In Borecky v. County of Nassau, (ED NY, June 18, 2026), a New York federal district court issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the Nassau County Religious Safety Act. The law prohibits picketing, literature distribution or oral advocacy within 35 feet of a place of religious worship (Buffer Provision). It also creates a bubble zone of 100 feet around a place of religious worship in which an advocate may not, without a person's consent, approach within 10 feet of a person to engage in oral advocacy, deliver literature or carry signs (Bubble Provision). Plaintiffs were advocates for immigrant rights. The court (in its 63-page opinion) said in part:
If the goal is to avoid harassment, intimidation, violence, or threatening speech, the County could have drafted a law that criminalized such conduct. It need not have also banned peaceful conversation, polite exchange, and information distribution on public streets—what amounts to the “extreme step of closing a substantial portion of a traditional public forum to all speakers.”... There is no evidence in this record that Nassau County considered any alternative laws or seriously engaged in any exercise of limiting the First Amendment damage inflicted by the RSA on individuals like Plaintiffs....
There might have been a record that justified the impositions on protected speech from the Buffer Provision. But it is not here....
Defendants have failed to articulate any rationale for having both a buffer and bubble provision to advance their interests in protecting religious liberty and public safety. The combined effect of the two exacts a chilling of free expression that neither does alone....
The Buffer Provision makes no attempt to accommodate the diversity and types of institutions around which the restriction operates. There are nearly 1000 such places, some are in storefronts, some which abut private business, others on detached pieces of property, others abutting sidewalks and public thoroughfares.... And as a result, the 35-foot radius around a driveway or entrance prohibits activity in all manner of places—including core public forums like sidewalks and streets—without regard to the particular site or location of any individual place of worship....
The differences between the Buffer and Bubble Provisions do not save the latter from facial invalidity....
Given the breadth of the expressive conduct and speech implicated by the law, an officer is left with the discretion to determine whether the individual standing in silence wearing a t-shirt with a political message is violating the statute or not engaging in expressive conduct at all. “Because of its overbreadth, the statute vests local law enforcement officers with too much arbitrary discretion in determining whether or not a certain emblem is grounds for prosecution. It permits only that expression which local officials will tolerate[.]” ...
amNY reports on the decision.