New York's August 25 287(g) Deadline Passes: State Sues Rensselaer Directly, Corrected 12-Agency Roster Shows Federal Court Already Denied a DOJ Injunction

New York’s August 25, 2026 deadline for terminating local 287(g) agreements with ICE has passed, and the record it produced corrects the premise this entry was commissioned to check. The state Attorney General’s Office of Immigrant Trust sent formal termination-demand letters — compiled in a single PDF, each addressed individually — to exactly twelve agencies on July 24, 2026: Nassau County Police Department, Nassau County Sheriff’s Office, Madison County Sheriff’s Office, Niagara County Sheriff’s Office, Steuben County Sheriff’s Office, Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s Office, Broome County Sheriff’s Office, Rensselaer County Sheriff’s Office, Otsego County Sheriff’s Office, Mohawk Village Police Department, Camden Police Department, and Allegany Village Police Department. St. Lawrence County is not on this list. WWNY confirmed the same count directly from the AG’s press release: “none of the 12 letters are addressed to the St. Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office.” St. Lawrence’s own 287(g) agreement — approved by the county Legislature in February 2026, championed by Sheriff Rick Engle over public opposition — was never confirmed to have been formally executed with ICE at all; Engle did not respond to press inquiries about its status. St. Lawrence is nonetheless live in the resistance story on a separate track: Sheriff Patrick Engle is a plaintiff in the fifteen-sheriff FAIR lawsuit filed August 26, named “the most” among the North Country plaintiffs, and the suit itself states he “has not withdrawn his intent to enter a 287(g) partnership” — meaning the county’s posture is defiance-in-intent on an agreement whose existence the state’s own letter list does not recognize.

The instrument. New York’s Local Cops, Local Crimes Act (Exec. L. § 170-k, part of the budget bill Hochul signed May 27, 2026) does not rely on each agency exercising a contractual termination clause. Section 170-k(7)(a) provides that any 287(g) agreement in force at enactment “shall be deemed not consistent with state law” and becomes “void and unenforceable in its entirety” automatically 90 days after enactment — August 25, 2026 — regardless of whether the holding agency ever sends notice. The statute separately “directs” agencies to “exercise any applicable termination provision contained within” their agreements, but that directive is a compliance instruction layered on top of a self-executing voidance, not the mechanism that does the voiding. This matters for the sheriff-signed-without-a-vote pattern documented at Crow Wing County, MN: in New York, the state law does not depend on who signed for its own effect, though it plainly does not stop a sheriff from asserting continued operational cooperation regardless of the agreement’s legal status — which is exactly what happened at Madison and Cattaraugus.

The federal ruling the record already contains. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a federal suit in June 2026 challenging the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act. On August 3, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York denied the federal government’s request to block the state’s 287(g) ban, letting the August 25 deadline take effect — this is the ruling Hochul and James referenced August 26 (“the courts have already declined to block this law once”) when responding to the FAIR-backed sheriffs’ suit. This is a separate ruling on a separate provision from the NDNY decision the same week in early August that blocked New York’s ICE-mask-ban provision from the same omnibus law; the two rulings run in opposite directions on two different sections of the same statute and should not be conflated.

Per-agency status as of August 27, 2026 (ICE’s website is the roster of record per Spectrum News’s August 18 count; no independent fetch of ICE’s live roster was completed this pass — see gaps):

• Broome County — Sheriff Fred Akshar sent a termination letter August 20, but the letter itself registers his objection and stated intent to sue; Akshar joined the 15-sheriff FAIR suit August 26. Paper-terminated, litigating to restore.
• Steuben County — Sheriff James Allard sent a termination letter to the ICE Buffalo field office August 25, the deadline itself: “officially terminating the 287(g) agreements… enacted in 2025.” No public defiance signal found. Terminated.
• Madison County — Sheriff Todd Hood’s office confirmed dissolving the formal agreement by August 18 (“to be in compliance with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act”) while stating it “will continue to work collaboratively with… ICE” on public safety needs. Hood is Bruce Blakeman’s running mate on the 2026 gubernatorial ticket. Paper-terminated, operationally continuing — the clearest instance of the paper-compliance/operational-continuation split in the set.
• Rensselaer County — Sheriff Kyle Bourgault’s office (agreement in force since 2018, Jail Enforcement Model) has not terminated. County Executive Steve McLaughlin stated publicly the letter “will not be complied with.” The state filed suit against the Sheriff’s Office August 27 in Rensselaer County Supreme Court — the Office of Immigrant Trust’s first civil enforcement action under the statute — seeking a court order compelling termination and a declaration that the agreement is void. Rensselaer separately sued the state in federal court (NDNY) August 25 challenging the ban. Still listed, now compelled by state civil suit.
• Nassau County (Sheriff’s Office and Police Department, two separate 287(g) agencies) — County Executive Bruce Blakeman missed the August 14 proof-of-compliance deadline; multiple outlets reported Blakeman announced compliance/ended the partnership August 26, one day after the ban took effect (not independently verified against a primary Nassau County document this pass).
• Cattaraugus County — Sheriff Eric Butler is a FAIR-suit plaintiff who, per the canon subpoena/lawsuit entries’ sourcing, “announced compliance with the August 25 termination deadline while simultaneously joining the suit… and stated the county would continue cooperating with ICE on criminal matters regardless of withdrawal.” Same comply-and-continue pattern as Madison.
• Niagara County — Missed the August 14 proof-of-compliance deadline (per the AG’s own letter, tier 1). No August 25-or-later confirmation of termination or continued defiance found this pass; Niagara appeared on Spectrum’s August 18 list of seven agencies still under active agreement.
• Otsego, Mohawk Village PD, Camden PD, Allegany Village PD — no post-deadline compliance reporting located for any of these four in this pass. Genuine gap, not absence-by-omission: these are small agencies (a county sheriff’s office and three municipal PDs) with thin regional press coverage relative to the larger counties.

What drove it and how durable it is. The mechanism is state statute plus AG civil enforcement — not a state agency vote, and not (for eleven of the twelve) IGSA board action. It is more durable against a single sheriff’s defiance than Crow Wing’s board-vote-free IGSA/287(g) signings, because the statute voids the agreement by its own force rather than depending on the signing party’s cooperation — but that same self-executing design is precisely what the FAIR-represented sheriffs’ Tenth Amendment suit and Rensselaer’s parallel federal challenge are contesting, and a first-round NDNY denial of a preliminary injunction is not a final ruling on the merits.

This continues the sequence recorded at 2026-07-30–ny-ag-orders-287g-termination-madison-county-defies (12-agency letters and the Madison defiance), 2026-08-14–nassau-county-ny-defies-287g-termination-deadline and 2026-08-14–seven-ny-agencies-defy-287g-termination-niagara-cattaraugus-ag-legal-action (mid-deadline non-compliance), 2026-08-26–ny-ag-james-subpoenas-counties-defying-287g-termination-law (compulsory process against four counties), and 2026-08-26–fifteen-ny-sheriffs-sue-fair-local-cops-local-crimes-act-287g-ban (the countersuit). It also connects to the federal-workaround pattern at 2026-07-09–ice-batavia-hard-sided-expansion-after-new-york-jail-ban — ICE’s response to losing county jail-bed access is to expand its own hard-sided capacity, a move the state’s 287(g) ban cannot reach because it binds only local government agreements, not ICE’s federal real estate.

Remaining research gaps

• Otsego County, Mohawk Village PD, Camden PD, and Allegany Village PD compliance status post-August-25 is not established from public reporting found this pass.
• Niagara County’s status after the August 25 deadline (as opposed to the August 14 miss) is not confirmed.
• ICE’s own live 287(g) participating-agency roster was not independently fetched and grepped this pass (persistent searxng rate-limiting blocked general web search for most of the session); Spectrum News’s August 18 count, sourced to the same roster, was used as the best available proxy. This should be re-verified directly against ice.gov before this entry is treated as final on roster status.
• Nassau County’s August 26 compliance announcement is sourced to secondary aggregation (Spectrum/WWNY roundups referencing wire coverage), not yet to a primary Nassau County statement or document.
• The full docket citation and case number for the August 3, 2026 NDNY ruling denying the DOJ’s injunction request was not located this pass (found only via the Troy Record’s characterization of the Hochul/James press release); a CourtListener docket-number lookup for a DOJ v. New York (or United States v. New York) 287(g) case in NDNY, filed roughly June 2026, would resolve this and should be done as a follow-up.