Elected officials across the country are fighting the federal government’s mass deportation campaign with new laws and funding. But some states are welcoming the shock troops.
by Whitney Curry Wimbish August 21, 2026 (Prospect.org)
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MANHATTAN – Standing with Attorney General Letitia James, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and a phalanx of local elected and community leaders last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put the Trump administration and their collaborators on notice that the state would not stand for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents snatching residents and abusing children.
Hochul announced $7.25 million in new legal aid funding for the 1,400 unaccompanied immigrant children across New York, 251 of whom are in detention. That money comes on top of the $16.9 million New York City’s latest budget allocated for the same purpose, and its $30 million increase to overall immigration legal services, which now total $150 million.
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She reminded law enforcement officials that they had until August 25 to end their 287(g) collaboration deals with ICE, said failing to do so would result in legal action, and name-checked Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, whose agreement with the agency is among the most extreme in the country. Hochul banned 287(g) agreements—deals that deputize local law enforcement agencies to conduct federal immigration enforcement—earlier this year under the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act. Five law enforcement agencies have refused to respond to James’s demand that agencies obey Hochul and send her their plan to exit the arrangements. On the contrary, more local police departments are signing the deals, while at the same time stockpiling more small arms, as the Prospect reported last month.
“My message is I expect [Blakeman] and everybody else in this state to follow the laws of New York and there are consequences if you do not,” she said and told the room of reporters she expected the media to call out his mischaracterization that her ban on 287(g) agreements means permission for crimes. “Someone like that will intentionally misrepresent, which is a nice way of saying ‘lie’ about what we’re actually talking about.”
“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate.”California state assemblymember Matt Haney
Apart from the police departments planning to operate illegal agreements, New York’s new laws and funding put it on one side of a new American divide. There are states that are actively fighting President Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign. And there are ones that welcome it.
Multiple states are in the first category: Since Trump retook the White House, lawmakers in that group have increased not only their anti-ICE laws but “their ambition in exercising local power,” as the National Immigration Law Center put it last month. According to its tally, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington have all enacted new legislation to fight ICE during Trump’s second term, including limiting collaboration between local cops and immigration enforcement, banning immigration officers from hiding their identities or going to sensitive locations, and protecting residents’ data.
States on the other side believe it is both moral and financially responsible to use local resources to help federal agents terrorize immigrants. Florida is on that side. The state holds more 287(g) agreements than any other; all 67 counties have 287(g) agreements as of last year and the “vast majority” of immigration enforcement is conducted by the local and state cops those agreements have deputized, according to the ACLU. That includes the Florida Highway Patrol, whose officers are detaining immigrants on highways and city streets during routine traffic stops. Earlier this summer, the state’s Board of Immigration Enforcement gave the Walton County Sheriff’s Office $9 million in grants for serving as an ICE holding facility.
Florida also requires by law that local police departments comply with ICE detainer requests. Under such a request, also called ICE holds or immigration detainers, the agency asks local law enforcement to keep in custody someone they would otherwise release so that agents can more easily deport them. There’s no nationwide law requiring cops to cooperate, but like Florida, officials in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have all passed laws forcing law enforcement to do so, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s State Court Report.
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Alabama is another state doing the federal officials’ work for them. Alabama’s Department of Corrections and six local police departments are among the agencies in that state to ink new 287(g) agreements as of the end of last month.
IN NEW YORK, HOCHUL ARGUED against allowing a federal agency that’s already better funded than most militaries in the world to soak up even more money by engrossing the funding of local law enforcement. Alongside her, Mamdani repeated information about immigration support services, including the Immigration Legal Support Hotline, whose number he read out: 1-800-354-0365.
States on New York’s side are likewise putting more money into legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children after Trump refused to renew a contract for a coalition of aid organizations nationwide, then assigned the job to disgraced anti-sex-trafficking organization Our Rescue for $244 million, though it has no experience doing that work, as the Prospect reported.
Next door in New Jersey, Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced earlier this summer a $12 million increase in funding for the Detention Deportation Defense Initiative, raising the total to more than $20 million, and established the Rapid Legal Response Initiative to increase the state’s ability to file habeas corpus petitions to protect people from ICE moving them out of the state.
New Jersey is home to the ICE detention camp Delaney Hall, run by GEO Group, where at least three people have died since December. Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-NJ) and other members of the state delegation are also working to track the true number of deaths inside, after ICE changed its policy in June to only report the deaths of people in detention custody. Doing so allows them to transfer custody of immigrants shortly before they die from catastrophic medical emergencies. They did so recently to 29-year-old Prisciliano Trejo Ricano, who died from leukemia shortly after ICE released him from Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, and Jose Chajon-Raxon, who died shortly after ICE released him from Delaney Hall. Mejia told the Prospect that she and other state electeds are working with families and local aid and faith organizations to keep track of who else is injured and at risk inside the camp.
Some states are coming at the problem in new ways, trying strategies that haven’t yet been attempted. Across the country in California, for example, a pair of proposed state laws would impose stiff new taxes on CoreCivic, GEO Group, and any other corporate detention profiteers. Under Assembly Bill 1633, such corporations would be subject to a new Private Detention Facility Tax of 50 percent of gross receipts and send the money into a new Due Process for All Fund to pay for legal aid and other immigration services. And under Assembly Bill 2465, the companies would be disqualified from receiving state benefits, such as grants and tax credits.
“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate,” Democratic California state assemblymember Matt Haney said Friday at a press conference outside Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump retook the White House.
“If private detention companies insist on making incarceration their business, California should make accountability, transparency part of the cost of doing business,” he said, adding, “If they look at this tax and say it’s too much for us to operate in California, well then bye.”
Speaking to the Prospect ahead of the press conference, California assemblymember Liz Ortega said that the laws aren’t going to shut down the detention camps, but they are going to put a price on collaborating with Trump’s terror campaign. Corporate profit-seeking is what’s driving the torturous conditions in Adelanto, where people inside are reporting squalid conditions, including “worm-like creatures” in the drinking water, and medical neglect, such as journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias’s untreated gunshot wound, which after 300 days inside has caused his arm to turn purple.
“We’ve been told over and over by the federal government that this is their domain and therefore states can’t do anything legally, so this is a different approach,” Ortega said, who added that her ask of other state lawmakers is to find ways to fight back, too.
“We can’t just work on this issue when we see this news,” she said. “This is something we have to continue to work on until this administration recognizes that what they’re doing is terrible, it’s unprecedented and it’s wrong.”
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Whitney Curry Wimbish
Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish
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