New York State should be at the forefront of protecting our loved ones and neighbors from ICE’s violence and lawlessness.
Yet over the past decade, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) have increasingly relied on local and state law enforcement and government agencies to search for, arrest, and deport New Yorkers. This entanglement of state and local agencies with ICE and CBP has multiplied the injustice of discriminatory and aggressive policing to surveil, racially profile, and target immigrant New Yorkers, ultimately enabling the cruel separation of families across New York State.
IDP’s “New York ICE Collusion Watch” focuses on the police-to-deportation pipeline by exposing patterns of collusion identified since the start of the first Trump administration between law enforcement and ICE across NY state. Whether it’s a phone call from a local police officer that brings in masked ICE agents, state troopers pulling people over based on racial profiling to arrest them for ICE, or counties signing a 287g agreement to authorize police to act as ICE agents, the police-to-deportation pipeline puts lives at risk.
Local and state agencies of all kinds are complicit in funneling New Yorkers into the deportation machine. In many instances, this type of collusion happens in the shadows outside of the public eye—through state and local law enforcement, public hospitals, shelters, schools, jails and prisons, and other agencies—increasing ICE’s and CBP’s ability to disappear New Yorkers.
Shamefully, while several other states have passed statewide protections against this collusion, New York has taken no action, despite a bill, the New York for All Act (S.2235/A.3506), which has sat in the state legislature for years. The New York for All Act would broadly prohibit state and local resources from being diverted to carry out a cruel and inhumane federal deportation agenda.
By exposing the proliferation of this collusion the New York ICE Collusion Watch fuels efforts to disentangle these systems. Ending NY’s complicity in the disappearance of New Yorkers, the separation of families, and the state-sanctioned violence being carried out by the Trump administration.
For more background on ending ICE/policing entanglement, see IDP’s resource here.
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