New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law banning local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE, and now 15 county sheriffs are suing her over it. She responded by countersuing one of them. This is fine. Everything is fine.
The Law That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits
The 'Local Cops, Local Crimes Act' is Hochul's signature move in the ongoing standoff between blue-state governments and the Trump administration's deportation machine. The law restricts local law enforcement from entering into 287(g) agreements, which are formal arrangements that deputize local officers to enforce federal immigration law.
Hochul's stated rationale, laid out in a memo Fox News obtained, is that using local cops and local resources for federal civil immigration enforcement pulls those officers away from actual local public safety functions. That is, genuinely, a coherent argument. Federal immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. Local police departments are not the Border Patrol.
But coherent arguments do not survive contact with a coalition of 15 sheriffs representing counties stretching from Lake Champlain to the Massachusetts border, all of whom have decided they would rather see you in court than follow the new rules. According to Fox News, that coalition filed its lawsuit challenging the 287(g) ban this week.
The Sheriff Who Dared Her to Do Something About It
Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin had been telegraphing his defiance since before the ink dried. Back in June, he told ABC's Troy affiliate, in terms that could not be more explicit: 'We don't really care what this legislature did, we are not going to let them endanger our citizens. I dare you to confront me on this, governor. We're not stopping.'
She confronted him. Late Thursday, Hochul announced a counterssuit against Rensselaer County's sheriff for noncompliance. So now we have 15 sheriffs suing the governor and the governor suing a sheriff right back. New York's legal system is doing great. Really humming along.
Hochul has also signaled she will enlist Attorney General Letitia James to go after other noncompliant counties. She framed the broader fight in characteristically pointed terms, quipping that local police should not be rounding people up in churches and schools to help 'Stephen Miller reach his quotas.' Which is a sentence that contains a lot of accurate information delivered with considerable attitude.
Enter Bruce Blakeman, Future Governor Candidate, Current Outrage Machine
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who is running against Hochul for governor, did not hold back. 'This law is written in the blood of the victims, past, present and future,' he said, which is the kind of line that gets clipped and played on Fox News for the next six months and is very much intended to be.
Blakeman pointed to specific cases to back up his alarm. He cited the killing of Westchester County resident Sheridan Gorman, which authorities attributed to an undocumented immigrant while she was attending college in Chicago. He also cited a recent case in his own county where an undocumented Honduran national was charged with second-degree rape and endangering a 14-year-old.
He also made the argument that ICE cooperation had direct operational value, pointing to a massive gang takedown in 2025 that netted 42 gang members and a seizure of dozens of illegal handguns and several kilograms of drugs. His point being that ICE involvement allowed authorities to hold suspects who might otherwise have walked under New York's cashless bail rules. That is a more substantive argument than the blood rhetoric, and worth taking seriously even if you disagree with where it lands.
What Hochul's Office Actually Says
Hochul's spokesperson pushed back on Blakeman's framing directly, telling Fox News Digital that his 'understanding of New York's bail and immigration laws is incorrect.' The spokesperson insisted the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act 'does not tie the hands of our police or stop them from apprehending dangerous criminals,' and that local law enforcement can still cooperate with federal authorities on criminal investigations and violent crime.
The distinction Hochul is drawing is between civil immigration enforcement, which the law restricts, and criminal investigations, which remain fair game. Whether that line holds up in the courts, in practice, and in the court of public opinion heading into a governor's race is a very different question.
Rep. Michael Lawler, the Rockland County Republican who treats fighting Hochul as his primary job function, posted on social media that she is 'the worst governor in America' and 'doesn't give a s--- about public safety or the rule of law.' Lawler is not exactly a neutral observer, but he is also not alone in his party in saying it.
The Political Math Underneath All This
Blakeman is cutting into Hochul's polling lead, according to recent surveys Fox News cited. Immigration and public safety are exactly the issues he wants to run on, and Hochul just handed him a law to campaign against with a clear target on it.
This is the trap that blue-state Democrats keep walking into. The policy argument for limiting local ICE cooperation is real and defensible. The political argument, in a post-2024 environment where immigration moved voters in ways that genuinely surprised a lot of Democrats, is considerably harder. Hochul is governing one of the most Democratic states in the country and she is still in a fight.
Blakeman's team, for its part, told Fox News Digital to refer to his public remarks when asked for additional comment. Which is the kind of response that means: we said what we said, and we think it's working.
The Dingo Take
Fifteen sheriffs suing a governor while the governor countersues one of the sheriffs back is not how a functioning government is supposed to operate. This is what happens when a federal administration uses immigration enforcement as a political weapon for years, forces every state and county in the country to pick a side, and then watches the resulting chaos as if it's a feature rather than a bug. It is a feature. The chaos is the point.
Hochul's law is legally defensible. The Tenth Amendment has real content. Local governments genuinely cannot be conscripted into running federal immigration programs. Courts have said this. Constitutional scholars agree. None of that stops it from being a brutal political liability in a race she was supposed to win easily, against a county executive who has discovered that 'written in the blood of victims' plays better on television than 'the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine.'
The actual people getting lost in all of this are the ones who always get lost: immigrants swept up in enforcement operations regardless of their circumstances, crime victims whose cases get used as rhetorical ammunition by politicians who couldn't pick them out of a lineup, and the cops on the ground who have to figure out what they're actually allowed to do while the lawyers sort it out. The lawsuit will drag on. Blakeman will keep talking about blood. Hochul will keep mentioning Stephen Miller. And somewhere in Rensselaer County, a sheriff is going to keep doing whatever he was going to do anyway.
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