New York Gov. Kathy Hochul left a meeting with President Donald Trump’s border czar on Friday believing the federal government won’t dramatically escalate immigration enforcement in the state without her blessing.
Hochul, a Democrat, met with Tom Homan in her office at the state Capitol for nearly an hour. It was an in-person, behind-closed-doors meeting the governor said was a follow-up to a previous phone call the two had about the federal government’s enforcement efforts.
The meeting came a day after Trump abruptly replaced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who had come under significant criticism for the federal government’s controversial immigration crackdown in the state of Minnesota — a surge that Homan was tasked with putting an end to last month.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Hochul said she reminded Homan that Trump had previously told her he wouldn’t launch a similar immigration enforcement blitz in New York unless she asked him to do so.
“I can once again reassure all New Yorkers, that request will never occur,” she said. “I reiterated that to [Homan] just as a reminder that that is the state of affairs as a directive from the president, that they are not going to have a surge anywhere near what we've seen in other states here in the state of New York.”
Homan’s two-day visit to the state Capitol kicked off Thursday, when he met in private with Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra and other Republican lawmakers, according to a spokesperson for the Assembly GOP. Later that night, he met with Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for governor against Hochul who said he spoke with Homan about “the urgent need to restore law and order and secure our communities.”
The border czar’s meeting with Hochul followed Friday morning.Among other topics, Hochul said she urged Homan against establishing any additional large-scale immigration detention centers in the state, which she said has “ created anxiety all the way from Orange County to Suffolk County to the North Country and Rochester.”
She also said she raised the recent death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind 56-year-old refugee from Rohingya who spoke little English and was found dead on the streets of Buffalo last month. His body was discovered days after he was released from local jail to Border Patrol agents who dropped him off at a coffee shop that was closed for the night after verifying his immigration status.
Hochul said she asked Homan to have the federal government grant visas to Shah Alam’s remaining family members in Myanmar so they can be reunited in the U.S., which Hochul said was a direct request from the man’s family.
“ This is the sobbing widow's request to me,” she said. “So I said we would pursue that as well.”
Homan did not speak to reporters at the Capitol on Friday. The Department of Homeland Security could not immediately be reached for comment following the meeting.
The border czar’s Albany visit came as Hochul seeks to implement new measures that would prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in New York, as well as prohibit the federal enforcers from entering sensitive locations like schools and churches.
Such measures have drawn the ire of Homan and the Trump administration, whose major immigration crackdowns have been a central tenet of the president’s second term in office. But Hochul said her legislative proposals did not come up during the meeting.
Homan’s visit to Albany was largely quiet — he entered and exited Hochul’s office out of sight of the awaiting press — and devoid of any significant protests, standing in stark contrast to a prior visit to Albany last year.
Last March, Homan held a news conference at the state Capitol with Republican legislative leaders to push a series of bills that would rein in New York’s pro-immigrant policies and force local authorities to cooperate with federal immigration policies.
That visit was punctuated by a tense confrontation with Democratic lawmakers and other protesters, who angrily confronted Homan about the federal government’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University who had been detained days prior.
Among those leading the protest was then-Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, whose captured-on-video confrontation with Homan quickly ricocheted around the internet and helped bolster his then-nascent New York City mayoral campaign. Homan did not engage, chewing an apple as state police escorted him to a nearby elevator.
The state Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, was not in session Friday.
