New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s push to restrict wearing facemasks in public is encountering stiff resistance from her fellow Democrats as they negotiate a new state budget, lawmakers and officials told the New York Public News Network.
During private talks in the majority Democratic state Senate last week, only a few members of the governor’s party spoke up in favor of her proposal, according to two officials briefed on the closed-door discussions who were not allowed to speak publicly. The officials said many legislators had expressed concern that a statute criminalizing the act of wearing a mask with ill intent — even if strictly defined, and even with exceptions for medical and religious uses — could lead to unequal enforcement.
State Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan, told reporters this was a particular concern given the Trump administration’s aggressive policing of people who participated in protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. The administration has attempted to deport demonstrators at colleges and universities because of their protest activity.
“ In the context of the Trump administration, [concerns over] things like proposals to … put limits on people's ability for masks in public definitely grow,” Krueger said. “I hear from a huge chunk of people in my district — they just want to wear masks for health and safety reasons, and they don't understand how someone will know what the difference is between them and someone who's hypothetically wearing a mask to rob a bank.”
As Gothamist first reported last month, the governor raised masking restrictions during talks with legislative leaders, but she didn’t immediately specify what she was looking for. Hochul spokesperson Anthony Hogrebe later said she supported a bill by state Sen. James Skoufis and Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz, but state leaders’ stances often shift as they attempt to settle on a budget. Some lawmakers said they remain concerned because the governor’s proposal still hasn’t been fleshed out.
Hochul first called for restrictions on public masking last summer, after images of masked demonstrators protesting Israel’s war in Gaza on a subway train circulated on social media. She has expressed interest in restoring a more limited form of the broad mask ban New York had on the books for more than a century, which officials suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases. State lawmakers formally repealed that mask ban in May 2020.
The Skoufis-Dinowitz bill, which Hochul had previously endorsed, would do two things. First, it would allow prosecutors to bring a higher-level misdemeanor charge if someone is found to have engaged in criminal harassment while wearing a mask.
Second, it would create a new violation called "masked harassment" for people who wear a mask “for the primary purpose of menacing or threatening violence against another person or placing another person or group of persons in reasonable fear for their physical safety.”
“We will continue to be pushing as much as we can to make sure that it's a policy that is both necessary, but also carefully tailored and designed to address the concern of safety for Jewish students around college campuses,” said Assemblymember Nily Rozic, a Queens Democrat who co-sponsors the bill.
Several labor unions, which advocate for their members’ priorities during the budget process, pushed back against the second part of the bill, arguing that the new “masked harassment” charge might be applied during picket lines, two people familiar with the negotiations said.
In a formal memo of opposition, a United Auto Workers local that represents attorneys and legal advocates wrote that any new masking restrictions would be “anti-worker, anti-public health, pro-incarceration, and does nothing to improve the living and working conditions of working-class people in New York City.”
In recent days, Hochul’s team has told unions she only wants to see additional layers of penalties for certain types of masked assault and harassment, a labor official said.
Avi Small, a spokesperson for the governor, said she has “consistently said that she supports restrictions on masks used in the commission of a crime, but believes in exceptions for health or religious reasons.”
Hochul and leaders of the state Legislature are discussing the potential restrictions on masks as part of the state’s next spending plan, a multipronged package of legislation that is expected to top $250 billion. The state budget was due April 1, but lawmakers have passed two short-term spending bills to keep the government open since missing the deadline.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said Thursday there were both supporters and opponents of masking restrictions in his conference, and that talks on the issue indeed remained fluid.
“There's a staff meeting — you just kind of start throwing out ideas,” he said. “There's no concrete counterproposal to the governor, but it's just an acknowledgement of trying to … see if you can build a better mousetrap.”
Hochul on Thursday said she didn’t see any difference on the issue compared to when she first called for restrictions last summer. “I have always been opposed to people using masks to harass other people and threaten them and be intimidating or to harm them,” the governor said Thursday. “That position has not changed.”
Former Gov. and current New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo and National Urban League President Marc Morial have both endorsed masking restrictions in the last week. Writing in the New York Daily News, Morial argued that restrictions could be fairly enforced.
Morial said the state’s pre-COVID anti-masking law “helped send the Klan scuttling into the shadows since — unmasked — they couldn’t well engage in their reign of terror.”