Six weeks after Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent his very first veto killing a City Council bill that would have pushed protesters back from schools, Governor Kathy Hochul accomplished the same thing across all of New York State, folded it quietly into the $268 billion budget, and then told reporters she never discussed it with him. “We have a lot of conversations,” Hochul said, “but just not on this one topic,” per JNS. On May 31, she signed it in a Cipriani ballroom full of about 600 Jewish community leaders, according to The Jewish Star.
The headlines on this have been sloppy. The new law does not ban all protest within 50 feet of every house of worship. It does two things. First, it creates a brand-new crime, “criminal interference with access to a place of religious worship,” which makes it illegal to knowingly block or intimidate someone trying to enter or leave, or to act in a way within 50 feet that puts a worshipper in reasonable fear for their safety, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. Second, it authorizes police to set up security perimeters of up to 50 feet around those sites where protests are not allowed, Spectrum News 1 reported. The violation is a Class B misdemeanor: up to 90 days in jail, a fine up to $500, and a permanent criminal record, according to JNS.
The law landed inside Hochul’s larger “Keeping New Yorkers Safe” package, which the governor’s office says also added $77 million for the NYPD subway deployment, expanded the SCOUT mental-health response teams by 50 percent, and tightened restrictions on 3D-printed ghost guns, per the official signing release. The buffer-zone piece was sponsored by Assemblymember Micah Lasher and State Senator Sam Sutton. Lasher said the legislation “sends a strong message that the state is committed to protecting places of religious observance and the New Yorkers who visit them, at a time of greater threat than any in recent history,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.
What drove it was a year of pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside New York synagogues that were hosting real estate events promoting emigration to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. One was outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, where a November 2025 protest against a Nefesh B’Nefesh event drew chants of “globalize the intifada,” according to Patch. One demonstration outside a Queens synagogue included pro-Hamas remarks, Spectrum News 1 reported.
On April 24, in the first veto of his mayoralty, Mamdani rejected a City Council bill that would have set protest buffer zones around schools, NY1 reported. His reasoning was constitutional: “religious observation is a First Amendment right, while access to educational facilities is not,” and the schools bill “does not have a counterbalance of the right to protest. It opens itself up to those constitutional concerns,” he said, per NY1. He did let a companion bill protecting houses of worship become law, but only because it “passed with a veto-proof majority,” and even then he said, “Though I disagree with its framing of all protest as a security concern, I don’t have those concerns any longer, so I made the decision to let it lapse,” according to NY1.
The city’s mayor drew a hard distinction, vetoed the part he thought crossed it, and lost the rest to a veto-proof council. Weeks later the governor passed a statewide version that covers houses of worship and certain religious schools anyway, riding it into the budget where no single mayor could touch it. The Forward framed it as a challenge to Mamdani, and quoted Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein saying, “If New York City fails to take the necessary steps to protect vulnerable New Yorkers, the State of New York must act”, in its reporting.
At the signing breakfast, Hochul did not hedge. “Nobody has the right to attack someone walking into a synagogue with their family,” she said, adding that she’d “had enough of putting out social media posts condemning the latest symbol of hate,” per JNS. At the same event, hosted by Met Council, the Jewish social services nonprofit that runs food, housing, and domestic-violence programs across the five boroughs, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Queens Rep. Grace Meng described a rise in antisemitic incidents, The Jewish Star reported.
Opposition has been loud. The New York Civil Liberties Union’s Justin Harrison argued that “creating anti-speech zones to prohibit protest outside New York’s houses of worship and reproductive health clinics would trample on New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights, open the floodgates for selective and biased policing,” according to Patch. Jews For Racial and Economic Justice called the law “disgraceful,” with spokesperson Sophie Ellman-Golan saying it was “outrageous and dangerous” that Hochul and members of the legislature chose to criminalize protest “at a time when the federal government is actively persecuting activists and organizers,” the Forward reported.
The bill’s own sponsor admitted the constitutional problem. Back when a 100-foot version was floating around, Lasher said it “would not stand the snowball’s chance in hell of surviving in a court,” because in 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down a 35-foot buffer zone outside Massachusetts abortion clinics, City and State New York reported. That precedent is why the final law leans on a “reasonable fear for safety” trigger and police-set perimeters rather than a blanket 50-foot no-protest line. The version that just bans speech in a zone is the version courts keep killing. Whether this version survives in court is an open question.
If you live in Brooklyn and want to know exactly what is now a crime before you head to a protest or a service, the governor’s official “Keeping New Yorkers Safe” signing release at governor.ny.gov lays out the worship-access provisions in the state’s own words. If you think it goes too far, the New York Civil Liberties Union is the group organizing against it and taking constituent input.
Featured image: Dmitryshein / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
