NEW YORK, June 8 -- A federal officer in a balaclava, badge tucked out of view, waiting in a courthouse hallway for a man with a scheduled immigration check-in. That is the figure New York's legislature tried to write out of existence last month. Tom Homan intends to send more of them.

The Trump administration's border czar has stopped calling the operation a possibility. The surge into New York City, he says, is now a matter of timing. "It's coming," Homan told reporters, days after Governor Kathy Hochul signed a state law that bars immigration agents from hiding their faces and forbids local police from doing the federal government's deportation work. What follows is not really a quarrel over a single statute. It is a question of wheth...