This story was reported before Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 4. Election results were not available at press time.
Nancy Ries, a Colgate professor emerita of anthropology and peace and conflict studies, is mounting a write-in campaign for Madison County Sheriff with no lawn signs, no advertisements, $5 spent in her campaign account and no expectation of winning. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, her name will not appear on the ballot alongside incumbent Sheriff Todd Hood, who is running unopposed. Every vote she receives will have required someone to deliberately write it in — an act Ries is counting on to send a message to county officials about Hood’s recent partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“I want to be able to go to the county and say, ‘Look, 100 people voted for me, 500 people voted for me,’” Ries said. “Obviously, I have no law enforcement background. I’m a 70-year-old retired person. But people want to send a message to the county supervisors to put pressure on [Hood] to rescind the memorandum he signed with ICE, which he legally could do.”
Ries’s unusual write-in campaign began in late August, after two contentious meetings with Hood about the Memorandum of Agreement he signed with ICE on June 30, 2025.
“I thought that in the context of everything happening under the Trump administration, it was really useful and important to be tuned in to local and regional politics,” Ries said.
The agreement enrolls the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in the federal agency’s 287(g) program, authorizing local deputies to execute immigration warrants and facilitate transfers of people in Madison County custody to federal ICE detention facilities. Hood signed the nine-page agreement without consulting the Madison County Board of Supervisors, which holds budget oversight for the Sheriff’s Office but cannot override such partnerships under New York law. The agreement was countersigned by ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheehan on July 2.
On July 23, Ries attended the county Criminal Justice, Public Safety and Emergency Communications Committee meeting. She and her husband, Colgate professor emeritus of sociology and Africana & Latin American studies Jonathan Hyslop, were the only members of the public present. Ries brought a two-page letter expressing concerns about the ICE agreement and gave it to committee chairman Rex Vosburg.
“Citizens can’t speak at these meetings,” Ries said. “But when I showed up with the letter, I was the only person there from the public, and they took my letter, and the clerk made copies for everyone sitting there, including the sheriff.”
After the meeting, Hood personally approached Ries and Hyslop.
“He came up to me, and he very cordially invited me to go into the conference room, so he could explain his logic about the ICE agreement,” Ries said. “We had a half-hour conversation with him. I had a lot of things to say, and he said a lot of things, and then I have documentation of the things I heard.”
Ries returned to the committee meeting on Aug. 26 with a second letter, this one unpacking specific provisions of the MOA. This time, when Hood invited Ries and Hyslop into the conference room after the meeting, he had five uniformed officers and one civilian employee of the sheriff’s department in there with him, according to Ries.
“He tried pretty hard to intimidate me,” Ries said. “Not in a forceful way, but in a condescending way, some slight ‘little lady’ kind of stuff. He tried to explain his logic, and he tried to explain the parameters of the Memorandum of Agreement with ICE.”
Ries had done her homework and could respond to Hood’s assertions with section numbers and exact quotes, contradicting his claims with the contract’s actual language. After that second meeting, a friend approached Ries with the unexpected suggestion that she should run for sheriff against Hood. Days later, after the friend consulted with leaders at the Madison County Democratic Committee, the idea solidified.
Ries has hundreds of immigrant friends across the United States, she said. Her husband immigrated from South Africa and is now a naturalized citizen. Many of her friends in Hamilton are immigrants.
“I know many people — colleagues, random friends, students — who are on various kinds of visas with lawful documentation to be in the United States, to work or to study,” Ries said. “So immigrant issues really matter to me, and I thought if we can use this as an opportunity to confront the sheriff’s decision to sign this agreement with ICE, let’s do that.”
The campaign has been deliberately low-profile, in what Ries called a “whisper campaign.” She opened an official campaign bank account, filed with the Board of Elections and has a campaign treasurer handling legal documentation, but all campaign advertising has been word-of-mouth. Part of the reason is concern about how the campaign might be perceived by Hood and his office.
“The last thing I want is for any law enforcement professional to think that I’m making fun of law enforcement,” Ries said.
And despite her minimal campaign infrastructure, the community response has been strong.
“People have been incredibly enthusiastic about it,” Ries said. “I think they know. I think they understand what I’m trying to do: to communicate the displeasure or the outrage or the concern — mostly concern — of people in Madison County.”
At the Hamilton No Kings Rally on Saturday, Oct. 18, Ries encountered physical evidence of that enthusiasm.
“I got to the rally on Saturday, and there was a woman who I had never seen before holding a sign that said ‘Elect Nancy Ries, Madison County Sheriff,’” Ries said. “I was like, ‘who was that?’ It was a big sign!”
As a Colgate professor, Ries spent decades teaching and researching Russian authoritarianism – work grounded in extensive fieldwork in Russia from the Soviet collapse through the Putin era. She witnessed firsthand how Putin systematically destroyed the country’s rule of law, beginning with targeting migrant construction workers from the Caucasus and Central Asia – former Soviet citizens suddenly labeled terrorists. She saw armed agents routinely pulling people off Moscow subway trains based on their appearance, operations that expanded to journalists, activists and business leaders, with many assassinated. By 2022, most of her Russian friends had fled or fallen silent. This scholarly expertise, grounded in lived experience, shapes her view of Hood’s ICE partnership as dangerous.
“I think of it as a curtain of police brutality and police violence and unaccountable law enforcement that comes down over the whole society,” Ries said. “When you live through and write about and watch that curtain of unaccountability and complete lack of due process of any kind, complete lack of human and civil rights descend on the whole society — when most of your friends leave the country because they’re afraid of being arrested if they stay … I and many other scholars who studied authoritarian societies see that happening from the first Trump term, and now with ever-increasing speed and brutality.”
When asked about this criticism in an interview with NewsChannel 9 Syracuse, Hood dismissed any concerns.
“It’s political and they try to spread this terrible narrative that the Gestapo’s going to come in. It’s not like that at all. We just want to know who’s in here,” Hood said.
Hood has continuously characterized his agreement with ICE as limited in scope.
“They have to have a criminal charge or a court order from a judge in order to take them in,” Hood told NewsChannel 9.
Hood further said he rarely encounters undocumented immigrants in his jail, and expected the MOA-sanctioned program to be applied only occasionally. But the MOA’s Appendix A — the section specifying what participating personnel can actually do — authorizes Madison County deputies to “detain and transport any aliens arrested pursuant to immigration laws to ICE-approved detention facilities.” Immigration violations are civil offenses, not criminal ones. Chandra Russo, a Colgate professor of sociology with a background in immigrant rights organizing, said the distinction matters.
“Around the country, people are detained not infrequently for reasons of racial profiling,” Russo said. “Just because you’re in jail, doesn’t mean you have been convicted of anything. The fact that the sheriff has agreed to collaborate with ICE is fairly significant.”
The agreement also specifies costs, stating that “the [Madison County Sheriff’s Office] is responsible for personnel expenses, including, but not limited to, salaries and benefits, local transportation, and official issue material.” Another section adds that the county bears liability for “costs of participating [Madison County Sheriff’s Office] personnel with regard to their property or personal expenses incurred by reason of death, injury, or incidents giving rise to liability.”
In a letter presented to the Madison County Board of Supervisors at the Aug. 26 meeting, Ries raised these budget concerns — concerns that Hamilton Supervisor Eve Ann Shwartz had already voiced at the July 23 committee meeting, according to Ries’s notes from the meeting. Shwartz questioned whether federal money would reimburse for personnel training hours, worried about the impact on the Madison County budget and expressed concern that Hood did not consult the Board of Supervisors before signing the agreement.
“[Shwartz] noted these are taxpayer dollars and that the Sheriff’s office must be held accountable for tax dollars going to ICE collaboration,” Ries wrote.
Ries also documented that other members of the Madison County Board of Supervisors “asked many good questions” about the agreement.
“There was a lot of concern among supervisors about many aspects of this ‘deal’ with ICE,” Ries wrote in her notes from the meeting. “They focused on budget and staffing issues that the supervisors have oversight on — since it was clear to all that this deal is signed and can’t be undone.”
Yet one section of the MOA includes a termination clause allowing either party to end the agreement with 90 days’ written notice.
“Hood could rescind this partnership,” Ries said. “He legally could do it. That’s what I want people to know.”
In the August meeting with Hood and five officers, Ries raised concerns about the complexity of immigration law. According to her notes, Hood stated that there are three categories of legal identities: citizens, green-card holders and “illegals.”
“I know from working with a lot of immigrants over many years that there are hundreds of different categories of documentation to live and work in the United States,” Ries said.
She mentioned her Ukrainian friends on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole during that meeting.
“There are millions of people from many, many countries in the United States on [TPS]. He did not know what TPS was,” Ries said.
Russo emphasized the same concern.
“Immigration law is also really complex,” Russo said. “[Ries] knows this in great detail. Street patrol and police officers are not trained in the intricacies of immigration law.”
Hood offered assurances to the contrary in the NewsChannel 9 Syracuse interview.
“If you’re keeping your nose clean and doing a good job, you’re pretty low on the radar when it comes to dealing with law enforcement,” Hood said.
But Ries said local immigrants don’t feel that assurance.
“My immigrant friends, especially those from Latin American backgrounds and Middle Eastern backgrounds, African backgrounds, are afraid,” Ries said. “They’re not just afraid in Chicago or New York or Portland or Los Angeles. They’re afraid in Madison County, New York.”
Ries has documented recent ICE operations that do suggest the reality is more complicated than Hood insists. On Sept. 11, ICE raided Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, New York, a village in Cayuga County about 30 miles north of Madison County. The sheriff of Cayuga County assisted ICE with security and traffic control during the raid. Ries documented, based on Spectrum News, CNYCentral and other regional outlets, that nobody arrested in that raid has yet been charged with a violent crime as of September, that these Cato detainees have not received due process of the law and that the raid has separated children from their parents indefinitely.
The Cato raid exemplifies the broader community impacts that concern experts like Russo, who is concerned that such operations — and agreements like the Madison County Sheriff’s Office MOA which facilitate them in the first place — have documented adverse effects on entire communities
“When local law enforcement works to enforce immigration law, which is generally a civil legal area and a very complex legal area, the consequences are pretty broad,” Russo said. “We see entire segments of our communities more reticent to come forward, to work with law enforcement, to serve as witnesses, to admit that they’ve been victimized.”
The fear Russo describes also has economic consequences in Madison County and the areas around Hamilton, where agriculture depends heavily on immigrant labor.
“I think [immigrants] are the backbone, a backbone,” Russo said, carefully noting that she doesn’t want to minimize the struggles or importance of native-born agricultural workers. “A lot of the workers our country requires — and has long required — particularly in regions like ours that are highly agriculturally-dependent, are folks who were not born here. Historically, local farmers have often been some of the staunchest advocates for robust immigration reform because they want a more reliable, protected, steady workforce.”
Russo placed Ries’s write-in campaign in a national context of battles around sheriff’s departments across the country. The campaign, she said, reflects both political education — many people are realizing that sheriffs are elected offices — and a response to feeling powerless about national-level enforcement.
“A lot of people are feeling a combination of helplessness and terror when they look at what is being orchestrated at the national level,” Russo said. “Thoughtful, experienced grassroots organizers on the ground are saying, ‘yes, it is terrifying, and even when we don’t have enough power to shift things as quickly as we would like at the national level, you can have an impact on local politics.’”
If elected — an outcome Ries considers highly unlikely — her first action would be invoking the 90-day termination clause for the MOA. But winning is not the goal. The point, Ries insisted, is to send a message of public opposition to Hood’s collaboration with ICE, countering his repeated claim that there is community support for the agreement.
“I hope that [Hood] can hear a sincere message to listen, to learn about immigration, to learn about the complexities of immigration statuses, to adopt a pose of compassion towards immigrant communities and understand that immigrant communities and immigrants in our area — right in our town — are afraid,” Ries said.
Friends have expressed concern about her challenging law enforcement, but Ries sees it differently.
“I’m not [afraid]. I might be a little anxious, but I’m not worried about myself. As a citizen of the United States with tons of privilege in my background as a white American, it’s my absolute responsibility to find avenues to do something,” Ries said. “I am developing as a human being by exercising my fearlessness and my communication skills and my ability to confront people in positions of power … it’s the inner strength that you get when you do something a little bit outrageous, but that feels right.”
In her Oct. 18 speech at the Hamilton No Kings Rally, Ries concluded with a call to solidarity.
“By gathering today, we join with millions of others to let the regime know: if you come for one of us, you are going to have to come through all of us,” Ries said to the crowd.
Hood did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Update: Madison County voters cast 1,510 write-in votes for sheriff on Tuesday, Nov. 4. If most of them are for Ries, it would be three times the number she said would have thrilled her. Hood won reelection with 7,486 votes.
“With help, I’m going to make the most I can of this vote,” Ries said, “with the goal of getting the sheriff to rescind the agreement.”
