ALBANY, New York — Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to erect legal barriers around President Donald Trump’s deportation tactics is turning the nation’s immigration politics on its head.
Her embrace of sanctuary-like policies — like limiting how local cops are deputized to work with federal agencies like ICE — came as public opinion has sharply turned against the president’s efforts to remove millions of people from the country following deadly unrest in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Hochul is now placing a bet that backing protections for New York’s large undocumented immigrant population will pay off with voters in the midterm elections and her own bid for a second full term. The Empire State is home to several swing House districts that stand to determine control of the narrowly divided chamber and the fate of Trump’s final two years in the White House.
“Public opinion has shifted and become much more critical of the Trump administration’s position on immigration policy, and I believe that the governor recognizes that,” said Brooklyn Democratic state Sen. Julia Salazar.
The national debate over Trump’s effort to remove undocumented immigrants from the United States is also playing out in Hochul’s heated reelection — a dispute that is highlighting the sharpest point of contrast between Hochul and her Republican foe Bruce Blakeman. Blue state governors — including New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, JB Pritzker in Illinois and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger — have called for ways of bottling up Trump’s use of federal immigration agencies. The stakes are even higher in New York, where an estimated 650,000 undocumented immigrants live.
Democrats in this deep blue state are contending with a base that’s eager to find ways of confronting and stymieing Trump’s signature issue. A statewideSiena University poll in February found most New York voters, 63 percent, believe ICE’s tactics went too far at the start of the year — including 83 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Latino New Yorkers.
That fervent opposition is cutting both ways for Hochul’s party.
Outrage over Trump’s deportations has trickled down into pivotal House races. Swing seat Democratic Reps. Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi were excoriated by left-leaning advocates over their votes earlier this year to fund agencies within the Department of Homeland Security amid the aggressive deportation push in Minnesota. Immigration advocates and local Indivisible groups have also pressured Hochul to back muscular protections for undocumented residents — underscoring the political imperative for the governor to get the bills passed in the coming weeks.
“Immigrant New Yorkers are living under constant threats of ICE terror — and unfortunately, local police and state agencies in New York State are being weaponized to do ICE’s dirty work,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “While our families across New York State are being separated, we must create the strongest safeguards for our communities against the unlawful actions of ICE.”
At the same time, Republicans expect Democrats are overplaying their hand on immigration — an issue the GOP homed in on after the broad criticism of former President Joe Biden’s handling of the border. An influx of migrants four years ago strained resourcesas officials struggled with the new arrivals, and immigration has become intertwined with a lingering Covid-era public safety concern.
The unrest in Minneapolis amid Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign, though, created a national voter backlash on his immigration policies, which had been until then a reliable Republican lodestar. And Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, has not dialed back his views.
“What happened in Minneapolis temporarily changed the equation, but over time I think a hard line against illegal immigration is going to largely be a good issue,” said Republican strategist Bill O’Reilly, who is not affiliated with the Blakeman campaign. “Republicans were shocked because they saw it as an 80-20, and Minneapolis kind of roiled that. Minnesota taught us what the American appetite is for immigration enforcement and that stops with violent criminals.”
Hochul is taking a very different track. She wants to make it easier for people to sue federal officials — like an immigration enforcement agent — when their constitutional rights are violated. She’s backed a measure that would prevent ICE from carrying out civil deportation warrants in sensitive locations like houses of worship or schools. And the governor wants limits on so-called 287g cooperation agreements between local police and federal immigration authorities.
Blakeman’s posture is the mirror-image opposite.
He’s embraced efforts by the Nassau County Police Department and federal immigration agents to work together to carry out deportations, deputizing local cops to work with federal immigration agents. As Nassau County executive, Blakeman signed an order supporting immigration agents wearing masks while carrying out their official duties. His campaign website touts that he’s “said NO to Kathy Hochul’s sanctuary policies, and worked with ICE to take criminals off our streets.”
“On my watch, 2,000 illegal migrants with criminal records have been removed from our communities,” Blakeman said in a statement. “While I stand with law enforcement to remove dangerous criminals, Kathy Hochul and local Democrats stand in the way, making New Yorkers more vulnerable to violence, rape, robbery, and carjackings.”
Hochul campaign spokesman Ryan Rudalevecki, in turn, knocked Blakeman for a close “partnership with Donald Trump’s rogue ICE agents [that] has already resulted in a death on its watch, a Long Islander’s head slammed into a brick wall, and small businesses losing customers as fear spreads. Bruce Blakeman calls that ‘seamless,’ because he’d rather do Trump’s bidding than stand up for New Yorkers.”
Hochul is seemingly an unlikely champion to take on sanctuary-like measures. As an Erie County official 20 years ago, she was a prominent opponent of then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses — a position she later reversed as lieutenant governor. A moderate, Hochul also has not fully embraced a bill called New York For All that’s favored by left-leaning advocates and Democratic state lawmakers.
Still, the governor’s desire to contain Trump’s deportation push in her state highlights how much immigration has significantly changed for Democrats following sweeping criticism of the Biden administration’s border policies.
Hochul’s top government advisers, meanwhile, are speaking cautiously with Trump administration officials and are desperate to avoid a Minneapolis-style crackdown in New York City.
Trump border czar Tom Homan met privately with Hochul in March, with the governor emerging from the conversation sharing her expectation that Trump will not conduct an aggressive deportation surge in the Big Apple like the Minneapolis operation.
“They seem to acknowledge that the politics went really bad for them and that the sort of consensus view in the country was that that was a gross abuse of power,” Jackie Bray, Hochul’s state operations director, said in an interview. “But I would say that hasn’t changed the reality for many immigrant families. They still feel quite terrified. The governor has met with these families.”
Homan has emerged as a blue state ambassador of sorts as the Trump administration refocuses its deportation strategy following the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, is changing some of the department’s procedures and policies.
Despite the adjustments expected as a result of that review, the February death of a blind Rohingya refugee in Buffalo, who was left outside a closed coffee shop by Customs and Border Patrol agents, has spurred Democrats to push for stronger sanctuary protections.
A former top state homeland security official, Bray believes those agreements that enable ICE to use municipal police department’s resources and officers for civil deportations have created a “time suck” for the local cops.
“We need our local law enforcement focused on local crimes. We need them focused on guns, we need them focused on assault, theft and larceny,” she said. “We need them focused on stuff that’s impacting the daily lives of everyday New Yorkers, and if they’re spending their time running around with ICE on civil immigration raids, they’re not spending their time doing what New Yorkers are paying them to do.”
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