Sheriff Baxter Stayed Silent While His Deputies Called Border Patrol

Records show routine stops became immigration handoffs.

A Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy charged a woman with criminal trespass after she ran from ICE agents and hid in a stranger’s garage. Another pulled a driver over for tinted windows, called Border Patrol to run his ID, and handed agents his home address after learning he had a removal order. A third arrested a combative, heavily intoxicated homeless man — a store clerk said he had committed no crime — and U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a detainer at his arraignment.

This is what Sheriff Todd Baxter’s office was doing while he said nothing publicly about immigration enforcement — and while local Democrats gave him cover to do it.

A Silent Sheriff

The Sheriff’s office has been a black hole on immigration. Legislators received vague responses, a barebones policy posted online, and complete silence from Baxter himself, a conspicuous silence among New York sheriffs during Trump 2.0. Local media, which does frequent interviews with Baxter about bail reform, gives him a pass.

After ICE’s deadly Minnesota occupation, the Democratic Caucus requested a meeting. Baxter sent the Undersheriff, as he dodges this issue every time. The Undersheriff told us if we wanted information about MCSO’s interactions with ICE and Border Patrol, we should file an open records request.¹

We did exactly that. Four months later, we received some of what we asked for.

What follows is a partial picture. The law allows broad exemptions for ongoing investigations and pending prosecutions, as well as incidents involving juveniles. MCSO claimed — implausibly, given everything else in the packet — that a diligent search turned up no emails, texts, or communications of any kind between MCSO and ICE or Border Patrol. But what they did produce is enough to understand this was a department that casually called Border Patrol.

I made this chart based on the records provided.²

A New, Better Policy – that the Sheriff Doesn’t Want to be Associated With

Tucked inside our FOIL packet was a February 10, 2026 internal bulletin — a new immigration directive from Chief Deputy Michael Fowler. WXXI also obtained it through a separate open records request and reported on it in April. In other words, neither of us got it voluntarily.

The bulletin is actually a meaningful improvement. It prohibits deputies from using federal agencies for language interpretation. It requires supervisor approval and captain-level sign-off before any federal agency can be contacted. It prohibits honoring civil immigration detainers. It requires deputies to notify a detained person’s family.

These are real guardrails, the kind immigrant advocates and Democratic legislators had been asking for. And Baxter issued them without saying a word publicly. No press release. No statement. No acknowledgment that anything had changed. The directive was read at roll call over three consecutive shifts and released only when journalists forced it out through open records law.

The sheriff quietly adopted a better policy and then refused to put his name on it or take public ownership of it. He’s been playing both sides this whole time. Baxter doesn’t want to alienate his MAGA supporters by announcing a policy that restricts cooperation with federal immigration authorities. So he said nothing. The old, vague policy summary is still posted on the MCSO website.

Meanwhile, the immigrant communities who most needed to know that the rules had changed — people who are afraid to call 911 and afraid to report crimes — are still operating on the assumption that any interaction with a Monroe County deputy could end with a call to Border Patrol.

I don’t have a problem with the Sheriff working with federal agents on serious crimes. And I’m grateful for the new policy. But those of us who raised concerns last year were ignored while he ran unopposed as a Democrat, accepted the anti-immigrant Conservative Party line, and avoided a public accounting of how his office was using ICE and Border Patrol. Democrats gave him cover the entire time.

I started asking questions in February of last year – on the floor of the legislature. I didn’t get answers until yesterday, because of an open records request legislators were forced to file to oversee a supposedly co-equal branch of government.

A leader with moral ownership of this moment would have said: here is what happened, here is what we got wrong, here is what we changed and why. Neither Baxter nor the Democrats who enabled his silence did any of that.

1. If you are a reader of my Substacks, you know I am loathe to file FOILs as a legislator for information we need to do our jobs.

2. Here is the FOIL we filed. Here is the letter responding to us.