake center at St. Brigid’s church in Manhattan on February 10, 2024. | Marco Postigo Storel

To facilitate mass deportations, Trump will need places to detain people whom ICE arrests. His allies have proposed dramatically expanding the agency’s detention apparatus, including by constructing makeshift camps.

Currently, ICE detention relies heavily on private facilities run by big corporations, like the GEO Group and CoreCivic, which have brutal human rights records. But state law prohibits running private detention centers in New York.

Instead, ICE incarcerates people in public detention facilities — currently in three corners of the state. It runs and manages one, near Buffalo, itself. The other two are county jails, run by the Clinton and Orange county sheriffs. (Other jails, like those in Alleghany, Chautauqua, and Rensselaer counties, housed ICE detainees in the recent past.)

Sheriffs generally use ICE contracts as revenue generators, charging the federal government a per-head, per-day fee to detain people in deportation or other immigration proceedings. While less notorious than private facilities, immigration detention in county jails has also come under fire for inhumane conditions: In 2022, ICE detainees in the Orange County Jail went on a hunger strike after years of allegations of abusive and racist treatment and lack of medical care. And last year, advocates filed a lawsuit and federal complaint over alleged retaliation for the protest.

On detention, too, advocates have attempted to end New York’s complicity in immigration enforcement. The Dignity Not Detention Act, first introduced in 2021, would ban government agencies in New York from agreeing to participate in immigration detention. But, like the New York for All Act, the bill has gone nowhere. Legislators have re-introduced the bill during every legislative session, but it has never made it out of committee.

“Action is overdue,” asserted Ahmad of the NYCLU. “Legislative leaders in Albany need to act on their rhetoric” and pass the laws that have been introduced — “before some of the worst things we’re fearing come to life.”