Earlier this year, as President Trump hosted a breakfast meeting with the nation’s governors, he declared that he would only look to escalate immigration enforcement in states “where we’re wanted.”
Then he glanced across the room to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York. ICE would not be surged there he said, “unless Kathy asks.”
The exchange caught the governor off guard, she recounted later, but it reflected the growing influence and unusual rapport that the governor, a centrist Democrat from Buffalo, has developed with Mr. Trump.
While many Democratic leaders have adopted a confrontational approach to dealing with the president, Ms. Hochul has opted for cooperation when possible. The relationship has given the governor unusual access to the White House to make her case for New York.
“He can call me anything he wants,” she joked in an interview. “As long as you’re going to tell me you aren’t going to come to New York City, I’m like, wow, I’m jotting this down. This is really good.”
Ms. Hochul said she has tried to foreground areas for collaboration, from rebuilding Penn Station to cracking down on transnational gangs, while still using her “bully pulpit” to criticize the Trump administration when appropriate.
The latest example of her strategy paying off came last week, when the governor met with Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and emerged with a deal to protect the health care of 1.3 million New Yorkers.
“My approach is personal appeals and personal, you know, arguments,” she said. “I’ve done that for the last year now, and sometimes it’s successful. And sometimes it’s not.”
Last year, the governor, who is seeking her second full term as governor in November, used her good-cop, bad-cop strategy to try to persuade Mr. Trump to drop his opposition to congestion pricing. She made a personal appeal during a White House visit in February 2025, listing some of the program’s benefits. When that didn’t work, she successfully sued to block the administration’s interference.
But perhaps the most telling illustration of the possibilities and limitations of her approach came earlier this month, when Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, paid an unusual visit to the State Capitol in Albany to meet with Ms. Hochul, the details of which have not been previously reported.
The mood was cordial as Mr. Homan, 64, was ushered into the governor’s offices in the State Capitol — a meeting that many interpreted as an attempt to reset after the deaths of two American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, and the subsequent removal of Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary.
Ms. Hochul said she began with a statement of her values: her opposition to open borders; her belief in the importance of a pathway to citizenship for those already living in this country; her commitment to public safety.
She urged Mr. Homan to release students currently detained; cancel a proposed detention center in Chester, N.Y., that has drawn local opposition; and guarantee that the president’s promise not to surge immigration agents in New York without her acquiescence would be honored.
Federal officials have since walked back some of their plans in New York, including the Chester project. A handful of detainees — including Dylan Lopez Contreras, a high school student from the Bronx — have also been released since Ms. Hochul and Mr. Homan met, although it was unclear what, if any, influence the governor had in the actions.
Ms. Hochul also asked that the relatives of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee who died shortly after being released from federal custody, be given a pathway to citizenship.
Mr. Shah Alam was held in detention for over a year pending trial on assault charges, until he was released in Buffalo on Feb. 19. Border Patrol agents were told in advance of his release and picked him up at the holding center. Several hours later, they left Mr. Shah Alam in a Tim Hortons parking lot five miles from his home, on a frigid Buffalo night. He was later found dead.
Mr. Homan listened as Ms. Hochul made her case. Then he made one of his own.
He asked that the governor allow ICE agents into New York prisons and jails, according to two people familiar with discussions, arguing that the agency could more easily round up people accused of criminal wrongdoing without risking the kind of public confrontations seen in Minneapolis.
Mr. Homan’s request was not surprising. In February 2025, he pressured Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York City, to allow ICE agents into Rikers Island. (The New York City Council successfully sued to block the move.) Since then, he has repeated calls to “let us in the jail,” including in a Fox News interview days before Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, was killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis.
For Ms. Hochul, the request is fraught. Leaders in New York City, a key power base of Democratic support, contend that giving ICE access to its jails would lead to the removal of people accused of minor misconduct, not just the “dangerous criminals” that the president has repeatedly warned about.
Democrats in the State Legislature have proposed legislation that would prohibit any collaboration between state or local officials and immigration agents.
Ms. Hochul has taken the middle ground: insisting that the state should assist federal immigration officials in criminal cases where a judge has issued a warrant. But she has also proposed barring localities from formally assisting ICE and banning agents from so-called sensitive areas like schools, hospitals and houses of worship. She has also increasingly spoken up against civil immigration enforcement — particularly the separation of families.
Ms. Hochul’s stance on immigration reflects some personal evolution on the issue. In 2007, during her campaign for Erie County clerk in western New York, she vocally opposed Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s order to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented people. Ms. Hochul said that she would provide driver’s licenses to undocumented people, but called for their names to be sent to the county sheriff as possible violators of immigration law.
She changed her mind several years later, she recently said, after seeing the realities of some of the first widespread ICE raids and the data that showed that Mr. Spitzer’s measure brought down traffic accidents.
“We in government are called upon to be open to new facts and circumstances, and not be stubbornly captive to a position once held,” she wrote in an essay for the Times Union in 2019.
Her position on immigration evolved further once she became governor. New York State saw more than 200,000 migrants flock to the city at the beginning of her tenure, straining resources and political will. At the peak of the influx, Mayor Adams bemoaned the burden and criticized former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a fellow Democrat.
Ms. Hochul was more pragmatic. She allotted roughly $5 billion to address imminent needs and lobbied the Biden administration to expedite work authorizations.
After Mr. Trump took office for his second term, Ms. Hochul became more outspoken against the president’s deportation agenda, which she says not only undermines the rule of law, but also offends her “as a human being.”
She visited a nutrition bar factory in Cato, N.Y., where ICE arrested 57 people, speaking out for families that have been separated; and met with those affected by the wave of deportations, like an 11-year-old boy from Long Island whose father was taken into custody by immigration agents in front of a Home Depot.
The governor’s stance on deportations had been considered a potential vulnerability with moderate and conservative voters, who had initially supported much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Ms. Hochul’s Republican opponent this November, the Nassau County executive, Bruce Blakeman, has stridently defended Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and pledged his county’s support for ICE.
But with the immigration crackdown falling in disfavor among many New Yorkers, even on Long Island, Ms. Hochul may find herself on safer ground with voters — especially given that she frequently sides with law enforcement in state-level debates over justice and safety.
Still, there may be limits to what Ms. Hochul can try to accomplish. At a certain point in her meeting with Mr. Homan, it became clear that there was little left to say.
Jackie Bray, the director of state operations, described the meeting’s endgame with a trace of political inevitability.
“We did not agree with things they were asking and they did not agree to things we were asking,” she said.
Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times.
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