Albany Reins in Police Collaboration With ICE but Doesn’t Ban Informal Cooperation

Lawmakers released the text of a long-awaited legislative deal to limit state and local cooperation with immigration authorities Wednesday. After months of debate, legislative leaders and Governor Kathy Hochul agreed on significant new protections for immigrants, but the legislation doesn’t limit informal collaboration between local police and federal authorities, which has funneled New York residents into immigration detention.

Immigrant rights advocates hailed the new protections, which include tools for New Yorkers to push back against federal immigration enforcement, but decried state leaders’ failure to go further.

“We will continue to fight to end this harmful informal collusion and call on Albany to step up,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Both the state Assembly and Senate passed the legislation Thursday. Hochul is expected to sign it.

The package will prohibit all law enforcement from wearing masks in New York state, following public anger over US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers covering their faces when they make arrests, including at immigration courthouses. It will also codify that private “sensitive locations,” like hospitals, churches, homes, and summer camps, can deny access to ICE. And it will enshrine in state law children’s right to attend school regardless of their immigration status.

While continuing to allow informal collaboration, the package of measures will also bar local law enforcement from entering into formal agreements with ICE that deputize local cops to make immigration arrests. The contracts, known as 287(g) agreements, have boosted ICE’s enforcement power, including in New York, where a dozen local and county police departments have signed them. In Long Island’s Nassau County, advocates believe 287(g) has helped ICE arrests reach historic levels, including a reported record high 352 in January.

The bill will also prohibit local jails from detaining people on civil immigration offenses — a practice that skyrocketed in New York last year, as New York Focus reported.

And the package will prevent state and municipal employees, except local police, from sharing information with immigration authorities — a provision designed to deny ICE access to the personal information of people seeking social services or public benefits.

The carve-out for police was one of the major sticking points in negotiations between Hochul and the legislature. Democratic legislators backed a more aggressive bill, the New York for All Act, which would have banned police from sharing information and collaborating with immigration authorities without a judicial warrant. Hochul said she was concerned that could prevent local authorities from working with the federal government to investigate crimes.

At one point during the negotiations, Hochul proposed limiting collaboration only to scenarios in which local police suspected a crime had been committed, but advocates for immigrants worried that standard was too vague and permissive.

In the end, officials struck most restrictions on informal collaboration. The package does, however, prohibit the state and local governments from dedicating resources to immigration enforcement. At a press conference Thursday morning, state Senator Andrew Gounardes, one of the sponsors of New York for All, said that would prevent local police from providing traffic control during ICE raids, for example.

To oversee these changes, the legislative package will also create an Office of Immigrant Trust, a branch of the attorney general’s office that will investigate complaints of violations and potentially sue or monitor violators. In the past, another investigative office within the attorney general’s office has reviewed complaints of local police violating state law by arresting people for immigration authorities.

Under the legislation, New Yorkers will be able to sue federal immigration authorities for alleged civil rights violations. Hochul advocated for that measure in part by citing the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar who died after Border Patrol released him from custody and left him in a Tim Hortons parking lot on a cold winter night in Buffalo. His family, she said, should be able to sue.

None of the measures in the package, however, would have prevented Shah Alam from winding up in Border Patrol custody in the first place, Gounardes said. Federal authorities picked him up from the Erie County jail after the sheriff’s office notified them that he would be released.

“We’ve done nothing to prevent another case like [Shah Alam’s] from happening,” Gounardes said.