Nassau County's Republican executive spent weeks daring Albany to make him break with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Tuesday night, hours after New York's attorney general fired off a subpoena, he blinked — then immediately picked a new fight.

Bruce Blakeman said his county attorney sent ICE a formal termination notice, ending Nassau's 287(g) agreement that had let deputized county officers help carry out federal immigration arrests. The move brought Nassau into compliance with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, a state law that took effect Tuesday and bars local police from signing or keeping civil immigration enforcement deals with ICE.

Of the 13 New York jurisdictions that held 287(g) agreements before the ban, 11 wound them down by the deadline. Nassau and Rensselaer counties held out — until Attorney General Letitia James's Office of Immigrant Trust issued subpoenas Tuesday to the Nassau County Police Department, the Nassau County Sheriff's Office, and Rensselaer's sheriff, warning that civil litigation would follow noncompliance.

Compliance With a Catch

Blakeman, a Republican running to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul in this year's governor's race, framed his climbdown as a fight he intends to keep waging. He told reporters he'll still order Nassau police to work with ICE "whenever possible" within the new limits, and that he's joining a federal lawsuit filed by 15 county sheriffs, led by Rensselaer County Sheriff Kyle Bourgault, that challenges the law as an unconstitutional intrusion on sheriffs' authority.

"This law is written in the blood of victims past, present and future. I am a law-and-order county executive," Blakeman said, adding that any future crime committed by an unauthorized immigrant "is on the hands of Kathy Hochul."

Hochul, who signed the measure in May, has rejected that framing. "We didn't need any 287(g) agreements," she said, arguing the point is to free up "local taxpayer dollars" for local crime-fighting rather than federal civil immigration enforcement. She's previously said no county executive is "above the law in the state of New York."

The standoff lands squarely in the middle of a 2026 governor's race in which immigration enforcement has become a defining split between Hochul and Blakeman. Nassau's jail had held more than 1,000 people on ICE's behalf since October under the now-terminated deal, and Newsday reporting cited in local coverage found only a small fraction had violent-crime convictions — a statistic Hochul's allies have used to argue the arrangement swept up far more than the "worst of the worst."

The law survived a separate legal test earlier this month when a federal judge rejected the Trump administration's own challenge to it, though the same ruling struck down a provision that would have barred ICE agents from wearing masks during operations. That leaves the sheriffs' suit, and Blakeman's pledge to keep pushing ICE cooperation to the edge of what the statute allows, as the next fronts in a fight neither side shows signs of dropping.