Last week, New York state Democrats did what they do best: They jammed what will ultimately prove to be unpopular and counterproductive restrictions on immigration enforcement into the state budget. They did it with bail reform. They did it with juvenile justice reform. And they did it with criminal discovery reform. While frustration is an appropriate emotional response to this development, surprise is not.
The changes being pushed through the recently passed budget bill are sweeping. According to reporting by The Post and others, the package includes measures:
- Banning law-enforcement agencies within the state from engaging in any formal or informal cooperation with federal immigration authorities;
- Banning federal law-enforcement agents from concealing their faces;
- Creating a state law right of action for New Yorkers to sue federal agents they believe violated their rights; and
- Prohibiting state jails from holding offenders on behalf of immigration authorities.
If New York was a “sanctuary state” before, it will soon be a sanctuary state on steroids once the budget is signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. All of these measures fall somewhere between deeply misguided and legally suspect.
First of all, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — which subordinates state law to federal law — makes clear that states cannot regulate federal entities, which means that federal courts may ultimately strike down some of these measures, depending on how they are enforced against federal authorities.
Secondly, further restricting cooperation between local and federal law enforcement on immigration-related matters will undermine the safety and security of many New York communities.
Hochul argues that such cooperation undermines local policing. Per Spectrum News, Hochul stated, “When [local police are] diverted into becoming ICE agents, literally doing their job with civil immigration enforcement, they’re not focused on what we need them to do.”
This is purposeful obfuscation on the governor’s part. Local police often encounter illegal immigrants through everyday police work. The idea that allowing officers who’ve arrested someone for a crime through the normal course of discharging their duties should be prohibited from notifying ICE when that person happens to be an illegal immigrant — particularly one on whom ICE has placed a detainer — is a strange one.
In departments operating under 287(g) agreements through which local officers are also deputized as federal agents, whatever time officers spend on federal matters will be compensated by federal authorities. More importantly, however, allowing cooperation with ICE may be the best hope a community has of getting an active offender off the street for any significant amount of time.
In the post-bail reform era, many offenders (even chronic and violent ones) will find themselves back on the street within hours of their arrests.
That reality has proven frustrating to both law-enforcement officers (who risk their lives to take offenders into custody only to see them waltz right out of the courthouse) as well as the community members harmed by offenders the system doesn’t seem willing to hold.
Allowing immigration authorities to take custody of someone as to whom the state’s official position is that they are a criminal (hence the pending case) reduces the risks faced by those in the neighborhoods back into which such defendants would be released.
Nor is the other go-to rationale for these restrictions — the idea that this is a rational response to the excesses of an allegedly rogue enforcement agency — compelling.
If New York state Democrats were sincerely concerned about the risks that ICE operations posed to New Yorkers, they would be capitalizing on opportunities to have their own, presumably more-trustworthy and better-trained, law-enforcement agencies handle some of the workload, taking it out of ICE’s hands. Such concerns would also counsel in favor of handing defendants in state custody over to ICE in controlled settings like courthouses and jails, rather than sending defendants with deportation orders and detainers out into the streets where ICE agents will have to find them, chase them and arrest them.
Indeed, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan said earlier this month that if Hochul and her Democratic colleagues pulled the lever they just pulled, “we’re going to flood the zone,” and “you’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen before. So, congratulations.”
All New York Democrats seem to have done here is to invite a slew of legal challenges to misguided legislation that will only increase the risks of both serious crimes being committed by illegal aliens who could have been deported, as well as the risks inherent in a large-scale federal immigration enforcement campaign that will likely be met with riots. And all without a modicum of public safety upside.
Congratulations, indeed.
Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of the 2022 book “Criminal (In)Justice.”
https://nypost.com/2026/05/30/opinion/new-yorks-new-sanctuary-state-laws-are-a-recipe-for-chaos/
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