Gov. Kathy Hochul proposes legal barriers to Trump's deportation push in New York

President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive campaign to carry out what he has promised would be the biggest deportation operation in the nation's history has spurred Gov. Kathy Hochul to propose state laws aimed at restricting where federal immigration officers can go and authorizing lawsuits against the federal officers for constitutional violations.

Under Hochul's lawsuit proposal, a person can bring state-level civil rights litigation against a federal officer based on standards that cover state and local officers. And under the "sensitive location" proposal, federal immigration agents would be kept out of hospitals, schools and houses of worship, absent a judicial warrant.

"We will not allow masked ICE agents to storm our schools, our day cares centers, our hospitals, our houses of worship for civil immigration raids unless they have a judicial warrant — and guess what that means — signed by a judge," Hochul said. "And when these boundaries are crossed, accountability matters. No one, from the president on down, is above the law. Let me repeat, no one."

Both items were included in the governor’s annual State of the State address Tuesday, in which dozens of other policies were proposed, on immigration and beyond.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who is running to unseat Hochul, a Democrat, criticized her proposals, particularly her immigration ones.

"I have to say her criticism of ICE is completely misplaced and out of proportion with what's really going on in the real world, and common-sense people understand this," Blakeman said, adding he would not interfere with ICE enforcement activities.

Referring to certain immigrants, he added: "These people should be removed from our communities. I don't think that there's any doubt in that."

But Blakeman also said he would not let ICE raid schools, houses of worship or day care facilities unless there was a criminal inside the facility.

"That's ridiculous. Kathy Hochul talks about that, but it just doesn't exist. Point out where that's happened. It hasn't happened," he said.

The New York Civil Liberties Union said Hochul’s proposals are a good start.

"Right now, there is just a real deficit of accountability for federal officers in terms of their compliance with the federal Constitution, right? We have existing laws that allow for people whose rights have been violated to sue state and local officials for damages for compensation when their constitutional rights are violated," said Perry Grossman, a supervising attorney at the NYCLU. "There’s currently no equivalent, no federal law that authorizes the suing of federal officials for money damages."

Grossman said the group would like legislation to address the issue of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields officers from being sued unless their actions break a clearly established right in statute or the Constitution.

Critics of qualified immunity argue that the doctrine unjustly disadvantages those who are victims of misconduct and can cover conduct even if it’s malicious, unreasonable or intentional just because it hadn’t come up in prior litigation.

Zachary Ahmad, senior policy counsel at the NYCLU, said Hochul’s proposal restricting immigration agents from certain locations didn't go far enough and he would like to see stronger and broader prohibitions on cooperation, at least akin to what’s in place in jurisdictions such as California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York City, Oregon and Washington.

For instance, Ahmad said, there should be a ban on the sort of agreements that Nassau County has entered into with the federal government under 287(g) of federal immigration law.

Under that agreement, local police officers can be deputized as immigration agents and local jail cells are contracted to hold immigrants in federal custody.

Ahmad declined to say whether the NYCLU would support allowing any contact or cooperation, under any circumstances, between New York authorities and immigration enforcers.

Newsday's Stephen Hughes and Bahar Ostadan contributed to this story.

By Matthew Chayes

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Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.