Central New York’s Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, found itself in the federal government’s crosshairs last month when the Trump administration made the county a focal point of the president’s push to force localities to dedicate resources to mass deportations.
Sheriff Derek Osborne did something routine: He released a man from jail after he’d served his sentence. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted Osborne to hold the man, an undocumented immigrant, past his release date so the federal agency could arrest and deport him.
The US Department of Justice is now investigating and threatening to prosecute the sheriff for failing to cooperate with ICE, though it’s not clear what the department would charge him with.
The sheriff’s office said Osborne “acted consistently” with state and local policy, didn’t interfere with federal law enforcement, and told ICE when the man was going to be released.
“From what I can tell, the sheriff did not violate any law,” said Estelle McKee, a professor at Cornell Law School in Ithaca who specializes in immigration.
The threats show how far the Trump administration is willing to go to pressure local police to work with ICE and may serve as a test case for whether federal officials can successfully spook local officials into compliance.
The Trump administration “is throwing every piece of spaghetti at the wall to force people and scare them into capitulating,” said Lena Graber, senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “The fact that they publicly announced the investigation — they don’t even have to file charges for that to have a chilling effect.”
Robert McWhirter, an expert in constitutional law who practices in Arizona and has written on immigration law, said he is not aware of any past instance in which a local law enforcement official has faced federal charges for not complying with an ICE directive.
“There’s no basis in law to do this,” he said. “There is no such crime as failing to help ICE do its job.” New York Focus and Bolts reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Still, the Justice Department has directed its prosecutors to investigate state and local officials who don’t comply with ICE directives in order to potentially bring criminal charges. Since January, the Trump administration has cut off federal funding from organizations that work with immigrants and threatened to withhold money from jurisdictions with so-called sanctuary policies. And it has filed civil lawsuits against New York state, Chicago, and the state of Illinois over policies that grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants and limit state and local agencies from helping with immigration enforcement.
Unlike Illinois, New York has no statewide law governing local collaboration with federal authorities on immigration. It limits state-level cooperation with ICE, and a state court has barred some forms of assistance by county sheriffs, but localities are largely left to decide whether to dedicate resources to helping with federal immigration enforcement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-run states are applying pressure on their own localities. Last week, Tennessee’s governor signed a law allowing the state to criminally investigate public officials who vote for policies that would protect immigrants from ICE, while a new Florida law empowers the governor to remove local officials who don’t comply with ICE directives.
For McKee, the Justice Department’s investigation into Osborne is part of this escalation. “These threats are just part of this administration’s tactics,” she said.
The federal ire and funding freeze threats have rattled communities in Tompkins County and Ithaca, both of which have had policies in place since the first Trump administration that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
“There is no such crime as failing to help ICE do its job.”
—Robert McWhirter
“Any attention we bring toward our county could have very negative impacts,” Tompkins County Legislator Shawna Black said during a recent meeting. Black told New York Focus and Bolts that the immigration attention exacerbated anxiety over the Trump administration’s recent order to freeze federal grants, which opponents are currently fighting in court.
“I’ve had people calling asking about SNAP benefits, asking about Medicaid,” she said. Others have asked about Cornell University research grants. “Whenever you start talking about our economy … it threatens all of us.”
Aid from local law enforcement is key to Trump’s agenda because ICE has limited capacity, while sheriffs and local police have the personnel and knowledge required to carry out deportations on the scale that Trump has promised.
Sheriffs also operate county jails, where ICE sources many of its arrests. Roughly four in five non-border deportations during the Biden administration — whose immigration enforcement infrastructure Trump is trying to beef up — involved people who came into contact with the criminal justice system.
In New York, cities and counties must choose for themselves whether to help with immigration enforcement.
“Local law enforcement officers are free to decline to
engage in immigration enforcement,” said Amy Belsher, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union who focuses on
immigration, “and in fact under certain circumstances are required to decline from doing so under state law.”
Only one of the state’s 62 counties, Rensselaer, has a formal contract, known as a 287(g) agreement, to allow local sheriff’s deputies to enforce immigration law within the county jail. Long Island’s Nassau County has authorized 10 detectives to embed within ICE and act as immigration agents, but has not made the text of the interagency agreement public.
After the Trump administration dropped federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and clawed back $80 million in federal funding for city migrant shelters, the mayor announced that the city is reopening an ICE office at the Rikers Island jail complex.
Tompkins County has gone in the opposite direction. In 2017, the county legislature adopted a resolution, called Public Safety for All, that said that local law enforcement shouldn’t stop, question, or interrogate people solely to enforce federal immigration law.
“We have a clear message that we are a welcoming place, and even though this is a really unprecedented and scary time, that this is a supportive community,” Casey Verderosa, executive director of Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, which offers services to resettled refugees and supports the county’s sanctuary policy, told New York Focus and Bolts.
Anna Kelles, a former Tompkins County legislator who wrote the 2017 resolution and later praised Osborne for aligning the sheriff’s department’s policies with it, now represents the Ithaca area in the state Assembly. She told New York Focus and Bolts the county won’t obstruct ICE but, she added, “we will not — nor are we obligated by the Constitution in any way to — use our resources” for immigration enforcement.
The Tompkins County resolution also said that the local sheriff’s department should not detain someone on the sole basis of an ICE “detainer.”
A “detainer” is an administrative request from ICE asking a county jail to hold someone past their scheduled release to allow federal agents time to arrest them. Some states have adopted laws that outright bar sheriffs from honoring these detainers. Immigrant rights groups have made the case that the requests violate the US Constitution.
In New York, an appellate court decision involving the Suffolk County sheriff in 2018 ruled that sheriffs can’t hold people solely on a warrantless ICE detainer.
“New York is pretty clear with respect to these administrative detainers,” said Thomas Mitchell, counsel to the New York Sheriffs’ Association. Sheriffs “are not permitted to hold inmates for any time past their normal release date” on just a detainer.
According to ICE press releases and public statements by local and federal officials, Osborne in late January released a 27-year-old Mexican immigrant after he agreed to a time-served sentence on an assault charge.
ICE asked Osborne to detain the man beyond the end of his sentence, which ended on January 28, until he was picked up by federal immigration authorities. Tompkins County notified ICE that the man was being released, but he was not immediately picked up. After his release, ICE arrested him on January 30 in front of a local social services office.
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were notified of when the individual in question was going to be released and had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident,” the Tompkins County administrator and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office said in a joint statement to reporters.
“We have a clear message that we are a welcoming place, and even though this is a really unprecedented and scary time, that this is a supportive community.”
—Casey Verderosa, executive director of Ithaca Welcomes Refugees
According to
the Justice Department, ICE sent Osborne’s office a “federal arrest
warrant,” signed by a US magistrate judge alongside the detainer. The
warrant was tied to a 2024 charge of illegally re-entering the US after
being deported. Guidance
issued by the attorney general’s office to local agencies advises that,
under current law, it is “permissible” and “justified” for sheriffs to
detain someone based on a warrant.
The county’s lawyer said local law enforcement is not
required to abide by federal warrants. “A federal court cannot direct a
local authority under the Tenth Amendment to execute a federal arrest
warrant — it is optional but not obligatory,” Tompkins County Attorney
Maury Josephson said during an early February legislative meeting.
Courts have interpreted
the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution as preventing the federal
government from commandeering the states to enforce its laws. McWirther,
the constitutional scholar, echoed Josephson’s assessment in an
interview, as did Belsher of the New York CIvil Liberties Union. “Local
law enforcement officers are not required to enforce federal immigration
law by holding someone for ICE, even when presented with a judicial
warrant,” Belsher said.
The Tompkins County sheriff, the Ithaca mayor, and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
So far, the administration’s threats haven’t prompted any changes to state or local policy.
In early February, the Ithaca City Council passed a resolution to “reaffirm” the city’s sanctuary status.
The county legislature held a meeting around the same time in which local officials largely defended the sheriff’s actions.
“I’m glad I live in a city and a county that has sanctuary status,” an Ithaca resident proclaimed at the county legislature meeting. “I have friends who are undocumented and who are in fear right now.”
Another resident brought to the meeting a petition — signed by 260 residents, she claimed — that urged officials to protect the local undocumented community.
“Visible dissent is crucial,” she said.
Mitchell of the New York Sheriffs’ Association said his organization’s members aren’t feeling any added pressure. “When the news reports first came out and it was in a lot of media, I think even nationwide media, there was obviously some concern about what’s going on” among sheriffs, he said, but the law seems clear that Osborne was not required to detain the person. “So I don’t think there’s any great concern about this.”
In Albany, immigration advocates and legislators have pushed for a bill to enshrine statewide standards and bar law enforcement from working with ICE in almost all cases. They say this would bring more clarity than the current regime and ensure that sheriffs are not helping federal immigration enforcement.
The legislation, which has the support of 27 senators and 55 assemblymembers, was first introduced in January 2020 but has stalled every session since.