Happy Thursday in New York, where Governor Hochul is interceding to make sure unaccompanied minors don’t attend immigration court without a lawyer.

As we wrote two weeks ago, the Trump administration allowed a $356 million annual contract to expire with the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which enabled representation for about 25,000 migrant children around the country, including approximately 1,400 children in New York. As a result, children as young as 3 have been compelled to Zoom into court proceedings, face questioning and sign forms in a language they do not speak.

The loss of legal services for children corresponds with an uptick in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity across the state, partly in response to a new law included in this year’s budget that restricts local police cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement.

Yesterday, accompanied by Mayor Mamdani and other Democratic leaders, Governor Hochul announced that the state will provide $7.25 million in state funding to fill in the gaps. The money will flow through the Office for New Americans to a coalition of legal providers led by the Hispanic Federation.

“The Trump administration has found a brand-new way to hurt children, innocent children,” Hochul said Wednesday. “Think of a child, all ages, going into a courtroom by themselves and having to plead their case. … Any parent knows that is preposterous. It’s cruel. It’s illegal.”

The matter of immigration enforcement in the state has become a major fault line between Hochul and her closest competitor in the gubernatorial race, Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. Blakeman announced that he is weighing his legal options to challenge the new rules on police cooperation. Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood, Blakeman’s running mate, told reporters that the law “is going to affect me very little. I’m still going to work with ICE. They can’t prevent us from working with them.”

“If New Yorkers want a leader like the governor that we have, who can look at that cruelty and name it for what it is, then they know that the choice is Gov. Hochul,” Mamdani announced while standing next to Hochul at yesterday’s funding announcement.

“If they want a leader who looks at the cruelty of ICE and sees a playbook of what to deliver at an even greater extent in New York state, then that’s Bruce Blakeman.”

Imagine that you share a ride to work with the same colleague most mornings. As it passes by a license plate reader, the camera records the car, which can be linked through vehicle records to its registered owner. Beside it, another sensor detects signals broadcast by devices traveling nearby, such as your phone and your colleague’s smartwatch.

After enough trips, software may treat some of those devices as a recurring electronic signature associated with the vehicle. Weeks later, one of the same device signals appears alongside a different car connected to an investigation. The signal itself may not contain its owner’s name, but its previous association with a known vehicle gives investigators another clue they can use to work out who was carrying the device.

Read on to learn more.

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