In their only debate before the November 3 election, Bruce Blakeman spent the night putting Kathy Hochul's record on crime, immigration and accountability on trial — from the ICE partnership her law killed, to the two women murdered in his county, to the Cornell case she never answered for.
Bruce Blakeman spent the only New York governor debate Tuesday night on NY1 exposing Kathy Hochul's record on crime, immigration, accountability and her own past statements, using their single face-to-face meeting before Election Day to prosecute the governor's record line by line.
On immigration, Blakeman called out her Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which banned 287(g) agreements and forced Nassau County and others to end their formal partnerships with ICE. The law took effect in August, dissolving cooperation deals that had let local officers perform immigration enforcement and hold people for federal authorities.
He pointed to the two women murdered in his own county by Rony Yahir Alvarenga Rivera, a 22-year-old illegal migrant from El Salvador who entered the country as an unaccompanied minor. According to the Nassau County district attorney, Rivera stabbed 32-year-old Eddy Raquel Hernández Castillo, who lived in the same Valley Stream home, more than 50 times, then drove to the Island Park Wendy's where they both worked and killed 42-year-old Ana María Del Águila Córdova, a mother of two. Blakeman's argument was direct: restricting local cooperation with ICE keeps criminals on the streets. He has previously noted that under the old agreement, Nassau removed roughly 2,000 illegal migrants with serious criminal records.
Blakeman then confronted Hochul over the Cornell 7 sexual assault case, as a Cornell University trustee whose school receives massive state funding, roughly $150 million a year. After the local district attorney initially declined to charge the fraternity members accused in the 2024 gang rape case, Hochul did not immediately demand an independent investigation. He asked where she was, as trustee and as governor, then told her: "Shame on you." She called the criticism pathetic; he pressed her on whether she denied being on the board.
"Shame on you." — Bruce Blakeman to Kathy Hochul, on the Cornell 7 case
The sharpest exchange came when Hochul accused Blakeman of associating with white supremacists, and he fired back with her own words — her 2024 remark that "young Black kids growing up in the Bronx... don't even know what the word computer is." She later walked it back and said she misspoke. He called the original comment reprehensible.
Through the night, Blakeman also tied Hochul to Zohran Mamdani and the broader pro-criminal, high-tax policies that have driven up costs and crime concerns for many New Yorkers — the record voters will judge when they decide the race on November 3.
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