ALBANY – Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia have sanctuary laws, those that limit law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities and protect illegal immigrants from certain legal ramifications based on the offense of entering the country illegally. The laws vary by state, but New York is one of them.
As State legislators jump the final hurdle in what is Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D-Hamburg) fifth delayed budget since she assumed office in 2021, and the latest budget under her tenure to date, Albany Democrats managed to work in a proposal to further strengthen New York’s already-liberal sanctuary laws.
The final proposed budget as it’s presented to lawmakers is divided into ten sections. The third section includes immigration provisions, the highlight of which is a limitation of 287(g), a federal agreement that allows local law enforcement to cooperate with or be deputized by federal immigration authorities. It allows said local law enforcement to serve certain civil immigration concerns, conduct detentions, and carry out arrest warrants.
“It pretty much bars any cooperation,” Assemblyman Jarett Gandolfo (R-Sayville) told The Messenger. “In Suffolk County, if someone who’s here illegally commits a crime that doesn’t qualify as bail-eligible, local law enforcement could contact Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make an arrest on immigration grounds and get that person off the street. Now, any of that cooperation will be in violation of the new sanctuary laws.”
Gandolfo added that local officials were already hamstrung enough and have had to get creative on ensuring public safety. District Attorney Ray Tierney (R) recently dropped a charge to a desk appearance so ICE could make an arrest, as ICE can’t make arrests at courthouses in New York under the “Protect Our Courts” statute.
Gandolfo says that Albany Democrats have a “lot of the gripes” that have “nothing to do with local cooperation.”
“They have general grievances with ICE. I think it’s a political calculation that they have to be seen as standing up to the federal government. They’re pointing to what happened in Minnesota and trying to extrapolate that that’s what would happen here if there’s cooperation with local police.”
Gandolfo counters with the opposite, in that the absence of local cooperation led to the situation unraveling on two separate occasions.
“What they’re [Democrats] doing here [New York] is a total overreaction and it’s a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. To completely bar local police from working with ICE even in situations where the person here illegally is out committing crimes is just lunacy to me. It serves no public safety purpose.”
Gandolfo said that Hochul and some Democrats had softened their images on immigration at the height of the migrant crisis, but ramped up resistance after Donald Trump (R-FL) returned to Washington. Moreover, he warns that if local jails can’t connect with federal authorities, then the federal government will have no choice but to detain that person in any feasible facility, one that might be in a different state.
“Even if ICE wanted to keep that person closer to home and their families, they’re forced to send them out of state because local authorities can’t cooperate. Most people wouldn’t be sympathetic to a heinous criminal getting split up from their family, but a civil arrest could not be housed in a non-federal facility here in New York.”
