New York City’s mayor took a stand against ICE with an executive order.
We will make it clear once again that ICE will not be able to enter New York City property without a judicial warrant. That means our schools, our shelters, and our hospitals. That means we will protect New Yorkers’ private data from being unlawfully accessed by the federal government and stand firmly against any effort to intrude on our privacy.
This order increases privacy by preventing personal identifying information/data from being shared with non-local law enforcement agencies. It will require privacy officers from city agencies to be compliant with the Identifying Information Law[1][2] as well as “additional privacy laws, as the Chief Privacy Officer may reasonably determine necessary.” I unfortunately don’t think this will make a big dent in ICE’s existing access to historic location data, nor do I think this will prevent them from gaining access to future location data. From my understanding, this privacy protection only seems to apply to the data collected by city agencies. I don’t think it prevents data commercially collected by privacy companies from being shared, even if their base of operations is in NYC. Again, this is from my understanding and I urge others to correct me if I am wrong. Despite all of this, it’s better than nothing.
The order also prohibits ICE from entering NYC property without judicial warrants. This resembles current private property rights, which dictates that only judicial warrants, not administrative warrants (under which most immigration arrests are carried out), authorize federal immigration agents entry into homes.[3] ICE is known to violate this, once memoing ICE officers to use force to enter homes with only administrative warrants[4] and even entering into homes without warrants at all.[5] But now that NYC property at large is also prohibited in similar manner, this will (hopefully) make it more difficult for individual ICE agents to terrorize people in NYC as they have done in Minneapolis.[6] Even though the executive order does not prevent private companies from sharing collected personal data, this aspect of the executive order should be a good blocker for warrantless arrests taking place in NYC based on that data, which we know ICE agents have historically relied on.[7]