NY AG James Subpoenas Nassau, Rensselaer, Broome and Steuben Counties Over Unterminated 287(g) ICE Agreements

New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas on August 25, 2026 to four counties that had not terminated their 287(g) agreements with ICE by the deadline set in state law: Nassau, Rensselaer, Broome, and Steuben. The subpoenas landed the same day the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act took effect, which bars local law enforcement agencies from entering formal cooperation agreements with ICE and prohibits local jails from holding people at the agency’s request. Nassau County is led by County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor, making the state’s first compulsory-process step against a county also a step against the sitting governor’s opponent. The subpoena is a materially different instrument than the demand letters that preceded it — it compels the production of records under penalty rather than requesting compliance, and it moves the confrontation from correspondence into a posture where refusal is contempt.

This is the enforcement action the corpus recorded the Attorney General’s office preparing. On August 14 the office named the non-compliant agencies and confirmed it was readying legal action after Niagara and Cattaraugus sheriffs missed the proof-of-compliance deadline, with seven agencies statewide still holding active ICE agreements (2026-08-14–seven-ny-agencies-defy-287g-termination-niagara-cattaraugus-ag-legal-action). Madison County had defied an earlier termination order (2026-07-30–ny-ag-orders-287g-termination-madison-county-defies), Nassau defied the downstate deadline (2026-08-14–nassau-county-ny-defies-287g-termination-deadline), and Broome drew organized advocacy pressure at its own (2026-08-06–broome-county-ny-287g-advocacy-rally-compliance-deadline) — all three now appear on the subpoena list or its immediate margin. The statute itself dates to Hochul’s May signing of the ICE-cooperation limits (2026-05-29–hochul-signs-ny-ice-cooperation-limits-287g-ban-mask-ban), and ICE anticipated the loss of county jail capacity by expanding its hard-sided Batavia facility (2026-07-09–ice-batavia-hard-sided-expansion-after-new-york-jail-ban).

The counterattack arrived one day later and runs in the opposite direction: fifteen New York sheriffs filed suit in federal district court in Albany on August 26 challenging the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act and the Office of Immigrant Trust as unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment, with Cattaraugus County Sheriff Eric Butler among the plaintiffs. That filing is a separate occurrence with its own legal theory and is not folded into this entry. What the two days establish together is that New York’s 287(g) ban has passed out of the compliance-deadline phase entirely: the state is now compelling records from counties, and the counties are now suing the state, on the same statute, in the same week. The 287(g) program has been the contested joint between federal enforcement and local policing since its creation (1997-10-01–287g-program-created-local-police-immigration-enforcement), and the pressure runs both ways nationally — Tennessee legislated a mandate compelling its sheriffs to sign the agreements New York is compelling its own to end (2026-05-10–tennessee-hb2219-287g-sheriff-mandate-signed-law).

What the deadline carried, and how ICE routed around it (added 2026-08-27)

The Local Cops, Local Crimes Act reaches further than 287(g): it also requires termination of IGSA detention contracts with ICE, so the August 25 deadline hit county jail-bed revenue as well as deputization. Twelve agencies held active agreements going in — Broome, Nassau, Rensselaer, and Steuben among them — and several sheriffs refused publicly, Madison County’s Todd Hood most explicitly.

Two mechanisms ran alongside the enforcement. Hochul’s office paired demand letters with $75 million in technology grants offered as a compliance incentive — a carrot attached to the stick, aimed at the operational argument that sheriffs lose capability by withdrawing. And ICE moved to absorb the capacity the law strands: the agency is expanding its hard-sided Batavia facility to take on jail beds the county contracts can no longer supply. That last point is the structural one. A state can bar its counties from contracting with ICE; it cannot bar ICE from building its own capacity inside the state. The detention footprint does not shrink — it federalizes.

Correction, 2026-08-28 — St. Lawrence County is NOT one of the twelve. This entry listed it among the agencies holding active 287(g) agreements at the deadline. It is not on the AG’s list. Verified against the New York Attorney General’s own compiled termination-letter PDF — all twelve letters in one document, dated 2026-07-24 — by enumerating every recipient salutation. St. Lawrence never appears. WWNY independently reported the same, sourced to the AG’s press release: “none of the 12 letters are addressed to the St. Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office.”

The count of twelve is correct — verified against the primary PDF rather than any secondary tally. Only the membership was wrong.

St. Lawrence is a separate track, and structurally the inverse of the pattern this corpus documented at Crow Wing County MN: there the sheriff signed 287(g) MOAs unilaterally with no board vote ever; here the county Legislature approved it, and it may never have been formally executed at all. Sheriff Patrick Engle is nonetheless the most-named North Country plaintiff in the 2026-08-26 FAIR lawsuit — which is likely how the conflation entered. Corrected roster and per-agency compliance status: 2026-08-27–ny-287g-compliance-deadline-passes-state-sues-rensselaer-corrected-roster.