By Piper Cherry
In February, a Nassau County Supreme Court justice rejected a legal challenge to Nassau County’s 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allowing county police detectives to continue working with ICE officers in detaining undocumented immigrants.
According to Newsday, Justice Danielle Peterson said the county had a “rational basis” to continue the partnership, which the county formed last year with ICE.
Last June, several petitioners filed the lawsuit against Nassau County, the Nassau County Police Department and its commissioner, Patrick Ryder. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman had announced the agreement between the NCPD and U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement in February last year. The agreement allows NCPD officers to stop, question and arrest Nassau County residents and permits them to serve and execute ICE administrative warrants in the county.
The lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, Latino Justice PRLDEF and the Hofstra Law Clinic on behalf of the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN), the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island and Haitian American Family of Long Island. Marc Soto and a John Doe were also plaintiffs in the case. The petitioners argued that the agreement was “arbitrary and capricious,” a legal standard that would suggest the policy lacked a rational basis or sufficient justification if ruled on by a court.
The agreement between NCPD and ICE is a task-force agreement, meaning officers can stop people, question their citizenship status and arrest them without a judicial warrant, though they are still required to show probable cause. However, stopping a possible detainee does require an ICE administrative warrant, which critics point out is not issued by the courts. The Obama administration discontinued this type of task-force agreement in 2012 due to allegations of civil rights violations such as racial profiling. President Donald Trump reinstated the model in early 2025.
A question of safety
In February last year, Blakeman said, “Nassau County Police and Sheriff’s Departments are fully cooperating with ICE and other federal agencies to round up illegal migrants.” Shortly after, officials announced that the NCPD was entering into the 287(g) agreement and had “cross-designated 10 detectives as civil immigration officers,” but also allocated 50 jail beds for ICE detainees. The next month, Ryder signed the memorandum of agreement to enter the program.
Blakeman had previously said that he believed the agreement was a necessary response to the “serious public safety concerns we all face,” and he directed the NCPD to enter the agreement to “keep Nassau County safe from unvetted illegal immigrants who commit crimes”, according to the lawsuit. However, Nassau County was named the “safest county in the country” by U.S. News & World Report, a designation that Blakeman posted on social media in April.
According to the American Immigration Council, there is little data to show that immigration is responsible for crime across the country, including in Nassau County. Data also shows that even as the number of immigrants in the United States has increased, the crime rate has steadily declined, according to the council.
In 1980, immigrants made up 6.2% of the U.S. population, and the crime rate was 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people. In 2022, immigrants made up 13.9% — more than double the 1980 figure — while the crime rate was 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people – a 60.4% decrease from 1980. Petitioners in the lawsuit argue that figures such as these show the agreement is “arbitrary and capricious.“
A question of legality
Melanie Creps, executive director of CARECEN, one of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, spoke about why the organization chose to petition for it.
“This 287 agreement should have never gone through. It’s not lawful according to the New York State law,” Creps said. “We were ready to join that lawsuit because we recognized this is not good for the community, it’s not helpful for anyone in our community, it’s not lawful and it’s hurting our work too.”
When Creps said that she believed the 287(g) agreement was unlawful according to New York State law, she was referring to Orellana Castañeda et al. v. County of Suffolk and Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office et al. The case was a class-action lawsuit filed in 2017 by law firm Winston & Strawn and LatinoJustice PRLDEF over the unlawful detention of immigrants in Suffolk County. The issue arose because the county held immigrants in its jail for up to 48 hours after they should have been released, allowing ICE to detain them.
In June 2025, following the rapid increase of ICE presence on Long Island, particularly in Nassau County, Assemblyman Charles D. Lavine, a Democrat from Glen Cove, issued a statement.
“The sudden presence of an armed and masked military force in Westbury resulted in a community response in which residents expressed anger over an obviously excessive and aggressive display of force,” Lavine said. “The resulting intimidation and threat to the peace and safety of our communities and the resultant frightening of our children is crudely un-American.”
When asked by The Advocate to comment on the lawsuit against Nassau County’s 287(g) agreement, Lavine said, “I am familiar with the agreement that Nassau County made with ICE to house people who were being detained, and I am following the lawsuit as it progresses.”
On Dec. 6 last year, Antonio Delgado, New York’s lieutenant governor, held a conversation about ICE and immigration that was attended by The Advocate. “Our communities, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, our children, they’re being terrorized,” he said in his speech in Brentwood. “And what ought to be their home is being treated like a hunting ground. They’re being preyed upon, right in our own backyard.”
Delgado criticized the lack of work in the New York government to prevent this. “It’s maddening to me that we haven’t gone back to Albany already and haven’t called a special session and haven’t passed New York for All to ban cooperation with ICE all across this state,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling.”
The New York for All Act would help immigrants in New York lead “more open lives” and take care of their communities, according to Delgado.
The legislation would ensure that state funds cannot be used to support ICE. It would also prohibit state and local government agencies in New York, including police officers and sheriffs, from cooperating with ICE, revealing sensitive information and diverting resources or personnel to federal immigration enforcement. The bill was first introduced in the State Legislature in February 2020, but has not been passed.
When asked about the lawsuit, Delgado said he could not comment on it specifically. “What I can comment on is the fact that 287(g) agreements are [going to] be banned,” he said. “We have a growing number of localities across the state that are participating in these agreements, and the state has and should take the responsibility of making it very plain to ICE that we are not here to cooperate in that fashion.”
In the eight months leading up to Sept. 5 last year, nine partnership agreements with ICE were signed under the federal 287(g) program in New York State. According to ICE, there were a total of 1,255 across 40 states as of Dec. 15 last year.
The program was created by federal law in 1996. No law enforcement agencies in New York signed on until Rensselaer County did in 2018. It remained the only New York county with a signed agreement with ICE for several years. In addition to Rensselaer and Nassau counties, the list now includes Broome, Cattaraugus, Madison, Niagara, Otsego and Steuben counties, as well as Camden, a village in Oneida County.
In early 2025, former mayor of New York City Eric Adams tried to authorize the presence of ICE agents on Rikers Island and issued an executive order to be signed by Randy Mastro, the first deputy mayor, in April.
More than a decade ago, an executive order had removed agents from the island. The City Council challenged Adams’ move, saying that “enabling ICE to pursue its aggressive immigration on Rikers will irreparably erode the trust between local government and the New York residents that it serves.”
New York State Supreme Court Justice Mary Rosado ruled Adams’ executive order illegal and an “impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest,” according to Politico.
