New York’s new law prohibiting local police from working with ICE through what's called 287(g) agreements is making a lot of headlines right now. Republican sheriffs, including some in the North Country, are suing to block it. Supporters say local police should be focusing on local crime and not detaining people who may be in the country illegally.
But federal, state, and local law enforcement work together all the time, including sometimes on immigration matters.
One collaboration is called Operation Stonegarden. New York has participated since 2009. Governor Kathy Hochul supports it. It pays counties along the border with Canada to work with U.S. Border Patrol, including to detain immigrants. This year, Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Franklin, and Clinton counties, and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, received a collective $1.23 million to participate.
Isabelle Taft reported on Operation Stonegarden for the nonprofit news outlet New York Focus. She told David Sommerstein that through the program, sheriff deputies go on patrols with a general mission to “improve overall border security.” Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
ISABELLE TAFT: They do traffic stops, in some cases doing marine patrols, coordinating in some cases with U.S. Border Patrol to do drug interdiction and just kind of make sure there's an additional law enforcement presence along the border.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN: So, these are separate from the regular patrols that sheriff deputies go on?
TAFT: Yes, exactly. And they don't do them all the time. Different departments do them different numbers of times out of the year. The idea, though, is that when they're on a Stonegarden patrol, they are not doing regular calls. They're going to be focused entirely on potentially locating drug traffickers, human smugglers, but most often, as far as I can tell, just doing traffic stops.
SOMMERSTEIN: So, the article you wrote was about these officers who are doing these Stonegarden patrols, including here in the North Country, using the program to handle immigration matters. You had mentioned border security and drug interdiction, but also handling if someone they pulled over is in the country illegally. Talk a little bit about how that works and give us an example.
TAFT: Sure. Most of the cases that I found where this was happening involved a traffic stop. So, the deputies would document that they saw a vehicle they thought was suspicious for some reason or that was violating a traffic law, like speeding or failing to signal.
They pull over the driver. They discover that they believe the driver and/or some of their passengers might be in the country illegally, and then they contact Border Patrol to check the person's identity. In some cases, it's not really clear why they are calling Border Patrol exactly.
The example that I got the most information about took place in Jefferson County in December 2025. A Brazilian man and his brother-in-law were leaving work at a construction site, headed to lunch. A Jefferson County deputy pulled them over, claiming that they had failed to signal properly, that they hadn't turned on their lights appropriately, and that they had a cracked windshield.
The deputy discovered that the driver had a Pennsylvania driver's license and his passenger had a Brazilian passport. As a result, the deputy called Border Patrol and wrote in the documentation of the stop, "for deportation". So, that man and his brother-in-law ended up spending months in detention before the driver was released on a habeas petition. He told me when I spoke with him that he'd experienced traffic stops before. When he first got pulled over, it didn't occur to him that he could wind up getting put in immigration detention because he had a valid driver's license. He felt that the stop was conducted solely for the purpose of turning him over to Border Patrol.
SOMMERSTEIN: What do we know about what a local police officer is supposed to do if they pull someone over who they suspect may be in the country illegally?
TAFT: That's a really good question, and it's not a simple answer because the policies in practice vary dramatically from one jurisdiction to the next. So, some counties, even those that participate in Stonegarden, told me our deputies will not turn someone over for a suspected civil immigration violation. Other counties said in our area, if a deputy encounters someone who they believe to be undocumented, they're going to call Border Patrol.
Where New York law is fairly clear is that law enforcement is not supposed to detain anyone for longer than it takes to process their criminal charge. So, in theory, it would be pretty clearly illegal for a deputy to take someone to the jail on a minor traffic violation and hold them overnight, for example, waiting for ICE to show up.
But it's much murkier, and I would say, pretty clearly legal under current law for a deputy to pull someone over, call Border Patrol, and they show up very quickly. That kind of thing is permitted under current law.
SOMMERSTEIN: What did you take away from your reporting on this?
TAFT: My main takeaway was that, for all the attention that 287(g) agreements have gotten, especially in New York over the last two years, there are many different channels for collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents.
To be clear, there's a lot of collaboration that happens that has nothing to do with immigration enforcement, and I think that has been one of the concerns of sheriffs who oppose the new ban on 287(g) agreements. They feel like this is just not workable; putting up these walls between local cops and federal partners is actually, in practice, really difficult to get right.
