Letitia James, the New York attorney general, announced on Tuesday that her office would deploy legal observers to document raids conducted by federal immigration authorities across the state.
The observers, outfitted with purple vests, could be sent to where immigration raids are unfolding to serve as “neutral witnesses on the ground,” her office said in a release, adding that they would be instructed not to interfere with enforcement activity.
The initiative, after criticism over the aggressive tactics used by immigration officers in Minneapolis, is aimed at collecting real-time information on immigration enforcement activity and identifying whether federal agents are acting lawfully, her office said.
The effort, which will be staffed by lawyers and other state employees, is the first of its kind by an attorney general’s office, according to Sophie Hamlin, a spokeswoman for Ms. James.
“We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability,” Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “My office is launching the Legal Observation Project to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law.”
After the fatal shootings in January of two American citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Trump administration has come under scrutiny — from lawmakers, judges and voters — over the use of excessive force by its immigration officers.
Democrats in Congress have pressed President Trump to rein in his mass deportation operation and to impose restrictions on immigration agents, demanding that they stop wearing masks and cease searches and arrests without warrants.
Responding to the outcry, Mr. Trump sent his border czar, Tom Homan, to try to de-escalate tensions in Minneapolis, where he announced a shift to more targeted arrests, rather than random sweeps. And on Monday, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, announced that agents in Minneapolis would begin to wear body cameras, a change that she said would eventually be enacted nationwide.
In New York and elsewhere, federal agents have clashed with citizens and activists showing up to record, protest and, at times, confront Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carrying out raids. And officials across the country have been seeking to preserve evidence of misconduct by agents after the Trump administration shut out local and state officials in Minnesota from investigations into the shootings in Minneapolis.
During the past year, cellphone footage taken by bystanders has become one of the main ways that the Trump administration’s deportation drive has come into focus, at times contradicting official accounts from the federal government. Trump officials have broadly cast cellphone-wielding protesters as agitators intent on interfering with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
In New York, volunteers and activists have regularly fanned out in the city’s immigration courts to record the arrests of migrants who were showing up for routine hearings. And in recent months, residents and organizers have sought to document a scaling up of early morning arrests in immigrant-rich neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, posting the videos on social media.
While ICE has detained thousands of undocumented immigrants in New York, the city has not been subjected to the large-scale operations that have taken hold in other Democratic cities, though it is a possibility for which local officials have been preparing for since last year.
Aside from filing immigration-related lawsuits, Democratic state attorneys general have started other initiatives meant to shed transparency on ICE activity.
Late last year, California and New York unveiled online portals for residents to upload photos and videos of misconduct by federal agents that could be used in state lawsuits against the federal government.
And in January, amid a surge of ICE operations in Maine, Aaron M. Frey, the state’s attorney general, opened an email tip line to field reports about “intimidating or excessive behavior used by federal agents.”
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration in the New York region.
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