Rensselaer County Sheriff Kyle Bourgault had a 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agreement, signed in 2018, allowed his deputies to help identify and process illegal aliens in county custody. New York State's response was to set a compliance deadline of August 25, then sue him when he didn't fold.
The state government is now in court arguing that a sheriff broke the law by enforcing it.
Governor Kathy Hochul made the administration's position clear: "Compliance with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act is not optional." That's the name Albany gave its law requiring local agencies to dissolve cooperative agreements with federal immigration enforcement. Local Cops, Local Crimes — as if helping ICE remove criminal aliens from your county jail is somehow abandoning local policing.
Attorney General Letitia James filed the suit. The same AG's office that has spent years pursuing political prosecutions now has the bandwidth to go after a county sheriff whose crime was cooperating with the federal government. Bourgault isn't the only target — 14 other sheriffs were sued alongside him, and 12 other jurisdictions had similar 287(g) agreements.
Bourgault isn't backing down. "This isn't just about 287(g)," he said. "This is about tools being taken away from law enforcement." When the state sent its compliance letter demanding he terminate the agreement, his response was that he "could take that letter, crumple it up and shove it."
The Local Cops, Local Crimes Act is one of those laws where the name does the opposite of what it says. Local cops are being told they cannot assist in identifying criminal illegal aliens in their own jails. The "local crime" the state is worried about isn't the assault or the DUI that put the illegal alien in county lockup — it's the sheriff making a phone call to ICE afterward.
Hochul warned that "Rensselaer County's failure to act in accordance with the law sends a clear message." She's right about that, just not the way she meant it. The clear message is that an upstate sheriff with a 287(g) agreement dating back to 2018 was doing his job long before Albany decided to make it illegal. The state had to pass a law specifically to stop sheriffs from cooperating with federal agents to hand over criminal illegals to the right authorities. That tells you everything about whose side Albany is on.
Bourgault and the 14 other sheriffs called the lawsuit "nothing but a frivolous waste of taxpayer dollars." From a pure legal-spending standpoint, New York is now using state resources to sue its own law enforcement officers for working with federal law enforcement officers to remove people who have 1, committed crimes, and 2, aren't legally allowed to be in the country. Every dollar Letitia James spends on this case is a dollar not spent on actual crime in a state where subway ridership requires a risk assessment.
A government that sues cops for cooperating with federal law enforcement, which supersedes state law, isn't protecting its citizens. It's protecting its politics.