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 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”. Trump, a Republican, has reserved his most aggressive surges in immigration enforcement for states governed by his political opponents, particularly California, Illinois and Minnesota. Show moreIn New York, small groups of legal observers are common at street protests, sometimes wearing the bright green hats of the National Lawyers Guild, focused on whether local police are violating rights or laws that protect freedom of speech. But a formal state-organized effort to deploy legal observers to monitor federal law enforcement appears to be new.

Source: The Guardian February 04, 2026 11:49 UTC