local police in upstate New York arrested Dalila Yeend for rolling through a stop sign in 2018 — then handed her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The police in Troy, New York, a city just north of Albany on the eastern banks of the Hudson River, held Yeend overnight for the traffic infraction and called ICE. ICE agents picked her up the next day and detained her at a federal facility in Buffalo. For almost three months, Yeend was separated from her two young children without access to her medication for bipolar disorder.

This kind of collaboration between New York’s law enforcement and ICE isn’t new: A handful of Democrats in the state legislature have, for years, been trying to pass legislation that would prevent local police from assisting ICE with immigration enforcement. Lawmakers fear that it prevents noncitizens from interacting with the police when they themselves need help or could assist in reporting crimes or carrying out investigations. Their efforts haven’t gained significant traction so far, but Donald Trump’s impending presidency — and his threats of mass deportation — have created a new urgency.

“Now more than ever, it is incredibly important that we build whatever walls we can to separate the plans of the Trump administration to conduct mass deportations of immigrants and the power of state and local governments,” said state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, who plans to reintroduce the New York for All Act when the legislative session restarts in January.

The sweeping measure would ban New York’s law enforcement from sharing sensitive information and personnel with ICE without a judicial warrant for civil immigration violations, though it does not prevent law enforcement from cooperating with ICE on criminal cases. If that bill had been law in 2018, police would not have been allowed to ask about Yeend’s immigration status and alert the federal government. Yeend’s immigration case was dismissed in 2018, and she got a green card the following year.

New York banned state agencies from inquiring about a person’s immigration status in 2017 and from making immigration arrests at courthouses statewide in 2020. But there is still no measure that addresses local law enforcement’s collaboration with ICE more broadly. That means a patchwork of regulations exist across the state. Gounardes noted that the New York for All Act is based on what is largely existing practice in New York City, Westchester County, and among New York’s state police. Gounardes also pointed to Los Angeles City Council passing a sanctuary ordinance last week. “We’re seeing other jurisdictions stepping up at this moment,” he said, “and New York should not be afraid to do the same.”

On the other side of the aisle, state Republicans tried to pass a bill last year that would require law enforcement and courts to notify ICE when an arrested person or defendant is not an American citizen. State Sen. Jim Tedisco, a sponsor of the bill, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he will reintroduce the legislation in the coming year.

While Trump spoke recently about planning to use the military to carry out his deportation plans, ICE leans heavily on state and local authorities. Almost three quarters of ICE arrests in the interior of the U.S. have been handoffs from other law enforcement agencies such as local and state jails or federal prisons, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, or ILRC. “It is state........

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