Fifteen New York Sheriffs Answer to No One

Fifteen sheriffs have decided that the constitution they swore to defend has exactly one article, and that article is about them.

"I don't answer to Kathy Hochul. I don't answer to Tish James. I answer to the great people of Broome County who afforded me an opportunity to administer this office."

— Fred Akshar, Broome County Sheriff, July 2026

New York became a test case for an idea the state has spent a century trying to kill: the sheriff above the law.

In late August, the state did something almost unprecedented. It passed a law, set a deadline, and waited for its own officers to comply. The Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul on May 27, voids every 287(g) agreement in New York, the deals that deputize local police and sheriffs as immigration officers for federal authorities. When the August 25 deadline arrived, nearly every agency in the state tore up its paperwork. One holdout remained, and it had been the loudest one all summer.

That one was the Rensselaer County Sheriff's Office, which has kept a 287(g) agreement with ICE for years and used it to initiate deportation proceedings against nine immigrants at no cost from Washington. When the attorney general's office demanded that the agreement be terminated, one county official told a reporter that the governor and the attorney general "could take that letter, crumple it up and shove it." County Executive Steve McLaughlin did better at a press conference. "We'll see you in court, governor."

On the day the law took effect, Rensselaer sued the state in federal court. Fourteen other county sheriff's offices joined, for a plaintiff list of fifteen, nearly a quarter of the state's 62 sheriffs. Albany answered in kind, suing Rensselaer in state court to force termination of the agreement. It was the first legal action brought by a brand new agency the state created for precisely this fight: the Office of Immigrant Trust.

The irony is in the filings. The 287(g) program comes with a menu of options. At the aggressive end, local officers make immigration arrests in the field. At the gentle end, a "Warrant Service Officer" program: a handful of deputies inside the jail who check, at release time, whether federal authorities want an inmate already serving a criminal sentence. Nearly all fifteen plaintiffs signed for the gentle end, and in sworn affidavits they said so, repeatedly.

"Our designated officers did not make civil immigration arrests in the community, did not conduct traffic stops for immigration status, and did not question people on the street about their papers," wrote Fred Akshar of Broome County, the former state senator and the most quoted plaintiff.

Translation: the thing the law banned barely happened. The fight was never about the arrests.

That is not nothing. The informal version is well documented. New York Immigration Coalition reports describe roadside vehicle inspection checkpoints in the Capital Region where ICE shows up uninvited, and separates families in front of their own kids. But the sheriffs' case, as their own lawyers framed it, is not about what their deputies actually did. It is about what they are allowed to do, which is a much bigger question.

There is a name for this. A 2025 article in the Georgetown Law Journal described "today's constitutional sheriffs": men who "view themselves as the highest authority in their county, answerable only to their electorate," a doctrine that has already produced open refusal to enforce gun controls, pandemic restrictions, and environmental rules. New York has run this exact playbook before. In 2022, a bloc of state sheriffs publicly admitted they would not enforce parts of the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, a duly enacted state law they simply did not like. The office, not the law, was the point.

"This lawsuit really is about the associated independence and the constitutional authority that is granted to the office of the sheriff," Akshar said. When the attorney general's office sent him a letter in July asking how his department intended to comply with the new law, he did not answer it. "I did not respond to that letter because the attorney general had no statutory authority to ask me those questions, nor did I have any obligation to do so," he explained at a news conference.

A state of 20 million people, with its own constitution, was told by fifteen of its own officers that the state does not exist unless they approve of it.

Follow the money and the doctrine gets clearer. The law also requires sheriff's offices to unwind older contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service, the decades old deals under which they house federal detainees for a fee, by November 25. Akshar says Broome stands to lose about $2.2 million a year. Albany County, not a plaintiff, has housed federal prisoners for years for millions in annual revenue, and its sheriff, Craig Apple, says he will not take ICE detainees anyway.

The politics are in the roster too. Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and the Republican gubernatorial candidate, suspended his county's agreement and is lining up to join the suit. Todd Hood, sheriff of Madison County and the Republican lieutenant gubernatorial candidate, is a plaintiff. When Hochul held a press conference touting the law, the sheriffs were invited. Not one showed up. She was flanked by four police chiefs.

The courts have already given the state a head start. On August 3, Judge Mae D'Agostino of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York denied the Justice Department's attempt to block the law entirely. The federal government, in other words, sued to keep the sheriffs' hands free, and lost. D'Agostino wrote that the law "seeks only to control whether New York and its localities voluntarily engage in certain cooperation with federal authorities."

Now the same fight is being made by the sheriffs themselves, with lawyers supplied by a Washington immigration hardliner group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The state's brief calls the plaintiffs' "reverse-commandeering theory," the idea that a state cannot strip a power from a local office that the federal government bestows, "unprecedented," "unsupported," and "unpersuasive." The plaintiffs had until September 16 to reply.

The federal government lost this argument on August 3. The sheriffs are making it now, with star badges instead of lapel pins.

In the communities the law is supposed to protect, the stakes are not theoretical. "New York banned this practice because we saw exactly where it leads: racial profiling, families torn apart over a traffic stop, and entire communities afraid to call 911," Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, told The American Prospect. When local cops can become a periscope for ICE, crime victims stop calling. Immigrants stop reporting. The streets get less safe, which is the argument the sheriffs will lose in court and win as a headline. Advocates are already pushing a stronger package, the New York for All Act, to shield immigrant New Yorkers from the administration's deportation machine.

"It's about cruelty," Awawdeh said. "That's their point."

The question was never whether fifteen sheriffs could keep a 287(g) agreement alive past a deadline. The question was what happens when a state's own officers decide their office is a one man constitution and the law is a suggestion. New York found out in August. The reply is due September 16, and the state's answer has already been filed, and it is short: no one is above it.