With the race for governor seemingly tightening in New York, President Donald Trump appeared on Long Island on Friday to headline a coordinated Republican effort to bolster the hopes of the party’s candidate, Bruce Blakeman.

The strategy was clear and familiar: to attack the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, on crime.

“Kathy Hochul has been very very bad on crime — a nightmare for crime,” Trump said, later teasing: “Bruce, if you lose you are going to be ashamed for the rest of your life!”

On the campaign trail, Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and a longtime friend of Trump, has mostly avoided invoking the president, who is broadly unpopular in New York and across the country.

But on Friday, Blakeman struck a different tone, thanking the president for all he has done to close the border, as he spoke to a carefully selected audience of largely law enforcement personnel.

Blakeman listed the details of several particularly heinous crimes and the seizure of dozens of illegal guns and drugs, over the past few months.

“Kathy Hochul — where do you want those guns?” Blakeman shouted, his voice cracking. “What neighborhood do you want to destroy? Where do you want those drugs? What community do you want to destroy?”

Trump’s appearance comes roughly a week before a New York state law that forbids localities from partnering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement goes into effect.

Blakeman has positioned himself as the law’s chief critic, bragging about having the most comprehensive agreement with ICE in the nation, as he campaigns to become the second Republican elected statewide in 50 years.

In his remarks Friday, Trump characterized places like New York City, which has laws restricting ICE from operating in jails, as among the biggest hurdles to enacting his deportation agenda. And he appeared to suggest Hochul would be committing some form of treason should she enforce the state law restricting police and ICE, which he called “deadly and sedacious.”

By contrast, Trump emphasized his unconditional support for law enforcement, swearing to uphold the provision that protects police officers from civil liability for their actions on the job, called qualified immunity.

“Would you like qualified immunity, everybody?” he asked the rows upon rows of uniformed officers behind him. The crowd went wild.

Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James defended the state’s ban on agreements between ICE and local police agencies. “The safety of New Yorkers is our top priority,” the two women said in a statement released before Trump’s appearance. “That’s why New York passed these laws, why we will enforce them, and why we will continue standing up to federal overreach. Our job is to enforce the law, and that is exactly what we plan on doing.”

At the event, Blakeman struck back at the moral case advanced by the governor and her party, that deporting those without legal status — a majority of whom do not have criminal records — is cruel.

“They say that we’re cruel,” Blakeman said. “You know what’s cruel? There’s an 18-year old girl, Sheridan Gorman, who was gunned down in Chicago,” referring to the death of a Westchester County woman who police believe was killed by an immigrant from Venezuela.

Blakeman has campaigned heavily on his county’s decline in crime, bolstered by a 2024 article by U.S. News & World Report that declared Nassau as the safest county in the country. Eight of the 25 safest counties listed were in New York state.

Like most of the nation, New York saw a precipitous drop in violent crime over the past two decades. That trend was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing social disruptions. Statewide there were 6,669 more violent crimes committed in 2021 compared with 2019, a figure that encompasses rape, murder, robbery and certain assaults.

Concerns over pandemic-era crime were amplified by another Trump ally, Lee Zeldin, as he challenged Hochul in 2022.

Zeldin, a former representative who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, tried to tie the governor to changes to the state’s bail laws that some had blamed for the rising crime rate.

Since taking office in 2021, Hochul has repeatedly fought against the more left-leaning factions of her party as she tried to tighten bail laws for repeat offenders and ease discovery rules for prosecutors. She also invested nearly $4 billion in anti-violence initiatives, from prevention programs to a multistate interdiction task force aimed at taking illegal weapons off the street.

By 2024, violent and index crime totals had begun to fall, though they still exceeded pre-pandemic levels. That trend has continued, and this spring, the state reported a 10% reduction in index crime, a category that includes property and violent crimes, compared with a similar period in 2022.

Still, it is not clear how much of an impact Hochul’s actions have had. The decline in crime in New York, much like its rise, closely tracked national trends. In 2026, the national murder rate fell to its lowest point in decades.

Under Blakeman, Nassau County also followed these trends. Violent crime increased in 2022, the year Blakeman was sworn in as the county executive, with roughly 350 more violent crimes that year than the previous year. Those figures continued to climb through 2023 and 2024 before falling off in 2025. Index crime peaked slightly earlier in 2023, two years into Blakeman’s term.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Grace Ashford/Al Drago

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