New York Sheriffs in Showdown With Hochul

New York State’s sheriffs are burnishing their constitutional credentials in a legal showdown with Governor Kathy Hochul. Albany Democrats are barring the sheriffs from cooperating with Uncle Samuel when it comes to enforcing federal immigration laws. Yet 15 of the state’s 58 sheriffs are asserting their status as independent officers under New York’s constitution and taking to federal court to defend their prerogative to uphold the law.“New York’s county sheriffs are independently elected constitutional officers” under the New York Constitution, the sheriffs’ lawsuit says. Governors have power to remove sheriffs and other state officials in cases of malfeasance. Yet the sheriffs remind Mrs. Hochul that “they are not subordinates or agents of the Governor or the Attorney General.” Upon taking office, sheriffs swear to “support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York.”That oath of office is part of the bedrock of our federal system, under which state officials pledge to adhere to the provisions of the national charter and America’s laws. Yet Mrs. Hochul and her fellow Democrats seem intent on driving a wedge between the sheriffs and their duties to the federal government. The state enacted a law seeking to void any cooperate agreements between sheriffs’ departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.The law, the sheriffs reckon, is antithetical to public safety and enforcing immigration laws. The measure, per the sheriffs’ lawsuit, includes “a suite of provisions that entrench New York as a sanctuary jurisdiction for criminal aliens.” The law, the sheriffs say, forbids them to “house individuals for civil immigration violations” and seeks to “second-guess the independent judgments of elected sheriffs” on “federal cooperation with immigration enforcement.”The sheriffs’ lawsuit reckons that the provisions of the state law would “nullify the ability of independently elected constitutional officers to enter into contracts authorized by federal law.” That means subjecting “officers’ core law-enforcement judgments to centralized state oversight and control.” The case is before Judge Mae D’Agostino, an Obama nominee. She will weigh the sheriffs’ argument that “the resulting harm is imminent and irreparable.”In a separate case, Mrs. Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James are suing the sheriff of Rensselaer County, Kyle Bourgault, over his refusal to stop collaborating with ICE. Mrs. Hochul argues with a straight face that the refusal means the sheriff and his deputies “are not serious about New Yorkers’ safety.” The governor, ignoring the oath of office to which she and the sheriff swore, asserts that “no one in New York State is above the law.”Ms. James insists that cooperating with ICE prevents sheriffs from fulfilling “their most fundamental responsibility: keeping New Yorkers safe.” Yet the sheriffs in their suit aver that they “prioritize public safety through removal of criminal aliens.” At Rensselaer County alone, hundreds of “foreign-born inmates” were processed in recent years, and nine turned over to federal authorities, including one “wanted for a sex crime committed in Ireland.”Plus, too, Rensselaer County “booked two Venezuelan nationals” linked to “a homicide that occurred in Connecticut,” the lawsuit says. This helps explain why Rensselaer County lawmakers see cooperation with ICE “as a core public-safety tool,” the sheriffs assert. It befits the heritage of the state’s sheriffs as bulwarks of the law to see these independent officials push back against state lawmakers who are putting politics over public safety.“Our status as independently elected Constitutional officers gives us the freedom, and the obligation, to speak out, and to serve as a kind of check and balance on legislative overreach on the state or local level,” says the state sheriffs’ association. They add that sheriffs are “compelled to speak out when legislation is proposed that will hamper us in carrying out our Constitutional duty to protect the citizens of this state.”

New York Sheriffs in Showdown With Hochul

New York Sheriffs in Showdown With Hochul

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