I always believe in the quote, be the change that you wish to see.

- A Hispanic police recruit is hoping to make a difference.

The effort to get more minorities on the force in the criticism that it's not enough.

Since I came to this country, I had eyes checking since 2016 and never a nice officer had told me good luck.

- Brothers living on Long Island, deported to a country where they have no family.

Newsday tracked them down in Latin America to get their story firsthand and... Our nation is back bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.

- President Trump's State of the Union address and the impact it could have on Long Island's key political races this year.

Island Insider starts now.

[Music] Thanks for joining us.

I'm Ken Buffa.

President Donald Trump's State of the Union address was the longest in history, to highlight what he calls a successful first year back in office.

The stock market has set 53 all time record highs since the election.

Think of that one year, boosting pensions, 401ks and retirement accounts for the millions and millions of Americans.

They're all gaining.

Everybody's up, way up.

- In addition to the economy, the president talked about his immigration crackdown and about his foreign policy.

He also touched on the passage of his big beautiful bill, which created trillions of dollars in tax breaks.

During his speech, he repeatedly criticized Democrats for not supporting his agenda.

All Democrats, every single one of them, voted against these really important and very necessary massive tax cuts.

Democrats had a different take on the impact of the president's agenda.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the party's response.

Since this president took office last year, his reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.

Small businesses have suffered, farmers have suffered, some losing entire markets.

Every day Americans are paying the price.

Instead of attending the speech, dozens of Democratic lawmakers chose to protest outside the Capitol building.

Newsday TV's Joye Brown dives into the impact of the speech on Long Island politics.

It was the President's first State of the Union address in his new term.

Now Newsday's Washington, D.C.

reporter Billy House and Newsday's Albany Bureau Chief Yancey Roy join me now to look at what the president said and its potential impact.

Billy, let's start with you.

What did you think about the tone of the address?

Well, I was actually inside the chamber, and the tone started out for the first good chunk of the record-long, one hour and 47 minutes State of the Union speech to be about highlighting everything the administration and House Republicans have been able to accomplish, from securing the border to tackling some affordability issues to ending some conflicts abroad.

But about midway, it took a sharp turn and became very combative in attacking the Democrats in the room on issues from immigration.

And in response, the Democrats on the House floor were shouting and yelling at the president as he spoke.

So it was kind of two different speeches in one.

- Well, Yancey, let's go back to affordability for just a second.

It was a major topic in the address.

It's also a big issue in New York's race for governor, with Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman claiming Governor Hochul has made life on Long Island less affordable.

How does those two things square?

Well, you know to go back to where we started with the State of the Union and President Trump addressed the word affordability, but he sort of mocked it.

It's almost as if he was trying to make fun of the Democrats for using it.

Certainly it was a big word in the buzzword in the New York City mayoral campaign.

And so I think that shows he's a bit on the defensive about the handling of the economy.

And so take that into the New York state race.

Both are trying to grab the mantle of affordability because despite what was said last night, prices on a lot of areas are really going up, cost of energy, health care, whatever.

And now who gets the blame for it and what to do about it is what Hochul and Blakeman are trying to struggle about right now.

With Trump in office, Hochul is blaming Trump for the tariffs and some of the other policies, the end of health care subsidies.

Blakeman is trying to blame Hochul for promoting green energy and taxes in general.

Well, Billy, what's the likely impact on the midterm election, specifically the crucial congressional races right here on Long Island?

Well, Trump is trying to kind of set the tone for Republican candidates and incumbents to focus on lower inflation and other aspects of the economy.

He's trying to lead the way, but in doing so, he did so in a combative way.

Our own Long Island representative, Democratic representative Tom Suozzi, in fact, kind of fed the bear by almost viral photos of him falling asleep during the speech.

He later said that he had heard it all before it was reruns and basically suggesting he was bored.

But the upshot was that kind of became an iconic photo overnight of democratic malaise or inability to deal with issues and dozing off.

Well, let's talk about the Trump administration's stance on immigration, which is a big, big deal here in the state as well.

Yancey, what's the potential impact of that, of what we heard last night on the governor's race?

Well, you know, our bureau did a story about the immigration and how it's playing in the governor's race.

And certainly coming into 2026, the Republicans in general and certainly in the governor's race were planning to use that issue because it had played well on a federal level a couple of years ago.

But the story also addressed the fact that since the killing of civilians by ICE officers in Minnesota, the dynamic of this has changed a lot.

And now it seems as though Democrats are pushing this issue to say that ICE, Homeland Security, is out of control.

Certainly the polling is starting to turn to their favor on that.

It's a long way to go until November, but right now Democrats are the ones who are using this issue aggressively, and Republicans are a bit more on the defensive, at least in New York.

So, what's the biggest takeaway for Long Islanders?

Let's start with you, Yancey.

There was more of, you know, it started out with the economy and then turning to grievances and division.

And so if that sets a tone for the congressional elections or for all, rather, for the Long Island elections and the gubernatorial election, I think that, you know, it's more like lines being hardened and rather than sort of trying to breach the gap or try to find some middle ground, it's more like if this is the tone for the elections, it's more like appealing to your base on either side and hoping they come out in droves right now.

Okay, Billy, it's your turn.

Well, precisely.

Of course, we have two congressional races on Long Island that are considered pivotal to which party will win the House majority this fall.

And in this speech, as we mentioned, Suozzi found himself pretty much accidentally depicted as the face of a Democratic party asleep at the switch.

That will run that theme for months in his race and will come to stand for other Democrats, whether fair or not, or whether even fair to Suozzi or not.

With regard to the other race and Representative, another Democrat, Laura Gillen, she kind of, like Suozzi, has been pushing herself as much as she can as a centrist, but this speech tried to, by Trump, certainly focused on underscoring there are vast divides and you can't be in the middle, you have to be on one side or the other.

So it was an effort to paint all Democrats on the fringe.

- Remember you can get in-depth coverage of local, national, and international politics at Newsday.com.

Two brothers were brought to the U.S.

from El Salvador as kids and grew up in Georgia.

Years later, they moved to Long Island in hopes of finding work.

But months ago, they were deported by ICE during a routine check-in and sent back to the country they hardly know.

ICE just deported these two brothers from Long Island.

So Newsday got on a plane and started banging on doors in El Salvador, all to find out what happened.

So, what happened?

Well, we should probably start at the beginning.

It's 2016.

El Salvador is overrun with gang violence.

And according to statistics, there is more than 5,000 murders per year.

To put that in perspective, that's roughly 14 murders a day, or a murder roughly every two hours.

It's really bad.

So their mother decided to pack up her sons, who were then 10 and 11 years old, and flee to America.

And where there's gangs, there's extortion.

Now once here, she settled in Georgia and applied for asylum while the boys began their American upbringing.

Jose joined Future Farmers of America with dreams of becoming a mechanic and preacher since he went to church several times a week.

And Josue joined JROTC with his sights on joining the Air Force to serve the United States.

They were pursuing their American dreams.

Joining me now to talk more about this is Newsday reporter David Olson, Melanie Creps, executive director of Immigrant Services organization CARECEN, and former immigration judge Andrew Arthur.

David, we start with you.

We heard about it in the piece, but can you tell us more about the brothers' arrest last year?

So the brothers arrived with their mother, they crossed the border into Texas in 2016.

A few months later, they applied for asylum.

They lost two cases and they appealed, and then the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected that last request.

So they were subject to what's called a final order of removal.

And so, but what had been the case, especially in the past, is that as long as they didn't have a criminal record, oftentimes immigrants were, even despite having the final order of removal, were allowed to stay in the United States as long as they checked in with ICE.

And so in March of last year, they went to one of their regular check-ins in Manhattan and they were arrested.

And then in May, they were deported to El Salvador.

So Melanie, the brothers' deportation is part of a larger crackdown going on by the Trump administration.

Can you talk about what's happening here on Long Island?

Yeah, Ken, we're seeing stories like this, many, many stories like this that is happening all around Long Island.

You know, Nassau and Suffolk County has been a targeted area by ICE recently, and among the advocacy groups that we're part of, that CARECEN is part of, we're seeing ICE activity multiple times a day pretty much for the past year.

And so a lot of stories like Jose and Josue's.

- What kind of changes are you seeing in the community because of this?

- There is immense fear, obviously.

I mean, I think terror is an appropriate word at this point for most people, who, of course, people who are people of color, who have an accent.

Terror is an appropriate word to use.

School attendance is down by immigrant kids, of course.

Parents are afraid to drop off their kids.

Kids are afraid to go.

Not sure, you know, whether a parent will be there when they get home.

Parents are afraid to go to the grocery store.

The fear is really, really heightened and we're seeing withdrawal from everyday life and that's affecting, of course, family stability and family health.

- Now, Andrew, I want to bring you in.

The Trejo Lopez Brothers had something called final orders of removal.

Could you explain what that means?

>> Sure Ken, a final order of removal is an order that's issued either by an immigration judge or by the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Assuming that there is no petition for review filed with one of the Federal Circuit Courts.

And what that document represents is that an individual has been found to be removable from the United States.

They've received due process.

They've been allowed to apply for any forms of protection that might allow them to remain in the United States, and yet they've been found to be deportable and therefore subject to deportation from this country.

Is this something that you've been seeing more frequently?

Final orders of removal?

Actually not.

It's probably the most common thing that I've seen in my 34 year career in immigration.

In fact, I've issued thousands of them, but with respect to the arrests of individuals who are under final orders of removal, it is different than under the Biden administration.

In fact, one of the biggest issues with the Biden administration with respect to immigration enforcement was their failure to actually execute those orders of removal.

Consequently, by November of 2024, more than 1.4 million individual orders of removal remained in the United States that were unexecuted.

That's a huge population of people who are living in the United States under final orders of removal and yet not removed.

So from that perspective, it's different from the Biden administration, but not that different from the George W. Bush administration, the Clinton administration, and the Obama administration, all of which I served.

Now, David, ICE responded about that final order of removal.

So what did they have to say?

- So ICE said, in part, once they've exhausted all due process and appeals, the aliens remain subject to a final order of removal from an immigration judge, and ICE must carry out that order.

And what ICE was referring to is what we talked about earlier, how they had lost two cases, appealed, lost that time, and then got their final order of removal.

So ICE's argument is they have had due process.

- OK.

And Andrew, records show the brothers have never been arrested.

But you say people without criminal records should not automatically be spared from deportation.

Why is that?

Well, that's actually a great question.

The Immigration and Nationality Act, the, you know, fundamental law that governs immigration in this country, states that at the time that an individual receives a final order of removal, DHS is under an obligation to take them into removal and detain them for at least 90 days or until they're physically deported from the United States.

And that's not some dusty relic of, you know, some ancient law.

When Congress passed the Laken Riley Act in June of 2025, or January of 2025, last January, it actually authorized state attorneys general to sue the Department of Homeland Security if it failed to take those individuals into custody and physically remove them from the United States.

So, you know, this is a statutory obligation that's always been imposed on the department, but one that Congress has doubled down on and, you know, has directed the department to fulfill.

Melanie, how do you respond to that?

The way I see it right now is, as a nation, we need to think through our moral obligation.

We need to think through our moral obligation to those who are being picked up currently, to those who have been living in our country and have no criminal record, have proven that they want to live in our country in a way that would be civically engaged.

One of the brothers here wants to go into the Air Force.

Their kids were serving in their church.

These are not threats to our community.

And so I think we need to think through what our moral obligation as a nation is.

And it makes me think of the Refugee Act of 1980, which was a response to the ship, the St.

Louis that had arrived from Europe with Jews on it during World War II that we sent back and many of those Jews then perished because we did not allow them to come in.

So our response was changing our refugee, you know, acceptance.

And so that Refugee Act in 1980 was a response to that because of our moral failure.

And we need to think right now, are we again repeating history?

Are we failing morally those who are here among us, not a threat to us?

They came seeking peace, seeking hope.

And are we failing them by sending back kids like Jose and Josue?

-Do you feel like at times now there is more tension between morality and law?

-I do think that there's tension between that because I think that we can parse out details.

I know that there's details in Jose and Josue's case that can argue why they should have gone back.

But if we look at the morality of it, we're all reading these kids' stories, and we're saying, there's no reason why they should be there.

They have no family there.

They have no future there.

Their future and their family is here.

So there is a tension there to say there has to be a way to justify the fact that, although maybe when they came, you know, by the letter of the law, it didn't justify them staying.

We have to find a way around that because we have a morality to these kids and to so many others like them.

With that said, David, is there any chance of Jose and Josue coming back to the U.S.?

There is.

Their lawyer is pursuing multiple legal maneuvers or avenues, but even she acknowledges it's an uphill battle.

- Did she say that all the maneuvers that she's exploring are just coming to fruition or is she trying to go back on things they've tried in the past?

One was a motion to reopen the case that was just denied on January 16th and then the plan is not to appeal before circuit court in Georgia.

The other part of this is that before their arrest, she had pursued an avenue through a family court judge in Suffolk County, which ruled after their arrest that they should not be removed.

And basically the way the system works is that ruling is then sent to U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, which was considering something called Special Immigrant Juvenile Visa, which is for people who were at the time of the filing under 21 and they need a ruling from the family court judge before they make it, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services makes a ruling.

So they finally in August, after their deportation, they're not eligible for that visa because they had already left the country.

And then their lawyer says, well, they left the country because they were deported and they failed to rule on this before their deportation.

So that avenue she's still pursuing, but that's more difficult because they're no longer in the country.

So safe to say the attorney is trying not only new ways, but trying to change old ways that they've tried in the past with a different attorney.

Right.

It's a combination and basically her argument on reopening the case is that the previous attorney in Georgia had not pursued that special immigrant juvenile Visa and that's one of the arguments for reopening the case.

But, again that was rejected on January 16th, although it's being appealed.

- Okay, a lot of moving parts Well, we will be following this story closely of course, bringing you any developments on the Trejo Lopez brothers case.

My thanks to David Olson, Melanie Creps, and of course, Andrew Arthur.

And you can read more about this story at Newsday.com.

It's been a little more than a year since Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman agreed to work with ICE.

At the time, he said the program was quote, "exclusively designed to remove criminals from our communities."

Newsday political reporter Bahar Asadan did some digging to find out if that's what's actually happening.

When Nassau County partnered with ICE last year, County Executive Bruce Blakeman promised to target immigrant criminals.

Now what we've found is that over the last 12 months, the county has jailed more immigrants with no criminal record.

Nassau County is also working with ICE in informal ways.

For example, we've reported that the probation department is tipping off ICE agents about people who've been convicted of crimes locally, such as homicide, raping a teenager, and ICE is then deporting those people before they've served any jail time for those crimes.

For continuing coverage on the immigration crackdown on Long Island, go to Newsday.com.

A Newsday investigation takes a look at diversity in our police departments.

We found both county police forces are still overwhelmingly white, despite efforts to hire more people of color.

Virginia Huie has the story.

Raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I always believe in the quote, "Be the change that you wish to see."

So as a woman too, and Hispanic woman, I want to give little girls something to look up to.

- Michelle Canela Hernandez is on track to joining the ranks of a growing number of Hispanic police officers on Long Island, which has increased 30% in five years.

But even with that rise, a Newsday analysis showed both counties still don't reflect the makeup of the island's three million residents.

Hispanics make up 10% of Long Island officers, less than half their 22% share of the Nassau and Suffolk populations.

Blacks represent 4% of police compared to 9% of the public.

Top police officials in both counties say they're satisfied with ongoing efforts to diversify, but admit their departments remain a long way from reflecting the communities they are sworn to protect.

We've done a lot of hiring in the last year and a half.

- Suffolk Police Department's current class is made up of two black, six Hispanic, one Asian, and 24 white officers.

We're hoping to continue to diversify our department.

You know, we want the best, of course, but we also want to represent the population that we serve.

So we're going to work very, very hard on recruitment in the next round.

-Could we do better?

Absolutely.

And we're always trying to do better.

-Nassau Police Department's current class has 100 recruits in training.

Of them, five are Black, eight are Hispanic, four are Asian, and 83 are white.

-We've been recruiting heavily.

We've been making the offers of, like I said, for mentoring and everything to help them out.

But then when it comes down to it, it's actually showing up for the test.

And then when you pass the test, what happens there?

- A 2021 Newsday investigation found an obstacle to police department's efforts to diversify is the multi-step civil service hiring process run by different county agencies that eliminates minority applicants at greater rates than whites at every grade.

- Their claim that they're trying to change the way we do things, does not rise to the level of earnest effort.

Civil rights attorney Fred Brewington expressed frustration over the pace of the agency's four-decade-long effort to diversify their ranks.

The cost is monumental.

We still start to get police that are not consistently sensitive to what's going on in the communities around them.

That's what Canela Hernandez hopes to change.

She believes her background will be an asset to the communities she will eventually take the oath to protect.

Say a Spanish speaking person is having an issue, they could relate to that one on one with a Spanish speaking officer.

And of course it will make things go smoother as well.

So I believe that it will be a great result with the diversity.

- Reporting for Newsday TV, I'm Virginia Huie.

Now from all of us at Newsday, thank you for joining us for Island Insider as we explore the issue that affects your lives.

For all the stories we've just shown you and much more, go to Newsday.com.

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