As expected, budget immigration protections fall short of full New York for All proposal

Lawmakers are set to approve a series of new immigrant protections agreed to as part of the state budget that stops short of enacting the full New York for All Act that immigrant rights advocates have pushed for. Legislators say they will use the last two weeks of the scheduled legislative session to push for additional protections that get closer to the full bill that they say Gov. Kathy Hochul has resisted. But lawmakers have so far refrained from using the levers of power at their disposal to force the governor’s hand on an issue the sponsors have painted as of dire importance. 

The Legislature printed the updated version of the Public Protection and General Government budget bill Wednesday night, the second of nine unfinished budget bills to reach the floor since the April 1 budget deadline passed. It includes the governor’s “Local Crimes, Local Cops” Act and several other provisions to limit local cooperation with federal immigration agents and  prevent local jails from housing immigrants on behalf of the federal government. It also would ban immigration agents and other law enforcement from wearing masks, and permit New Yorkers to sue U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for alleged civil rights violations.

At its core, the legislation bans what are known as formal 287(g) agreements that local law enforcement can enter into with ICE. They permit local police to work with ICE, ranging from sharing information and honoring detainer requests to deputizing officers to act as federal immigration agents and permit them to enforce civil immigration law. A number of local police and sheriffs’ departments have signed such agreements. 

Compared to the governor’s original proposal from January, the final version also will prohibit informal agreements with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol that functionally act like a 287(g) information sharing agreement. During the Thursday Assembly debate on the issue, Assembly Member Catalina Cruz explained the bill treats informal agreements as patterns of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, rather than one-off instances of cooperation.

But to the chagrin of both immigrant rights advocates and lawmakers who have worked on immigration issues, the final budget language does not explicitly forbid all informal cooperation between federal officials and local law enforcement. “The legislative package falls short of offering comprehensive protections by continuing to permit informal law enforcement collusion with ICE and Border Patrol,” Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement. Though he also praised the bill’s advancements, he stood firm in calling on lawmakers to pass New York for All in its entirety.

Legislators tried to negotiate with the governor to include language in the budget that would ban all informal collusion with ICE and CPB by local law enforcement. But after rejecting Hochul’s initial proposal that would have permitted cooperation if police had probable cause for a crime, legislative leaders and the governor could not come to an acceptable agreement to deal with those informal communications. 

“We did not have three willing partners willing to go that far,” state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, sponsor of the New York for All Act, told reporters Thursday morning. “And so we have more work to do to make sure that we have three willing partners so that this doesn't happen again.” He asserted that the budget legislation would not have prevented a situation like one that happened to Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a blind immigrant who was found dead after his transfer by local Western New York police to CPB.

A spokesperson for Hochul did not immediately return a request for comment, but her office has previously highlighted instances when the governor has tried to negotiate with legislative leaders on the issue, including removing language around law enforcement cooperation they disagreed with.

Gounardes and state Sen. Julia Salazar said they’ll push to get the full New York for All Act passed before they leave for the year. “I'm really proud that the Senate acted swiftly and early this session (and) convened a group of senators who wanted to focus on immigration policy,” Salazar said. Gounardes added that their chamber was “ready to pass the bill.”

But neither the state Senate nor the Assembly has passed the New York for All Act yet. That’s despite widespread support among Democrats, with Gounardes quipping “almost every Democrat” spoke at a rally for the legislation in April. “As much as we may have wanted to pass this, these are also complicated issues,” he said Thursday.

Both Gounardes and Salazar pointed to the fact that the governor still needs to sign legislation. “We do need all three parties in order for something to become law, and so I think that what we’re doing today is really important, and we have to continue to try to get all three parties to a place where we can go further in protecting all New Yorkers,” Salazar said. 

But lawmakers do have options to force the governor’s hand. While the governor does need to sign bills that pass both chambers in order for them to become law, legislative leaders can bait the governor into either going on the record vetoing a measure, or to sign it to avoid bad press. Usually, they wait until Hochul “calls it up” before sending the legislation over for her signature or veto. The reason is that once it hits her desk, the governor has 10 days to decide how to act. Legislative leaders historically don’t send bills until she is ready as a courtesy.

Asked why lawmakers did not employ a more aggressive tactic on an issue they considered so important, Gounardes suggested things might have been different had the budget process not dragged on. “The budget calculations this year really, I think, warped a lot of what other legislative strategy we may have tried to employ on this issue and other issues,” he said. 

But ultimately, Gounardes went back to placing the blame on Hochul. “We want to be in a place where we’re actually passing things that we know are going to help people, and that we can actually put those protections in place immediately,” he said. “And we don't have three partners that can do that on this particular issue right now.”