New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is pressing the Trump administration for details on reported expansions of immigration detention facilities in upstate New York.
The Democratic governor wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin this week, seeking information about plans to increase capacity at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Batavia in western New York.
Hochul also referenced plans for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to create detention cells at a federal building in Rochester as well as a recently signed lease on a warehouse near Newburgh, about 70 miles north of New York City.
“My long-standing policy has always been that we will cooperate with law enforcement when crimes have been committed and there is a warrant for arrest or a court order, because we want our streets to be safe as well; but this unbridled aggression against law-abiding New Yorkers must stop,” Hochul wrote. “So I ask: is your Department building or expanding immigration detention facilities in New York? If so, where, to what capacity, and under what authority?”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said it would respond to Hochul through official channels. Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said the expansion is needed because of a recently enacted state law that bars local jails from detaining people for ICE.
“Policies of not cooperating with ICE put New Yorkers in danger,” Bis said in a statement. “When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities.”
More than 2,000 people were held for ICE at local New York jails in the last federal fiscal year, according to data compiled by the Deportation Data Project, a California-based research network.
Officials in Rensselaer and Nassau counties have said they will challenge the provisions of the new state law. The federal government last month sued over the new law; the case, as well as a countersuit by state officials, is pending.
Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition advocacy group, said Hochul was right to seek more information.
“New Yorkers deserve to know exactly what's happening in their own communities,” Awawdeh said. “Secretly building detention machines in our own backyards is not the answer here.”
