New York is creating a team of legal observers that will don purple vests to monitor and record the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement officers as they seek to detain and deport migrants, the state’s attorney general said on Tuesday.
The announcement follows weeks of sometimes violent tumult in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump has deployed thousands of armed, masked agents as he tries to deport more migrants than any of his predecessors.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the state’s new legal observers would be volunteer employees from her office, trained to observe, without interfering, whether Trump’s immigration enforcement “remains within the bounds of the law”.
“I am proud to protect New Yorkers’ constitutional rights to speak freely, protest peacefully, and go about their lives without fear of unlawful federal action,” James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability.“
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said James was putting New Yorkers in danger by not working with ICE.
Leticia James is amazing. I worked for a Fidelis care and they had managed medicaid plans for NYS. Pre-covid a gentleman was approved for pain injections, but couldn’t get into the office before his authorization ran out, because anything non emergent was closed. Once the doctor’s office was open, the doctor submitted a new request, with the same clinical information, and it was denied. I put an appeal together for this man, painstakingly pulling the clinical records from the first authorization, the second authorization, EVERY PAID CLAIM related to his condition, AND EVERY RX CLAIM FOR PAIN MEDS the company paid for. 4 hours of work. The appeals team denied it in 15 later. I rage quit, helped the man file an external appeal through the state department of finances. The state ruled in favor of that medicaid client. Then I helped that man file a complaint against the insurance carrier with the NYS attorney general, (Leticia James.) There was lots of other bullshit going down at Fidelis, like denying claims for covid testing, which I also helped consumers make complaints about because I new what was going on was illegal. Leticia James raked them over the fucking coals. She has been fighting for everyday people, and she makes me proud to be a NYer.