“When I’m putting my kid in the bathtub at the end of the night, when the tub fills up with rust-colored water, it’s really hard to look at that and not think that you’re doing some kind of harm,” said Fontana, who has pushed the state for help cleaning up her village’s water.

Many of Tupper Lake’s roughly 5,000 residents are wary of drinking the village’s water straight from the tap. It is tainted with a toxic disinfectant and has long violated state safety standards, though it’s officially deemed acceptable to use. And Tupper Lake is far from alone.

A NYCity News Service and New York Focus analysis of 2024 state Department of Health data, the latest available, found that 79 public water systems across the state have water contaminated with toxins exceeding state limits. 

These water systems serve more than 575,000 New Yorkers, from wealthy Long Island suburbs to working-class upstate towns, though the state notes that some water recorded as contaminated may not be delivered to customers.

In 2020, the health department set maximum acceptable levels for the industrial solvent 1,4-dioxane and PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” These toxins joined 10 others listed as drinking water contaminants, including arsenic, radioactive radium and uranium.

New York ranks among the states with the highest number of contaminants in its tap water. Many communities are trying to improve the quality of their water, spending millions of dollars to shut contaminated wells, build new treatment facilities, and find cleaner water sources. 

But these solutions often take longer than allowed to fix the problems. State regulators have granted deferrals that let violations persist as long as public water districts are making progress, records show. And it’s not always clear who should be held accountable for the cleanup.

Governor Kathy Hochul launched a five-year $3.75 billion commitment to water infrastructure as part of this year’s budget, bringing total such investments to nearly $10 billion since 2017. 

“New York is committed to removing health disparities [through] targeted funding for underserved communities so that we may all be afforded the basic right to safe drinking water,” the department said in a statement.

Fontana regularly hears about how the problem affects Tupper Lake residents. Many residents have turned to stocking up on bottled water and buying expensive home filtration systems, Fontana said. Some even avoid giving tap water to their pets. 

“It’s devastating to this community,” she said. “It’s very difficult to go through the day without somebody talking about the water situation in the community, and this has been ongoing for many, many, many years.”

NYCity News Service and New York Focus reported on seven communities grappling with contaminated water. Use the interactive map below to read their stories.

Seven systems, seven fights

Tupper Lake Garden City Park Western Nassau Hempstead Harvey School Carmel Fleischmanns

Tupper Lake Garden City Pk.
Franklin Sq. W. Nassau Hempstead Harvey School Carmel Fleischmanns

Adirondacks · Franklin County

Tupper Lake

Served

About 3,300 people

Contaminant

HAA5 — disinfectant byproducts

In Tupper Lake, the water has elevated levels of chemicals known as HAA5, haloacetic acids that can stem from disinfectants like chlorine and pose a long-term cancer risk, including damage to livers and kidneys. The federal and state limit for HAA5 is 60 micrograms per liter. On average, water in Tupper Lake contained 63.1 in the data studied. At least one test came in far higher, at 184, records show. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the village’s HAA5 levels were 92.8.

Meanwhile, Tupper Lake’s drinking water has violated the federal Safe Drinking Water Act since at least 2014, according to the village’s annual drinking water quality reports.

Tupper Lake residents have long received government-required notices from the village informing them that its water violates federal and state standards. One such notice from October 2025 states that the water is “suitable to drink, cook with, and bathe in,” but suggests additional measures to reduce exposure, including using activated carbon filters, and ventilating the bathroom while showering by opening a window or using an exhaust fan.

During the last two decades, the public water department has overhauled its infrastructure, and work continues.

One simple way of eliminating contaminants like HAA5 is to flush water from the system by letting fire hydrants run onto the street, for instance. This keeps water from becoming stagnant. But if that doesn’t work, alternate solutions can be expensive.

That’s what happened in Tupper Lake, Fontana said. When village officials approached the state government for help, they were urged to rely on groundwater, which the state considers safer, rather than water from Big Tupper Lake and Little Simon Pond.

“The State of New York said you have to find a different source or retrofit your facilities,” Fontana said. “And the only way that they would help fund a new treatment system was for us to go to groundwater wells.”

Since it was too expensive for the village to fix its facilities without outside help, Tupper Lake officials decided to drill two wells, taking on $9 million in debt after also getting state aid. That means 2,800 customers face higher bills.

“Any debt we incur is billed back to those customers,” Fontana explained.

The residents began receiving their water from the wells in 2018.

But then the water got worse.

The well water developed an excessive amount of iron and manganese, making the tap water brown — to the surprise of village officials.

Geological studies, engineering reports, and even the first flow of water did not show a presence of iron, according to Fontana. But the longer the wells were used, the more brown the water became, she said.

While the discoloration is off-putting, it is not a violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The EPA provides voluntary guidelines on iron and manganese, noting they may cause cosmetic effects, like discoloring teeth or skin, or affect the taste, look, or odor of water.

The acceptable standard for iron is 0.3 milligrams per liter. Iron levels in Tupper Lake ranged from 1.2 to 2.6, according to its latest drinking water quality report. Large amounts of iron can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and stomach pain, according to the report.

The problems didn’t end there. The two wells could not pump out enough water for the entire town, forcing the town to supplement it with the contaminated water from the filtration plant.

The village plans to drill a third well so it can rely solely on groundwater. Its current filtration system will be replaced with a new $25 million filtration plant, which will treat the water for iron and manganese. The project will likely be done by 2028, according to the mayor.

It will cost an estimated $25 million, but that is still less expensive than the $39 million it would take to fix the current filtration plant, Fontana said.

In February, Fontana took samples of the contaminated water to show lawmakers in Albany. Working with Assemblymember Michael Cashman, she successfully advocated for Tupper Lake, earning a $12.5 million budget line in capital funding for water infrastructure updates. While the funding won’t completely close the village’s budget gap, it’s a crucial win for the community, according to Fontana.

“This funding will help us move forward with the long-term solution to provide a safe, reliable drinking water supply for our residents.”

← Fleischmanns Garden City Park →

Long Island · Nassau County

Garden City Park and Franklin Square

Served

38,000 across two districts

Contaminant

PFOS — forever chemicals

A 2019 study from the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a non-profit focusing on tracking water quality in New York State, found that Long Island had “by far” the most contaminated water in the state.

Much of the problem traces to an underground aquifer contaminated over decades by discharge from manufacturing plants.

“Everything we pour on the surface eventually seeps down and contaminates the underground water supply,” said Adrienne Esposito, director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment. “So it’s really way more vulnerable and susceptible to contamination than many, many, many other areas.”

Water in some parts of Long Island is contaminated by PFAS, chemicals which were once used in everything from nonstick cookware to firefighting foam to food packaging. Now mostly banned in some states, they’re known as “forever chemicals,” because they remain in the environment and in the human body without breaking down. Studies have linked PFAS exposure to increased cancer risk and developmental problems in children.

New York State began systematically tracking PFOS and PFOA, two of the most common PFAS compounds, in 2021. The data revealed problems in parts of Long Island.

The Garden City Park Water District and the Franklin Square Water District — two neighboring systems serving a combined 38,000 people — both had untreated water that exceeded state PFOS limits between 2020 and 2024, according to state health department data.

John Hughes, the superintendent of the Franklin Square Water District, said his district has “never pumped out any water that was over the limit” since at least 2020, when New York instituted a PFOS cap. Franklin Square has had granulated carbon filtration systems on some of its wells since the 1990s, according to Hughes.

While Garden City Park did not respond to requests for comment, its 2022 Water Quality Report indicates that it installed a granulated carbon filtration system the same year that the water it served to customers dipped below the state PFOS limit.

Granulated carbon filters cost between $1 million and $1.5 million per system, Esposito said.

“Most water districts want to be in compliance, but the filtration is expensive,” she said. “The water districts used to get very angry with us [for our activism], but then they realized, you know, we’re the ones lobbying for their grants.”

In 2020, New York established maximum contaminant levels for PFOA, PFOS, and 1,4-dioxane. As of August 2026, four water districts — all in Nassau County — have been granted “exemptions” by the Department of Health, buying them another year to come into compliance. A spokesperson for the agency told New York Focus that an exemption “does not absolve the water suppliers of their responsibility to mitigate their systems,” and that each exemption includes a “mandatory compliance strategy.”

← Tupper Lake Western Nassau →

Long Island · Western Nassau County

Western Nassau County

Served

About 120,000 people

Contaminant

1,4-dioxane

In Western Nassau County, officials overseeing the public water system – which serves about 120,000 people across the towns of Hempstead and North Hempstead along with several villages and unincorporated areas – have taken steps to remove 1,4-dioxane from the water supply. Research in animal models suggests long-term exposure to the industrial solvent in drinking water can cause cancer.

Used as an industrial solvent in chemical manufacturing, 1,4-dioxane was first detected in Long Island’s water supply in 2015. The contaminant can be found in a wide range of products, including some laundry detergents, dish soaps, shampoos and cosmetics. It is also found in some paints, varnishes, degreasers and inks.

Unlike some other contaminants, 1,4-dioxane cannot be filtered out. Instead, cleanup requires more expensive measures — advanced oxidation process (AOP) treatment methods used to break down and remove pollutants.

The state has granted the Water Authority of Western Nassau County deferrals while officials have worked to mitigate contamination.

Michael Leiner, the water authority’s chief engineer, said it has “run out” of deferrals. The authority took the last contaminated water station in its system offline in 2024.

The water authority is removing 1,4-dioxane by running the station’s water through a tank that exposes it to dozens of UV bulbs and hydrogen peroxide, which work in tandem to remove the contaminant.

“The AOP process completely removes it, it doesn’t just reduce it,” Leiner said.

Leiner notes this treatment process is “very expensive,” though he declined to share specific numbers. A 2021 municipal bond statement from the water authority documents “approximately $50 million” in revenue bonds for capital improvements that would address both 1,4-dioxane and PFAS contamination.

Meanwhile, the water authority’s operating expenses rise.

From 2020 to 2024, those expenses jumped 22 percent, according to an annual report from the state’s Authorities Budget Office. Over that same period, the authority’s debt increased by more than 41 percent, though an independent audit in 2024 still found the water authority to be in a “strong” financial position.

The authority may also get some of that money back. More than two dozen Long Island water districts have sued private companies over PFAS contamination, and at least nine, including Western Nassau, have sued over 1,4-dioxane — all seeking to recoup water cleanup costs from companies they say are responsible for contamination.

The Western Nassau water authority filed a lawsuit against the Dow Chemical Company, Ferro Corporation, and Vulcan Materials Company in May 2019, and is seeking to recoup the costs of new treatment facilities, according to its 2021 municipal bond statement.

While some water districts have settled, they can face obstacles gaining access to settlement money. The Water Authority of Western Nassau County declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Dr. Vasilis Vasiliou, director of the Yale Superfund Research Center, has been studying 1,4-dioxane in Long Island’s water supply for more than six years in collaboration with the Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

Vasiliou said the county has made great progress. “They have done tremendous work in Long Island, and most of the public water is now high quality,” he said.

The Yale Superfund Research Center project focuses primarily on public water supplies because those sources are easier to access and test. But hundreds of thousands of Long Island residents get their water from private wells, many of which are likely contaminated, according to Vasiliou. He hopes to expand the center’s research to those water sources in the future, but property owners are sometimes reluctant to grant access to their wells.

“If you ask to look for contaminants in their area, they might be hesitant,” Vasiliou said, “because if you find something, you may decrease the value of the house.”

← Garden City Park Hempstead →

Long Island · Village of Hempstead

Hempstead

Served

56,000 residents

Contaminant

1,4-dioxane

Seven of the nine wells in Long Island’s Village of Hempstead, population 56,000, contain 1,4-dioxane at levels above the state standards, records show. The village was granted a deferral after the new contaminant standards were introduced, and then an exemption, which expired in August 2026. The water authority applied for an extension in July 2026, but there is no publicly available response from the DOH yet.

Under the terms of the deferral, the village must notify residents of the contamination, submit quarterly progress reports, and take steps to minimize exposure, including relying less on the most contaminated wells and blending their water with cleaner sources.

The village has acknowledged in filings that 1,4-dioxane remains in water delivered to residents and says it needs to build at least one new treatment plant in order to meet state standards.

According to the village’s most recent report, the project will be carried out in five construction phases. New advanced oxidation process (AOP) treatment systems and buildings will be the first to come online, followed by iron removal filters, granular activated carbon filters, new chemical feed systems, and extensive rerouting of water mains.

The first phase is pending approval from the Nassau County Department of Public Works, and Hempstead has no firm timeline publicly set for full treatment.

Mayor Wayland Hobbs directed reporters for this story to water plant director Steve Giardino, who did not respond to interview requests.

Hempstead faces major financial constraints. Documents show village officials authorized $55 million in bonds in 2024 for construction improvements at the Clinton Street Water Treatment Plant, where the AOP systems would be installed. The village has applied for state grants and subsidized financing that could lower its borrowing needs, but the documents don’t specify the final amount.

In the meantime, water utility bills have risen sharply. The highest usage tier reached $13.97 per thousand gallons, among the highest on Long Island, deferral records show. Village engineers said the rate hike is intended to help pay for construction.

The village has also pursued legal action. In August 2025, Hempstead filed a lawsuit against several corporations it alleges are responsible for contaminating its water supply with hazardous chemicals. At least two of the companies named have pushed back: Rococo Associates denied guilt outright and Nassau Chromium Plating Co. Inc. argued that the claims against it are arbitrary.

← Western Nassau Harvey School →

Hudson Valley · Westchester County

Westchester County

Served

About 510 people

Contaminant

1,4-dioxane, PFOS and PFOA

In Westchester County, the Harvey School, a private college preparatory school with an annual tuition of over $50,000, has a public water system that serves about 510 people. The public water system is one of the state’s smallest. It is also the state’s only public water system that has exceeded standards for three different contaminants under the 2020 state regulations.

The data showed that the school’s water system exceeded standards for the dry cleaning contaminant 1,4-dioxane, as well as PFOS and PFOA, two categories of forever chemicals.

The school issued a notice in May 2024 that one of the system’s two wells — the only one showing contamination — has been shut down since June 2021 and will remain offline until a PFAS treatment system is approved and installed.

The notice confirmed the chemical concentrations exceed state standards, but the school said the water was still “acceptable for all uses” and “does not pose a significant short term health risk.”

After years of noncompliance with the Westchester County Health Department, the school reported in February 2026 that it had been granted an extension until January 30, 2027 to complete construction of a treatment system designed to remove PFOA and PFOS.

The Harvey School did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

← Hempstead Carmel →

Hudson Valley · Putnam County

Putnam County

Served

About 33,500 people

Contaminant

PFOA and PFOS

In Carmel, a suburb of about 33,500 people in Putnam County in the Hudson Valley, contamination circulates through septic systems, according to town engineer Richard Franzetti.

Carmel operates 13 separate water districts that are “not hydraulically connected,” Franzetti said, which means contamination cannot be solved with a single fix.

Over the past year, the town has focused on contamination from forever chemicals, particularly PFOA and PFOS. Working with a contractor, Carmel completed a pilot study testing three treatment methods: granular activated carbon (GAC), ion exchange resin and a clay-based material. Two pilot systems ran simultaneously — one for surface water and one for groundwater.

Final findings from the study were expected in April but have been delayed, Franzetti said. Early indications point toward granular activated carbon as the likely solution, he added.

“Ultimately, what’s going to come out of it is probably going to be using the GAC,” he said, “because that’s the most effective way of doing it.”

He acknowledged the anxiety residents feel, especially those with compromised immune systems. But Franzetti also noted that drinking water isn’t the only source of forever chemical exposure.

“The problem with PFOAs is that they’re everywhere,” he said. “If you drink a glass of orange juice, you’re drinking PFOAs. If you floss your teeth, you have PFOAs… If you get fast food anywhere, the packaging has PFOAs in it.”

Carmel’s path forward depends on the pilot study’s final results, future funding, and a broader reckoning with forever chemicals.

“Everybody wants to turn on their tap and have clean water,” Franzetti said. “But there’s no singular answer to it all.”

← Harvey School Fleischmanns →

Catskills · Delaware County

Fleischmanns

Served

Just over 300 dwellings

Contaminant

Arsenic

In the Catskills village of Fleischmanns, drinking water comes mostly from springs that feed into a storage tower above town. But two of the village’s four wells, which are used as an emergency reserve, have arsenic levels that now exceed the state standard of 10 micrograms per liter, according to the village’s 2025 Annual Water Quality Report.

“They’ve always been right on the limit,” said Todd Murphy, who runs the village’s water and wastewater plant. “They started to go up around the end of 2023, and then through 2024 to current, one of the wells has consistently been over.”

The wells are tested regularly, Murphy said, and residents are notified when arsenic exceeds acceptable levels. But the two contaminated wells are rarely used and fixing them is too costly for a village with just over 300 dwellings.

“To add arsenic removal would be several million dollars,” Murphy said. “For two wells that we don’t really use, it’s just not cost-effective.”

Instead, the village is pursuing state and federal grants to drill two new wells in a different location and then abandon the contaminated ones. The process could take years. In the latest public notice sent to residents, the village said it anticipates “resolving the problem within the next 2-3 years.”

Like many small water systems across New York, Fleischmanns faces an uphill battle, with aging pipes installed in the 1960s and 1970s, a limited tax base, and state funding programs that often require local matching funds that the village does not have.

“Our tax base is very, very small,” Murphy said. “We have to be mindful of residents and try to do the best we can with what we have.”

← Carmel Tupper Lake →

Resorts World New York City, which in April became the first full-scale casino to open downstate, is locked in a fight with the state about whether it needs to pay upward of $150 million a year to the state’s horseracing industry on top of its regular taxes. Resorts World argues it can subtract those payments from its total taxes — and has suggested it may abandon a planned $3.3 billion expansion of its Jamaica, Queens complex if forced to pay the higher rate.

Resorts World’s claim centers on language it included in its casino application last year, in which it proposed to pay a “tax rate of 56 percent, inclusive of racing support.” The state said it never signed off on that particular language, which it says would run afoul of the law.

“By law, tax rates do not, and have never, included racing support payments,” Hochul spokesperson Gordon Tepper told New York Focus in a statement.

The state budget would take a hit if Resorts World’s argument won out. “The State’s priority is to generate substantial tax revenue for public education and mass transit, ensure continued support for the racing industry, and deliver the investment, jobs and economic benefits Resorts World promised for Southeast Queens & New York State,” Tepper said.

The casino’s lobbying blitz in the spring resulted in a stalemate, with the state legislature voting to kick the can down the road for a year and ensure that the horseracing industry keeps getting payments while the fight plays out. But Resorts World is pushing again to codify its own interpretation of the tax rate, hoping to resolve the fight ahead of a Sept. 4 deadline for the casino owners to file a legal challenge.

“We are having constructive conversations with the state and are hopeful about continuing to build on our successful partnership,” Resorts World spokesperson Stefan Friedman said in a statement. Friedman did not respond to questions about whether the company is seriously considering abandoning its expansion project.

Some lawmakers have taken the casino’s side. Last week, Congressman Gregory Meeks and nine other local lawmakers called on the Gaming Commission to clarify that Resorts World’s 56 percent tax rate includes racing support. The uncertainty threatens “billions of dollars in private investment, thousands of jobs, local businesses, and the communities we represent,” the officials wrote in a letter.

The 56 percent tax rate Resorts World proposed in its application to the state Gaming Commission last year is much higher than the maximum tax rates offered by the other two winning casinos, Bally’s Bronx and Metropolitan Park in Queens, which will pay 30 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Resorts World, owned by the Malaysian conglomerate Genting, says it would effectively pay a 72 percent tax rate on slot machines if the racing support payments had to be made separately. (State officials say the other two casinos will make the payments separately, and they have raised no public objections.)

Resorts World already held a groundbreaking in July for its expansion, which is supposed to include a 2,000-room hotel, an arena, 6,000 slot machines and 800 gaming tables — creating 5,000 permanent jobs once completed by 2029.

Queens state Senator Joe Addabbo, a strong supporter of the casino, said Resorts World executives have told him that the higher tax rate could threaten their ability to obtain financing for the expansion.

“Based on what they tell me, the jeopardy comes with the lenders,” Addabbo said. “If 56 percent turns into 72 percent, I think any rational person would see that as a problem, let alone a bank.”

Resorts World plans to rely heavily on borrowed money to build its expansion, according to the state regulators who reviewed the casino bid last year. Even as it recommended giving Resorts World a license, a state panel last year warned that it had “concerns that the project’s financing plan relies heavily on future operating cash flow and future debt financing to fund a substantial portion of development costs.”

Resorts World has continued to woo powerful officials as it pushes its tax vision. Last month, the casino sponsored a concert on Martha’s Vineyard featuring hip-hop legends Rakim, Slick Rick and Big Boi. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie appeared to be in attendance, according to a social media post he made. Sources told New York Focus in June that legislative leaders were open to Resorts World’s argument, even as the Gaming Commission opposed it.

Patrick Jenkins, a top Albany lobbyist who is close to Heastie, also posted photos from the event. Jenkins’s firm is one of seven different lobbying companies on Genting’s payroll this year, state records show.

Friedman, the Resorts World spokesperson, said the company hosts “widely attended public events on Martha’s Vineyard every year to extend our brand recognition — particularly important now that we have New York City’s first commercial casino.” He did not respond directly when asked whether Resorts World would report the concert as lobbying activity.

Revenue from the new downstate casinos is supposed to flow to public schools and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the state’s financial plan assumes that Resorts World will pay the tax rate that was accepted by the Gaming Commission, said Tim Ruffinen, a spokesperson for the Division of the Budget. A state-commissioned report previously projected that Resorts World would pay about $2 billion each in MTA and education taxes between 2027 and 2036, assuming the casino paid the 56 percent tax rate.

Well over $500 million is at stake in the dispute, since Resorts World must make the racing support payments on its own before the other two downstate casinos open. That is not expected to happen until around 2030, since Bally’s and Metropolitan Park must be built from the ground up — unlike Resorts World, which converted its existing video-lottery facility at the Aqueduct Racetrack into a full-scale casino while it builds its expansion.

Vicki Been, an NYU Law School professor and former deputy mayor who chaired the state board that recommended giving Resorts World a casino license last year, said in an interview that she believes the company has no standing to demand changes. She noted that the board issued written guidance against any changes to the tax rates, after a previous instance in which Resorts World tried to amend its application.

“We wanted to make it crystal clear that if they went back to the legislature and said, ‘It’s so unfair that the others bid a lot lower and they’re paying a lot less’ — well, that’s the bidding process, that’s what you bid,” she said.

Campbell began spending more time monitoring the use of technology than he spent teaching, he said. When he asked one student how they had gotten every question right the night before but failed the next day, he said the teenager responded, “ChatGPT.” 

“I just had to admit that it wasn’t working,” Campbell said. “The kids didn’t learn. They didn’t retain anything.”

Last school year, Campbell eliminated technology from his classroom. The Chromebook cart remains untouched during class time. Instead, students pick up a hard copy of a worksheet and a dictionary, and spend the first 15 minutes reading, writing, or completing a vocabulary activity. Homework is completed by hand and turned in the following day.

“I have pretty much gone back to the way I was teaching when I first started,” said Campbell, who has been a teacher for 25 years. 

In recent years, the use of ed tech has exploded. About nine in 10 public schools nationwide had a 1-1 device program providing every student with a laptop or tablet during the 2024–25 school year, according to federal data. But as schools pour millions into ed tech and artificial learning programs, parents are increasingly questioning whether those investments improve learning — and a growing number of teachers are ditching tech for traditional analog instruction.

Policymakers are beginning to respond, too. On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI and caps on screen time through middle school. A new state bill would go further: the FOCUS Act, introduced by state Senator Andrew Gounardes last month, aims to sharply limit reliance on screens and to “create a right to analog learning.”

If the bill passes, it would be the most comprehensive restriction on ed tech in the country. 

Some of the teachers who’ve already implemented those changes say they’re seeing promising results. It took some time for Campbell’s students to embrace the changes, and they didn’t do too well on their first exam without access to technology — but improved by 20 points on the second. After students spent more time in his class learning vocabulary, Campbell heard from other teachers that their English grades also went up. He noticed a boost in student confidence, as they received better grades on work they completed independently. 

His classroom became noisier, but in a good way: Students came to him with questions and talked over classwork with each other, rather than staring at their Chromebooks.

Westchester teacher Jill Anderson had a similar experience in her third grade classroom. 

When the children were supposed to do work on their Chromebooks, Anderson would often walk around and discover them playing with different text fonts and colors, browsing YouTube, or customizing their avatars on online learning platforms. 

During the 2024–25 school year, she stopped allowing her students to use 1-1 devices except for mandatory online testing and occasional writing activities. This month, as she prepared her classroom for the new school year, she decided the best place for her district-issued cart of Chromebooks was the storage closet. 

“A kid who is off task on a device … who knows what they might get into,” Anderson, who’s been teaching for 20 years, said. “A kid who’s off task sitting at their desk with paper and a book is maybe daydreaming and bored, but maybe they’re coming up with something great.” 

Gounardes’s bill is the latest in a string of efforts by state lawmakers to rein in the ed tech boom. 

It would require screen-free instruction in pre-K through fifth grade, and give older students and their parents the right to refuse to use a school-issued device if there is a reasonable alternative. 

School-issued devices would have to be free of social media, gaming, direct messaging apps, chatbots, generative AI, and cameras. Ed tech companies would have to register with the state Attorney General before offering products to school districts, and the State Education Department would update its learning standards so that students are taught about the impact of excess screen time and social media use.

“We’ve rushed to put these devices in kids’ hands, and these platforms in front of their faces without ever asking, ‘Is it effective, and cognitively, is it good for kids?’” Gounardes told New York Focus.

The bill has the support of the powerful New York State United Teachers union, among other groups. In a statement, NYSUT President Melinda Person applauded lawmakers for “moving quickly to begin the crucial work of defining which technologies belong in our classrooms — and which should be limited.” 

Some districts have already taken steps in response to parent backlash. Mamdani’s Wednesday announcement means New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, will adopt a sweeping new technology policy barring individual screens through second grade and generative AI tools for students through eighth grade. The new guidelines recommend that students in grades 3–5 be limited to 30 minutes of daily screen time, and middle school students to 45. 

Research has linked excessive screen time to poorer academic performance, lower attention spans, and behavioral issues. A 2026 study across 50 countries by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education also found that using AI in education can undermine children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. 

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Transforming Education, a nonprofit that helps educators use ed tech in schools, acknowledged that after the pandemic, school districts focused on getting technology into classrooms without preparing teachers to use it in meaningful ways.  

But he argued that the solution is not to legislate the number of devices in each grade or the minutes students spend in front of a screen. Instead, Culatta said, school districts must set clear expectations of what quality ed tech looks like, and train teachers to use it in ways that enhance their instruction, boost student creativity, and support special education students and English language learners. 

“You can walk into a lot of schools and see technology being used in ineffective ways, but that does not mean we should stop using technology in ways that are really helpful and prepare our students for their futures in a digital world,” he said.

Saranac Lake English teacher Kelsey Francis first noticed a major problem with students using AI when they returned from spring break in 2023. Assigned a simple, 250-word essay about the best ice cream in the Adirondacks, students turned in formal writing responses about the history and origin of the dessert, with no local context. They then started asking ChatGPT to generate personal narratives to use for college applications, she said. 

Last school year, she required her students to handwrite all of their essays and class assignments. This summer, the teacher bought a classroom set of dictionaries, so students could learn how to look up words without relying on the AI summary at the top of Google searches.

Francis, who’s been teaching for 26 years, has also started assigning significantly less homework, because she said there’s no way to stop students from using AI on their own time. 

“Until someone comes up with something better, if we want to actually gauge their abilities and what they have learned, it has to be done in front of us,” she said. 

Substantial improvements in students’ writing abilities will require a longer-term commitment to limiting educational technology, Francis said. But after a year of returning to analog instruction, she said she has noticed that students are more engaged with their assignments, scribbling down their initial thoughts and developing their own unique ideas rather than turning in polished work that lacks individuality. 

About 250 miles south, in a small district of around 900 students near West Point, ninth grade English teacher Paul Lukacik has also turned his teaching routine on its head. For much of the past 30 years, students read and discussed literature in class, then completed writing assignments about those works at home. 

Recently, his school’s English department decided that all writing must now be completed in class, by hand, on paper. Every day, Lukacik signs off on where students finish their work and prohibits them from adding to their notes at home.

“It’s gotten to a point where all they can have on their desk is a pen, a piece of paper, and the literary source they are using,” Lukacik said. “They can’t have any notes because I’m just catching too many students who have already written the work of AI in their notebook, and then just transfer it while they are in class.” 

Lukacik acknowledged how time-consuming the new writing policy is, emphasizing that he used to get significantly more work done. 

It’s been an adjustment for students, too. “Some students can’t functionally write,” the high school teacher explained. “They don’t actually hold a pen or a pencil correctly. I don’t want to call anybody out in class, so I have to model in front of everyone how you’re supposed to hold it.” 

Lukacik said it’s too early in the process to see significant results, but he hopes to see the payoffs in student learning before he retires.

Some teachers who’ve made the switch feel they were initially oversold on the benefits of ed tech. A few years ago, Anderson, the Westchester teacher, thought it would help differentiate instruction for her students and get them interested in learning to code.

But her experience as a parent changed her mind. Anderson allowed her own child to use the ed tech she had access to as a teacher, she said, and realized it only made them crave more time on a screen. She found success removing iPads and gaming consoles from her home, and began thinking more critically about the use of technology within her classroom.   

“I have such regrets,” Anderson admitted. “Because guess what? Those kids I taught how to code, they aren’t even going to code like that anymore.”  

As she shifted away from 1-1 devices, Anderson noticed her students became more engaged in assignments and collaborating with others. Playing learning games with each other, rather than on a computer, taught them sportsmanship and how to solve conflicts. “We connected so much more without it,” she said.

Anderson is excited by the FOCUS Act’s potential to curb screen time in schools. Her district supports her traditional approach to instruction, but not all teachers are as lucky, she said, and the ability to limit technology in a classroom “shouldn’t depend on a district’s director of technology or superintendent.”

“I think there were a lot of promises about how technology would help us differentiate instruction and reach more students,” she said. “But the more tech you bring into your classroom, the less connection and human skills you build.”

New York Focus spotlighted the questionable contract last year, after it was inked by then-Mayor Eric Adams’s administration in the final months of his tenure. The city agreed to pay more than $320 million for 350,000 Chromebook laptops equipped with T-Mobile LTE service, along with up to one million lines of cell service for those computers and other school-issued devices. The T-Mobile portion of the contract cost the city about $3.5 million per month and just under $200 million in total.

Adams signed the contract despite data indicating that the large majority of public school students already have internet at home. City officials had also raised internal concerns about the contract, complaining that it required the city to pay T-Mobile a flat fee regardless of how many lines of cell service were active. The city had approached T-Mobile without soliciting competing offers from fellow city vendors Verizon and AT&T, the critics noted, and it was unclear whether the Department of Education even wanted the internet-connected laptops.

Eight months into his tenure, Mamdani is now terminating the T-Mobile part of the contract, a move first reported by Chalkbeat. Department of Education spokesperson Nicole Brownstein said that the administration views the contract as unnecessary because it replicates an existing program that allows schools to pay $10 a month per child to provide LTE service through Verizon to any student who needs it.

“We know reliable technology access is critical for our students, and our schools are ready to support any family who needs help accessing LTE at home through established internet programs already available to every student through their school,” Brownstein said.

“We appreciate T-Mobile for their support of our students and educators. Ultimately this program, launched under the prior administration, duplicated existing resources at an unnecessary cost. By discontinuing this component of this contract, we are saving taxpayer dollars while continuing to deliver the internet connectivity we know our school communities rely on.”

Brownstein said last week that the administration had instructed school principals to identify families without internet access and give them LTE service before the first day of school on Sept. 10. Although the 350,000 laptops have already been distributed to schools, city officials also told principals that the T-Mobile student plans would end on Aug. 31, Chalkbeat reported.

The move comes amid a broader backlash against education technology, including a state bill introduced this month that would sharply limit the use of screens in classrooms and the distribution of school-issued devices. Mamdani is set to announce new technology rules including a ban on individual screens until third grade, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Naveed Hasan, an elected member of the city’s school board, commended Mamdani for canceling the T-Mobile contract and urged him to go further in curbing waste in school technology spending and in reviving plans for city-owned tech infrastructure. The school board had grown increasingly skeptical of tech vendors and recently rejected a contract for Oracle software.

The city did not provide an official estimate for how much money would be saved by cutting the contract, which has already been in effect for about a year. The savings may be partially offset by more students receiving LTE service through the Verizon program. But at nearly $50 million per year, the contract was costlier than many of the other programs that Mamdani decided to slash as part of cost-cutting efforts in his first budget earlier this year — like a $9.9 million Department of Social Services consulting contract with McKinsey.

That initial effort helped the city find $1.77 billion in savings over two years, which represents less than one percent of the city’s spending over that period. Mamdani wants to double down on that work, announcing in July that he will ask city agencies to find more savings worth 2.5 percent of their budgets.

At the time, New York was experiencing one of its most humid stretches in decades, as tropical air from the Caribbean brought humidity levels rivaling those of the Amazon rainforest to the state. Dew points reached as high as 79 degrees, creating oppressive moisture.

Heat like that can make Adriana’s legs feel weak and her knees buckle. Quick gulps of water, merciful clouds, and the occasional breeze offer a little relief. Adriana has found other ways to cope, though: Occasionally, she’ll sneak unauthorized breaks behind trees, hidden from the orchard’s owners.

Adriana has worked at the apple farm for more than a decade. In all those years, she said, her boss has only once ever told workers they could take additional breaks because of the heat. That happened this June, as smoke from wildfires in Canada and high temperatures turned the orchard into a furnace. (Like the other farmworkers New York Focus spoke to for this article, Adriana requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from her employer and because of immigration concerns.)

There are no federal laws requiring employers to protect workers from heat-related working conditions, even as climate change ratchets up temperatures and makes extreme weather more common. Some states and cities have taken matters into their own hands. Seven states now have laws guaranteeing all workers access to water, shade, and rest breaks during extreme heat events. But New York is not one of them. 

A group of lawmakers in New York has spent the last three years trying to pass legislation, known as the Temperature Extreme Mitigation Program or TEMP Act, that would require employers to provide water, access to shade, and preventative breaks to protect workers from heat-related health risks when temperatures exceed a certain threshold. This year’s delayed budget meant there wasn’t enough bandwidth for the bill to make meaningful progress, said Assemblymember Harry Bronson, who represents parts of Monroe County.

“It would be better for the feds to do this. But since they’re not acting, we have to act,” said Bronson, who chairs the Assembly’s labor committee and sponsors the bill. 

The agriculture industry has staunchly opposed the bill. The New York Farm Bureau, the state’s largest agriculture advocacy group, has repeatedly asked lawmakers to exempt agriculture workers from the TEMP Act requirements. It’s also taken issue with the bill’s heat-specific standards kicking in at 80 degrees Fahrenheit rather than at a warmer temperature and its stringent water availability mandates, according to the group’s 2026 Policy Book. 

“No one is more concerned with the health and safety of farm workers than the farmers who employ them,” a Farm Bureau spokesperson wrote in a statement. “We must work together to find solutions that promote worker safety while not imposing unrealistic, burdensome legislation upon our farmers.”

Bronson is hopeful that the bill will pass next year, with changes that address some industry concerns. “People are getting injured, and people are dying,” he said.

Adriana remembers a sweltering day last September when one of her coworkers collapsed, his body motionless. One worker drenched a shirt in water and pressed it on him while others got water. The supervisor helped haul him into a car with air conditioning.

“I got scared to see my coworker like that,” she said.

The number of workers in the US killed by heat exposure has increased almost every year since the pandemic: 36 in 2021, 43 in 2022, 55 in 2023, and 48 in 2024, according to federal data. Most deaths occurred among agriculture, construction, landscaping, and manufacturing workers.

In 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency that regulates working conditions, proposed a standard requiring employers to take steps to protect indoor and outdoor workers. But the rule has stalled under the Trump administration. An OSHA spokesperson told New York Focus that the agency is still reviewing comments from a public hearing it held last year about the proposal. 

The dangers of prolonged exposure to heat are well-known. Heat can cause cells to die, wreaking havoc on other major organs. And the increased blood flow, as blood is rushed to the skin for cooling, can overload the heart and trigger heart attacks, said Shao Lin, the chair of the department of environmental health sciences at the University at Albany.

“The human body has some natural cooling systems to calm down the heat, but if you stay there too long, then they can’t adapt to heat exposure anymore,” said Lin, who has researched climate change’s impacts on human health. “Breaks are vital for outdoor workers in the heat because they allow the body to cool down, lower core temperature, and recover from physical strain.”

Climate change is causing New York to experience higher dew points, which creates more dangerous situations for people working outside, said Jase Bernhardt, a Hofstra University meteorologist and climatologist.

“Even if the summertime heat temperature is staying the same, if there’s higher dew points … it becomes more uncomfortable and more dangerous for people like outdoor workers,” Bernhardt said.

Dolores, an agriculture worker in Western New York, recalled symptoms she experienced while grafting apple tree branches at an orchard: her head throbbed, her stomach churned, and pain shot through her ears.

She believes employers should be required to provide breaks on hot days or allow workers to go home when it’s too hot to work safely. Without those protections, many workers push themselves to the brink out of fear that they won’t get paid or will be fired, she said. 

“Often, people don’t leave because of fear that they can be laid off,” Dolores said. With better protections, “one can confidently say, ‘I have a headache, I can’t take it anymore, I should leave.’”

Eline Martinez, a worker rights advocate at the Worker Justice Center of New York, echoed that argument.

“Too often, workers are forced to choose between earning a paycheck and protecting their well-being,” Martinez said. “The lack of enforceable standards creates inconsistent working conditions, where worker safety and training on heat-related illness depends on the practices of individual employers rather than clear public protections.”

Fernandez, a dairy farmworker in Western New York, said his employer has invested in large fans, cooling systems, and irrigation to help cows adapt to the hotter summers and blistering winters. But the farm does not have drinkable water for workers.

“Just like they take care of their system, their business, their production, they should also take care of their workers,” said Fernandez, a leader with the farmworkers advocacy group Alianza Agrícola. He said he has asked his managers, “If both the cows and the workers are important to the business, why not give priority to both?”

In the absence of action by the state, New York City has taken its own steps. At the end of June, Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order directing city agencies to create and implement plans to prevent heat-related illness, the first initiative tackling the issue in city history. 

Around 1.4 million New York City workers currently endure prolonged periods of time outdoors, the city estimated.

But most of the state’s outdoor agricultural workers work elsewhere. Assemblymember Bronson said he was unaware of another city in the state that has taken New York City’s approach. A state Department of Labor spokesperson told New York Focus the agency does not have information on whether other cities have enacted policies on worker and heat protection. They instead pointed to workplace guidance and best practices the state developed as part of its 2024 Extreme Heat Action Plan, whose recommendations are not binding.

Gabriella Szpunt, a lead organizer at New York’s United Farm Workers, a labor union advocating for farm workers, called the Extreme Heat Action plan a “goodwill gesture” but said that “there needs to be something with teeth.”

Adriana and Dolores both said the state should require employers to provide a designated, cooler area for breaks and mealtimes, and to allow workers to take breaks or go home when it’s too hot, without fear of punishment. 

In the meantime, workers will continue to protect themselves by showing up with jugs of water, wide-brimmed hats, breathable clothes, and sunscreen.

“We know we can’t do anything about the high temperatures,” Dolores said. “I simply want the people in the government to see the agricultural work that we do, which is really tough.”

Since 2009, local law enforcement in New York have worked with Border Patrol through the program, Operation Stonegarden, to promote security along the state’s northern border by carrying out special overtime shifts. 

New York Focus learned that the program is also facilitating immigration arrests, despite Democratic leaders’ insistence otherwise. 

Our investigation, based on dozens of records requests, revealed that deputies on Stonegarden patrols have helped Border Patrol arrest at least 24 people for immigration reasons since 2023. 

Here are the key takeaways from our reporting:

Operation Stonegarden is engaging in immigration enforcement, despite claims to the contrary. 

Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, several sheriff’s departments, and the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which administers Stonegarden, all told New York Focus that Stonegarden doesn’t facilitate civil immigration enforcement. That’s true in some counties, but not in others.

Deputies on Stonegarden patrols in Oswego and Jefferson County reported turning over 23 people to Border Patrol for immigration reasons from 2023 through May this year. Video footage obtained through records requests shows how some of those arrests unfolded in Oswego County. 

In one, a sheriff’s deputy pulls over a red truck and tells the driver he was “speeding a little quick back here.” Border Patrol agents are already on the scene, and the deputy bumps fists with one of them as he takes the driver’s license and registration back to his car. At the end of the video, Border Patrol agents lead two of the truck’s passengers into their van.

Governor Hochul vowed to restrict local cops’ collaboration with ICE. But she still supports Operation Stonegarden. 

Not long after Hochul signed into law a new measure banning formal agreements between New York law enforcement and ICE earlier this year, she issued a press release touting the $2.7 million headed to New York border counties via Operation Stonegarden.

After New York Focus shared key findings with her office — including the at least two dozen immigration arrests facilitated by deputies on Stonegarden patrols — a spokesperson issued a statement backing the program.

“Governor Hochul will always support local law enforcement in securing our borders and maintaining public safety, but this administration will not aid ICE in federal civil immigration enforcement or support attacks on New York communities,” the spokesperson said, without acknowledging that Stonegarden aids Border Patrol in immigration enforcement. 

Operation Stonegarden remains shrouded in secrecy.

When deputies complete a Stonegarden patrol, they fill out a “Daily Activity Report” that includes fields for the number of vehicle stops, penal code violations, and the total number of people turned over to Border Patrol. New York Focus filed records requests for these reports with each of the 13 border counties, but only five released records. 

Others claimed that only Border Patrol could release the records or that they no longer had access to them after submitting them to the Department of Homeland Security. Without those reports, it’s impossible to know what deputies did on their Stonegarden shifts. (Several of the counties that refused to release records, including Erie and Monroe, the largest on the border, told New York Focus that immigration enforcement is not part of Stonegarden’s purview.) 

Beyond the immigration arrests New York Focus tallied, records also describe deputies turning over an additional 21 people to Border Patrol without specifying why, raising the possibility that some were arrested for immigration violations.

To track the rising use of artificial intelligence in political communications, New York Focus analyzed 54 opinion articles attributed to New York elected officials that have been published since May 1 by three prominent news outlets: City & State, the Albany Times Union, and the New York Daily News. We ran each of those op-eds through the AI-detection tool Pangram and contacted the officials whose pieces were flagged as containing AI content.

Nine politicians — including the governor’s running mate, the mayor of Albany, and the chair of the Senate technology committee — acknowledged that they or a co-author used AI in producing 10 different articles. Another five said they could not be sure whether AI was used, four denied using AI, and nine did not respond to requests for comment. Twenty-six of the articles were classified by Pangram as fully human-written.

Just over half of the pieces — 28 in total — included text that Pangram identified as AI-generated.

New York Focus is only naming politicians who acknowledged using AI, since Pangram's detection software is not foolproof. The software works by training an AI model on millions of examples of both human- and AI-generated text; independent analyses have found that it has a near-zero rate of identifying human writing as AI. The company says its latest model has a false-positive rate of 0.0041 percent.

None of the pieces disclosed the use of AI — even though lawmakers passed a bill this year that, if signed by the governor, would require news outlets to disclose substantial AI content. (One outlet, City & State, added disclosures to some articles after receiving New York Focus’s questions.)

The findings show how AI is already shaping a critical part of politicians’ jobs: the way they communicate with the public. These instances of AI writing are harder to track than some previous cases, like the uncanny fake videos released by Andrew Cuomo in last year’s New York City mayoral race and by Bruce Blakeman in this year’s contest for governor.

Elected officials have long relied on staff to ghostwrite their op-eds, a practice that many of the officials reached by New York Focus were quick to note. Relying on AI tools could be viewed as just another form of outsourcing. And about half of U.S. adults now say they use AI chatbots, according to a June survey by Pew Research Center.

But the public has reacted with outrage to even minor uses of AI in politics. Cuomo’s mayoral campaign faced an uproar last year over a single citation in his housing plan that revealed the use of ChatGPT for research, even as his aides insisted that AI was not used as a writing tool.

Adrienne Adams, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor and former New York City Council speaker, acknowledged through a spokesperson that AI was used to compose her Daily News op-ed from May touting her record on child care. The spokesperson said that after Adams joined Hochul’s re-election ticket, Adams’s team used AI to compile and summarize her public comments and transcripts from internal interviews about child care and family issues.

Albany Mayor Dorcey Applyrs acknowledged that her office used AI to help write her July op-ed in the Times Union about the city’s fiscal crisis. Her spokesperson Zipporah Hommel did not give details about how AI was used, but said the mayor’s office used “a host of digital tools, including generative AI, to support synthesizing, editing, and proofreading content.”

“All content is vetted and fact-checked by members of the team for accuracy and cohesiveness before being distributed,” Hommel said.

Frank Morano, a Republican City Council member from Staten Island, confirmed that he used ChatGPT to compose a City & State op-ed published in May about legalizing bodega cats, co-bylined with State Assemblymember Keith Powers. Morano said he used AI to “organize and refine” his ideas, but emphasized that he and his staff edited the piece.

“I don’t view AI as fundamentally different from other technologies that have changed how people work,” Morano said in an interview. “The question is, are you representing someone else’s views as your own? These are 100 percent my positions and AI helps me organize my ideas and communicate more efficiently sometimes.”

But the stakes of publishing AI-generated content could soon get higher. In June, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require news outlets to add disclaimers to any published content “substantially composed, authored or otherwise created” through the use of generative AI. If an outlet publishes AI content without that disclosure, the attorney general would be empowered to investigate and seek penalties starting at $1,000. 

The so-called FAIR News Act would likely apply to op-eds submitted by outside contributors like elected officials, according to both its supporters and critics.

“The public needs to understand that something was largely generated,” said state Senator Patricia Fahy, the bill’s prime sponsor. “I just think we’re at the beginning of trying to regulate this.”

Hochul has not taken a position on the bill, and her office said only that she would review it. The FAIR News Act was supported by labor unions but opposed by news industry groups like the New York News Publishers Association, which argues that the bill would violate the First Amendment, risk politicized investigations against news outlets, and create too much uncertainty about what constitutes “substantially” AI-generated content. (New York Focus is a member of the News Publishers Association.)

Most of the officials contacted by New York Focus said their AI use was limited; none admitted to fully AI-generating any piece of writing, although some were identified by Pangram as extensively AI-written.

City Councilmember Harvey Epstein’s office suggested its staff would reevaluate their use of AI after acknowledging to New York Focus that the technology was used in a pair of City & State op-eds on horse-drawn carriages and after-school programming that he co-authored with colleagues in the City Council and state legislature. Epstein spokesperson Jackson Fischer-Ward said both pieces were “conceived and written by our communications team.”

“As part of the editing and proofreading process, AI tools were used in a supplemental way. We’re evaluating if AI tools will be part of the editing and proofreading process in future written communications,” Fischer-Ward added.

Some officials said AI made its way into their op-eds through co-authors and group writing efforts. Councilmember Julie Won acknowledged using AI in a Daily News op-ed from June about her campaign for Congress, telling New York Focus that a three-person team used AI “to help refine and suggest edits for our final draft,” but adding that “the ideas and substance are our own.” 

“And as the op-ed reads, my voice and my opinions are captured by my team from multiple sessions of brainstorming, reviews, and edits, and as our final step we had AI suggest edits,” Won said. “As an immigrant and second language speaker, the tools help refine the final product but it does not have the capability to replace myself and my team for my identity and our campaign’s mission.”

AI was also used in a City & State op-ed about the city’s waterways co-authored by Councilmember Virginia Maloney and Julie Raskin, leader of the nonprofit Waterfront Alliance, according to Raskin.

“The op-ed was written by staff and AI was used to edit for clarity, in accordance with the Waterfront Alliance’s generative AI policy,” Raskin said in a statement. She added that the piece was then edited by staff of the Waterfront Alliance and Maloney’s office.

And state Senator Kristen Gonzalez, a leading advocate for AI regulation and chair of the chamber’s technology committee, confirmed that AI was used in an op-ed she bylined in City & State calling for data-center regulation. Gonzalez’s spokesperson, Kat Deus Veloso, said Gonzalez’s office did not use AI, but that one of several “stakeholders” that contributed to the article acknowledged “using AI to assist them.” (Veloso declined to name that person. The Pangram analysis identified only one paragraph as AI-generated, a much smaller share than in most of the other pieces.)

Are you aware of notable ways that AI is being used in government or politics? We want to hear from you. Contact reporter Nick Garber at nick@nysfocus.com, or on Signal at @garber.01.

Other officials called their use of AI a legitimate writing tool, in moderation. Councilmember Shahana Hanif said her office used AI to help write her City & State op-ed about mass surveillance at Madison Square Garden, co-bylined with a surveillance oversight advocate. 

“My team and I have used AI tools to perform office functions, including limited writing and editing, and to make our work more efficient,” Hanif said in a statement, adding that the technology should be used responsibly and regulated to prevent abuse.

And a staffer for Assemblymember Landon Dais said his office used AI to edit his Daily News op-ed about deed theft after the newspaper asked them to shorten the piece by more than 800 words to fit in the print edition. Dais’s chief of staff, Quintin Maidment, said it was not the first time his office had used the technology.

“In general, we use AI to make content clearer, to analyze research, to provide translation and to design flyers,” Maidment said in an email. “This allows our staff to do their jobs more effectively and helps a small office handle a very large volume of work.”

Five other officials said they did not know whether AI was used because so many people had a hand in writing a given op-ed.

Reached for comment, editors for the three publications expressed varying levels of concern.

Peter Sterne, news and opinion editor for City & State, said the use of AI violated the publication’s policies. Following New York Focus’s inquiry, the publication added disclaimers to the five articles whose authors acknowledged AI use.

“In the past, we have relied on the honor system, but going forward, we plan to run every op-ed submission through AI detection tools,” Sterne said in an email. (Sterne previously worked at New York Focus.)

Andrew Julien, executive editor of the Daily News, said in an email: “We appreciate the information provided by New York Focus. We will review the op-eds in question along with our processes regarding disclosure of AI use to assure compliance with internal policies and best practices.”

Akum Norder, senior editor for opinion at the Times Union, said in an email that the newspaper expects all submitted content to be “original.” The publication is “not OK” with contributors using AI to do their writing for them, but finds it acceptable to use AI for editing and proofreading.

Norder said she had not suspected AI authorship in Albany Mayor Applyrs’s op-ed because an initial draft contained punctuation errors and because the piece resembled the writing style of four previous pieces that Applyrs had submitted to the newspaper.

“AI is only going to get better at writing and harder to detect,” Norder said. “As technology evolves, our procedures will evolve with them, as best they can.”

Camille Rivera, a progressive Democratic strategist, said she recently rejected a client’s suggestion to use AI to compose a written piece as part of a political campaign, worrying it would compromise the candidate’s integrity.

“We’re not going to run an AI campaign. That’s not what voters want,” she recalled saying. “They want to see what your real thoughts are.”

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry was prized for its mystery. “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio taught them about kindness and acceptance. “Freak the Mighty” by Rodman Philbrick showed them the power of friendship. 

Now, she said, they don’t read any. Instead, students often spend class time reading excerpts and short stories to better prepare them for the sorts of questions they’d encounter on standardized exams.

The demands of her school’s reading program leave no room to study novels, the English teacher said.

“We’re told that we cannot deviate from the program, and if you have to do the program, there’s literally no time,” Pipia said. 

Another New York City middle school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said her school taught novels before the pandemic. Now, “it can be done, but not with the constraints placed on us as teachers,” she said. 

For the past few years, her school has required her to have her students — most of whom are English language learners and struggling readers — spend half of each 40-minute class period, four days a week, completing an online targeted reading intervention program, she said. They often end up clicking through the program and visiting Spotify and YouTube instead. The remainder of the period is devoted to the school’s core curriculum, which does not require novel studies. 

The classroom library she spent a decade building has become “purely decorative,” she said. With teachers no longer using books, her school is “literally throwing them away.” Even if she had the time to teach a book, the veteran teacher said, her students either have no interest in reading or barely know how. 

“Half of them have never read a book,” she said. “In 10 years, we went from kids reading multiple novels in class to them having never opened a book.” 

All New York City elementary schools and most middle schools use one of three city-approved reading curricula. Two of them — EL Education and Wit and Wisdom — require full-length books, while HMH Into Reading and Into Literature do not.

In a statement provided to New York Focus, New York City Public Schools Press Secretary Nicole Brownstein emphasized that English class is “not the only time students have access to full texts.” 

“Literacy is foundational for every child’s success and every New York City Public Schools student has access to whole books both in their classrooms and via the citywide digital library,” she said, adding that there was a 14 percent increase in digital book checkouts last school year compared to the year prior. 

There’s limited data on how much students are actually reading in school. In New York state, where districts have significant autonomy over curriculum, reading programs can vary widely depending on the district, campus, and even classroom. 

For more than a decade, classrooms across the state have been shifting away from full-length books and toward shorter literary works, largely to align with state learning standards and assessments. In interviews with New York Focus, English teachers from across the state lamented that teaching novels has also become more challenging because students have less stamina for or interest in reading them anymore — even in districts that still encourage it.

“I teach fewer novels because the kids simply cannot handle it,” said Lori Atkinson, a 37-year high school English teacher at the rural Copenhagen Central School District in the North Country.

Atkinson has seen a slump in endurance and attention span. She cited the impact of the Common Core, a set of academic standards for English and math that most US states, including New York, adopted in the 2010s. It placed a greater emphasis on students’ ability to analyze short, complex passages of text. (In 2017, New York eliminated Common Core and adopted a similar state-specific set of standards.) 

“I believe the decline in reading happened when we were forced to excerpt everything, because when you excerpt, you are not building stamina or background knowledge,” Atkinson said. “It became all about standardized tests and trying to get the mark that you were proficient.” 

But Atkinson primarily blames students’ lack of reading skills on technology, social media, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Teenagers addicted to instant gratification do not have the concentration and skills they need to stay engaged through a long novel, she said, and turn to AI to generate summaries for required reading.

When Atkinson taught ninth and 10th grade in the 1990s, she typically taught five novels and a Shakespeare play each year. Now, teaching 11th and 12th grade, she considers herself lucky to get through three books. She said she used to lend out 20 books a week to students, and now lends out one or two a month. 

The challenge extends beyond novels. Atkinson said that when she assigns a two-page article at the beginning of class, she often sees about half the class stop reading within three minutes. 

Even things that were once a treat are now a challenge to their attention spans. Last school year, after her seniors read “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, she showed them a five-minute movie trailer for the Netflix adaptation. She said most of the teenagers stopped paying attention halfway through. 

Saranac Lake Central School District in the Adirondacks, where high school English teacher Kelsey Francis has worked for 26 years, still encourages educators to teach full-length texts. 

In recent years, however, the number of books Francis can get through during the school year has dropped dramatically. She attributes that, in part, to how AI has affected teaching and learning. Francis has largely stopped assigning homework because she expects students will turn to AI to complete it. Instead, students have to do most of their work by hand in class. 

Making those changes has left significantly less class time for reading. 

It also takes students much longer to get through a book. Since the pandemic, Francis said, she’s seen a major decline in student vocabulary skills and stamina. 

“They fatigue after more than a few pages,” she said. “If I were to ask them to independently read for 30 minutes, that is going to be really tough.” 

English teacher and education consultant Emily Aierstok had a similar experience in her Capital Region school district. 

Because students have shorter attention spans, she’s had to slow down the pace of reading assignments. Instead of assigning two chapters of reading for kids to do at home, she now assigns one. And in addition to requiring 20 minutes of independent reading for homework, she now begins each class with five minutes of reading time to support struggling readers. 

But last school year, Aierstok’s seventh graders read eight books through in-class and independent reading — the most in her 26 years of teaching English. She said she’s been able to overcome challenges with student stamina and interest by giving her students agency in choosing which books to read. 

New York state’s English Language Arts standards require that students read “both shorter-text and excerpts, as well as full-length works.” In a statement to New York Focus, State Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare said the agency is committed to ensuring all students have access to skilled instruction, but also noted that local school boards and districts are responsible for selecting curricula and instructional materials. 

“Exposing all students to grade-level reading materials with age-appropriate complex ideas and language is critical to mastering the learning standards and developing the knowledge and skills necessary for success beyond the classroom,” the statement reads. 

Fewer than half of New York students in grades 3–8 are proficient in reading, according to state data. Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, said students’ lack of exposure to full-length books has contributed to the state’s literacy crisis. 

Smink said it’s important for students to read full-length books to build stamina, learn about context, and develop a love for reading. But he’s also concerned that too many students don’t have the foundational skills to reap the benefits of reading and said that teachers should be focused on building literacy earlier.

“Just giving a book to a kid that doesn’t have those foundational reading skills is also problematic and can lead to disengagement,” he said. 

Atkinson, the Copenhagen teacher, said it’s critical teachers continue teaching students full-length books to “rewire their brain” and show students the rewards of persistence. Younger educators are not being taught the importance of novel studies in college and in teacher preparatory programs, she said, so it’s up to veteran educators to spread awareness. 

“If we never teach them a novel, then shame on us because we’re the ones who are not giving them the opportunity to build those skills,” she said. “If all we expect from them is an excerpt, then all we’re going to get from them is the bare minimum.” 

Later this fall, counties across the state will pay more to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, running after a sharp decline in federal support.

Over 2.7 million New Yorkers are enrolled in SNAP, also known as food stamps; last year, the average household received $376 in monthly benefits. For decades, the costs of administering the program — from processing applications to issuing benefit cards — were evenly split between the federal government and states.

States will soon be responsible for 75 percent of program expenses, thanks to President Donald Trump’s 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill.” Starting this October, that will amount to an additional $168 million annually in New York. Beginning in fall 2027, as states start covering a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time in the program’s history, New York will also have to pay an estimated $1.1 billion in direct benefit costs.

Rather than using state funds, New York is making counties pay for most of the increase. Counties, in turn, are likely to pick up the tab through higher property taxes — or cutting other social services and staff.

New York’s approach makes it an outlier, says Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties, or NYSAC, which represents a coalition of county governments. Just two other states, New Jersey and North Carolina, are doing the same. 

Acquario said the decision — based on the state’s interpretation of a law that puts New York counties in charge of public benefits — offloads a “state responsibility” onto counties, which have fewer ways of raising revenue than the state. County social services departments are already navigating fast-moving federal changes to SNAP eligibility that have strained their budgets and staff. 

The state has tied individual counties’ cost increase to how many of their residents rely on SNAP and the amount of benefits they receive. Under state guidelines, the annual increase could range from roughly $27,000 in rural Hamilton County, where a few hundred residents receive SNAP benefits, to nearly $111 million in New York City, where more than 1.7 million residents across five counties are enrolled in the program. The projected median cost increase across the state is about $555,000. 

Several counties that spoke to New York Focus set aside funds to cover the cost increase in the last fiscal quarter of 2026, but have not yet figured out what they’ll do next year. More permanent changes, like property tax hikes, require formal approval from local officials.

Neither New York City’s Human Resources Administration, which oversees SNAP, nor Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office responded to requests for comment about how the city will cover rising SNAP costs. 

Many county leaders have been hoping for a reprieve from Washington or Albany. NYSAC, along with counterparts in New Jersey and North Carolina, has been lobbying Congress to delay the cost shift. NYSAC has also been urging Governor Kathy Hochul to include the costs in the state budget. So far, neither effort has been successful.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, Governor Mikie Sherrill earmarked $71 million to cover higher administrative SNAP costs over the next year, affording counties a transition period. The New Jersey budget, passed in June, also established a minimum monthly SNAP benefit of $95 per household; similar efforts in New York failed to gain traction.

“While the State cannot replace the loss of federal partnership, Governor Sherrill’s budget works to blunt the impact and protect New Jersey families during this transition,” noted Maggie Garbarino, a spokesperson for Sherrill, in an email. 

Hochul’s office did not respond to questions from New York Focus. The governor “has been clear that no state can backfill these federal funding cuts alone,” spokesperson Nicolette Simmonds wrote in a statement. “As these federal cuts take effect, the State will continue to work with counties and local governments to ensure residents have access to critical resources.”

Counties’ financial burden will balloon even more next October, when states will start paying a portion of monthly SNAP benefits in addition to administrative costs — a change that could cost New York an additional $1.1 billion annually. The state expects counties to foot this bill, too, says NYSAC, but has not yet disclosed how much individual counties will pay. 

New York has a history of shifting the burden of public benefits onto counties, says Acquario. Amid the Great Recession, Albany permanently changed the cost share for Safety Net Assistance, a state program that provides temporary cash assistance to needy households, requiring counties to cover 71 percent instead of 50.

Property taxes remain one of the few ways counties can raise revenue, but not all are willing or able to do so. Earlier this year, a dozen counties hit a state cap limiting how much local governments can increase their levies each year — which Acquario finds alarming. It signals that counties are struggling to balance their books, he said, and that they’re likely ill-equipped to absorb additional costs. 

Washington County, in the Capital Region, increased its levy by nearly 17 percent this year, but it estimates that it will have to spend $78 of every $100 it collects in taxes on state and federal mandates such as SNAP or Medicaid, leaving the county with limited room to fund staff salaries and services. 

To cover its increase in administrative SNAP costs — projected at $574,558 — the county’s Department of Social Services has kept vacant positions unfilled, leaving a smaller staff with more paperwork thanks to recent changes in SNAP eligibility. It’s unclear how much the county will have to pay in SNAP benefits starting in 2027, and officials are just beginning to discuss how to cover it. 

“We’re going to plan for the worst and hope for the best,” said department Commissioner Duane Vaughn. 

In nearby Warren County, the board of supervisors voted to raise the levy by 12 percent, exceeding its tax cap. Director of Public Affairs Don Lehman attributed the increase to rising SNAP costs and other surging expenses like retirement and staff health insurance.

“Warren County would greatly appreciate relief from New York State on SNAP costs, Medicaid costs and other unfunded New York state mandates,” Lehman wrote, adding that staff are “looking at any and all feasible options to limit spending and increase revenue without raising taxes” next year.

By contrast, Ulster County is seeking to avoid regressive property tax increases by targeting wealthy residents. A proposed surcharge would raise income taxes by as much as 2 percent on single earners making over $250,000 or couples making over $500,000.

Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger called the proposal a “modest step” toward creating a “fairer system” in a county where a large share of residents already spend at least half their income on housing and struggle to afford basic necessities. 

If the measure is approved by the state legislature in the upcoming legislative session — Ulster’s state delegates have introduced twin bills to implement the surcharge — the county could raise between $9 million and $11 million annually to help cover higher SNAP costs, including a projected $738,057 bump in administrative costs this October and nearly $8 million in direct benefits next fall. Ulster is also expecting its share of annual Medicaid costs to rise next year.

“Everyday people simply can’t afford to shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost of funding essential government services,” Metzger said.

A Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy was patrolling near a strip mall in Watertown, 30 miles south of New York’s border with Canada, last December, when he spotted a Chevrolet cargo van. He noted three traffic violations: failing to turn on headlights, signaling improperly before making a turn, and driving with cracked glass.

The deputy, Shawn Bulger, stopped the vehicle and learned that the driver, a 52-year-old man, was a native of Brazil. He had a Pennsylvania driver’s license; his passenger was carrying a Brazilian passport. The deputy recorded in sparse detail what happened next: He called a Border Patrol officer “who came to assist.”

“Both individuals were detained and transported to BP Station for deportation,” he wrote.

The call to Border Patrol wasn’t necessary to address the alleged traffic violations, and it had nothing to do with any state crime. But that day, it was very much part of the county deputy’s job. He was conducting a special overtime patrol as part of his agency’s participation in Operation Stonegarden, a federal program that pays local law enforcement to work with US Border Patrol.

A New York Focus investigation has found that in some counties, the program has turned local cops into occasional immigration agents. Available records show that New York sheriff’s deputies on Stonegarden detail have reported turning over at least 24 immigrants to Border Patrol since 2023, mostly after traffic stops. That’s likely an undercount; the records are sourced from five of the 13 participating counties, and New York Focus’s tally does not include an additional 21 people whom deputies turned over to Border Patrol for reasons they did not explain in their reports.

Since 2009, a few years after the program launched on the US–Mexico border, Stonegarden has funneled tens of millions of dollars to the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which has doled out about $30 million to New York’s border counties for local deputies and police to conduct traffic stops and patrol marinas and trails. The counties also use Stonegarden funds to buy equipment, particularly surveillance technology like automatic license plate readers. 

Several sheriffs told New York Focus that Stonegarden patrols have nothing to do with immigration enforcement, focusing instead on drug interdiction or preventing human trafficking. But at least three counties have used the funds to assist in immigration arrests, records show.

The revelations come as New York leaders vow to combat President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Earlier this year, the state enacted legislation banning a controversial type of formal partnership between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as a 287(g) agreement. Passed under the banner “local cops, local crimes,” the measure was a response to concerns that local police were assisting federal agents with immigration arrests.

“We’re sending a strong message to ICE: You will not weaponize local police officers against their own communities in the state of New York,” Governor Kathy Hochul said in January.

To obtain Operation Stonegarden contracts and daily activity reports, New York Focus filed public records requests to the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services and to all of the New York counties that participate in the program. Most counties denied the requests, claiming that the documents are exempt from disclosure, that they no longer had access to them, that only Border Patrol could release them, or that they had no records. New York Focus is continuing to press for the documents.

Yet the measure Hochul signed into law left local cops free to work with immigration agents outside of 287(g) agreements, including through lesser-known programs like Operation Stonegarden.

State Senator Andrew Gounardes, who’s among a group of legislators pushing for a broader ban on local collusion with immigration agents, said New York Focus’s findings regarding Stonegarden show why stricter policies are necessary.

“I think we should push for more guardrails and more answers to these questions, and ask why local police are being funded to turn people over to the federal government based on the suspicion that they’re here without status,” he said.

State Senator Rachel May, whose Syracuse-area district includes a sliver of Lake Ontario, described the program as potentially “an end-run around what we were trying to do” by banning 287(g) contracts.

Hochul and other Democrats have boosted Stonegarden, this year touting the $2.7 million award as part of millions in federal funding to “support counterterrorism and emergency preparedness efforts.” The governor’s public statements about the program don’t mention immigration enforcement.

In response to New York Focus’s findings, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office said in a statement that the governor “will always support local law enforcement in securing our borders and maintaining public safety.”

“This administration will not aid ICE in federal civil immigration enforcement,” the statement said. The spokesperson did not acknowledge that through Operation Stonegarden, local police are assisting Border Patrol — like ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security — with exactly that.

The federal government paid Jefferson County just over $800 for the 10-hour shift during which a deputy stopped the Brazilian man in Watertown, records show. The form the deputy completed to document his work that day included fields for number of vehicle stops, penal code violations — and total number of people turned over to Border Patrol.

The driver, who asked to be identified by his last name, Martins, told New York Focus that he and his brother-in-law had just left work at a construction site for a lunch break when the sheriff’s deputy pulled him over. He did have a cracked windshield, he said, but insisted he had signalled appropriately and didn’t need to turn on his lights because it was midday.

“He simply approached me so he could call Border Patrol,” Martins said.

Border Patrol agents showed up within 10 minutes, he said. Bulger didn’t write him a ticket, he added.

Bulger did not respond to a request for comment. Jefferson County Sheriff Peter Barnett did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. 

Martins, who had lived in the US for almost five years and was in the process of appealing a deportation order, wound up detained by ICE in the Broome County Jail for two months before a federal judge ordered a bond hearing. He was released on a $50,000 bond in early February; his family had to borrow money to pay it.

To keep up with payments, Martins works from 7:30 am to 8 pm almost every day at a construction site in Maryland, he said. His months-long detention was wrong, he believes, in part because of how it started, with a traffic stop on a cold winter day.

“I felt at that moment that my constitutional rights were being violated,” he said. “I felt that it was almost illegal.”

Every border county in New York receives funds through Operation Stonegarden, in amounts ranging from $100,000 to $325,000 this year, plus $90,000 for the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe.

Stonegarden’s funding for overtime patrols is meant to give deputies time and resources to help Border Patrol “secure U.S. international borders,” according to the counties’ contracts with the state. Deputies on a Stonegarden shift aren’t supposed to respond to regular calls involving local crimes unless necessary. Instead, they keep an eye on the interstates and state roads that run toward Canada, as well as waterways and trails near the border. They submit “daily activity reports” to the Department of Homeland Security to document each shift.

In Jefferson and Oswego counties, those reports show that deputies have helped detain at least 23 immigrants since 2023. Chautauqua County deputies turned over at least one person to Border Patrol in 2023. The records do not indicate that the people apprehended had recently crossed over into the United States.

In written responses to New York Focus’s questions, Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone said that Border Patrol has not directed departments participating in Stonegarden to enforce immigration law. At the same time, he wrote, department policy calls for contacting Border Patrol when officers encounter undocumented immigrants during criminal investigations or arrests. 

Documents and video footage obtained by New York Focus show how some of the arrests unfolded.

On April 1, 2025, Oswego County Deputy Michael Fera summarized his shift with the line: “Turned over 8 illegal immigrants to USBP.”

Body camera footage from that day shows a deputy pulling over a red pickup truck near a church in Fulton, New York.

“You took like a big winding right, then you were just speeding a little quick back here,” the deputy says. The driver tells him that he and his passengers — all men in work clothes — are on their way to a construction job. 

As the deputy walks back to his vehicle, holding the man’s license and registration, he crosses paths with a Border Patrol agent.

“Sup, man,” the deputy says. The two men bump fists. At the end of the 23-minute video, Border Patrol agents lead two of the truck’s passengers into their van.

That same day, an Oswego County deputy conducted another traffic stop that resulted in Border Patrol detaining several more people on their way to work, including a man named Antelmo Labato. In an incident report, Fera wrote that he had been patrolling with a Border Patrol agent when they arrested Labato.

The agent later told him that Labato had a 15-year-old US citizen son who would have no other guardians once Labato was deported, the deputy wrote. He contacted the county Department of Social Services so they could look for a foster family for the boy, who eventually joined his father in Mexico. Fera declined to comment.

Many of the immigration arrests initiated by Oswego County deputies, including Labato’s, were previously reported by Syracuse.com. Last year, the attorney general opened an investigation into the Oswego County Sheriff’s Office’s interactions with federal law enforcement involving immigration. The office declined to comment about Operation Stonegarden and told New York Focus it had no updates on its investigation into Oswego.

Oswego County Sheriff Don Hilton did not respond to emails and phone messages requesting comment. Last year, he told the Oswego Palladium-Times that a small fraction of traffic stops his deputies conducted resulted in a call to Border Patrol. Half of those calls involved an ongoing criminal investigation, and the other half were to ask federal agents for translation help, he said. Syracuse.com reported earlier this year that the sheriff’s office said its deputies had conducted no stops with federal agents in 2026.

In another body camera video, an Oswego sheriff’s deputy pulls over a white box truck with expired registration and discovers that the two men inside, who only speak Spanish, lack driver’s licenses. He calls a tow truck to take the vehicle they’re not allowed to drive — and a Spanish-speaking Border Patrol agent to “explain the tickets.”

The men waited nearly an hour for the agent to arrive. Local police in New York are allowed to contact federal agents to report that they suspect someone of being in the country illegally, but they can’t detain people for civil immigration offenses — like overstaying a visa — without a warrant. That includes situations where police hold someone longer than needed to process their criminal charges so immigration agents can arrive to pick them up, Attorney General Letitia James wrote in 2020.

When the agent finally arrives, he describes the traffic violations, then asks the men what countries they’re from and if they have documents to be in the US. The video doesn’t capture their full answers. The agent then pats the men down and directs them into his car.

“Good to go, bro,” the agent says to the Oswego deputy after he shuts the door.

Eleven of the Stonegarden immigration arrests that New York Focus identified took place in Jefferson County, a summer travel destination bordering Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Deputies reported turning over an additional 17 people to Border Patrol without specifying why they did so. Three of the confirmed immigration arrests took place in the first five months of 2026, the most recent timeframe for which New York Focus obtained records.

“Three subjects turned over to Border Patrol after a traffic stop on state Route 177 in the Town of Adams,” a deputy wrote after a Stonegarden detail in April.

The records show that Jefferson County deputies have also assisted Border Patrol agents with surveillance, sharing information about vehicles of interest with the agency’s Targeting Unit, which identifies people to arrest. On December 30, 2025, one officer spent 90 minutes surveilling a construction site in Watertown.

Sheriff’s departments in five counties told New York Focus that their agencies’ work with Stonegarden doesn’t involve immigration enforcement. That includes the two largest border counties in the state, Erie and Monroe. (Neither county agreed to make agency leaders available for interviews, and an Erie County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions.)

Instead, the departments said, the fund supports efforts to deter crime across an international border that receives far less attention than its southern counterpart.

“A civil immigration thing — that’s not what we do,” said Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck. “What we are concerned with is, is there some type of criminal activity connected to our border? Human trafficking, someone running guns or drugs.”

In response to questions from New York Focus, a US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said that Stonegarden enables to state and local law enforcement to “jointly enhance security along the United States land and water borders.”

Quattrone said that in Chautauqua County, the funding has been particularly useful to help his agency patrol Lake Erie and respond to marine emergencies. The resources Stonegarden provides are useful for boating accidents and search-and-rescue missions as well as working with federal partners “when activity on the lake raises legitimate border-security concerns.”

Records show that officers have spent much of their time during Stonegarden patrols conducting traffic stops that result only in citations. Some mention undercover purchases of illicit drugs or marijuana seizures. Deputies described participating in boat patrols on Lake Erie and snowmobile patrols on trails in the North Country. Many reports include lines like, “No suspicious activity was observed.”

New York Focus obtained daily activity reports from Cayuga and Wyoming counties that showed deputies on Stonegarden details recorded no immigration arrests.

“We do not enforce immigration laws in Wyoming County, and that is not part of that detail whatsoever,” said Undersheriff Colin P. B. Reagan. “We’re not asking about citizenship, we’re not asking anything like that.”

Yet with little oversight from the state, the program has sometimes resulted in the kind of formal working relationship between New York law enforcement and immigration agents that state leaders have vowed to halt.

The state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services said that Stonegarden funding “supports the fight against terrorism and transnational crime.” After New York Focus shared the key findings in this story, an agency spokesperson said that Stonegarden is “not related to civil immigration enforcement so we do not track or deal with immigration issues in the management of the grant program.”

In New York and nationally, Operation Stonegarden has largely flown under the radar, in part because it’s relatively small compared to other federal law enforcement programs, costing less than $100 million annually. A 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found weak oversight of Stonegarden spending and little effort to measure what it was actually achieving.

“Border Patrol is unable to accurately depict how border security has been enhanced by program funds,” the report noted.

Many of the daily activity reports reviewed by New York Focus contain few details. Sometimes, officers reported conducting no stops of any kind during a Stonegarden shift. 

In Chautauqua County, where deputies frequently reported patrolling local beaches and marinas and talking to community members, one report appeared to satirize uneventful shifts. 

“On today’s tour I showed up with a half unbuttoned shirt, dirty boots, and coppehagen in my mustache,” said a report filed in May 2023, referring to a brand of dipping tobacco. “I sat around for about an hour and a half. I drove to Hanover and got a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I went to sunset and stared at the beach for about 3 hours. Then I drove to Pizza Village and ordered ½ turkey sub, slice of pizza, deep fried mushrooms, and a root beer. I then drove to Ripley for another chew and a nap, by that time it was 2300 and I was $450 less broke, end of tour.”

Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone told New York Focus that the report was completed by someone other than the deputy under whose name it was filed “as a practical joke.”

“How it ended up in the official files I do not know,” he wrote. “The individual who completed the report has been dealt with appropriately.”

Since President Trump returned to office, officials and residents in some counties have criticized the program for potentially opening the door for local police to conduct immigration enforcement.

Last year, seven Monroe County legislators voted against accepting Stonegarden funds. This year, the grant drew more opposition, and activists who oppose local collaboration with immigration authorities launched a campaign to try to defeat it.

“We recognize that other law enforcement agencies across the country may elect to use this agreement to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement,” Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Michael Fowler wrote to county lawmakers last month. “However, our law enforcement powers are granted by NYS and we must follow NYS law. Therefore, we are prohibited from Immigration enforcement duties by NYS law.”

On August 11, the legislature voted 17–12 to accept the funding.

Earlier this year, after New York Focus uncovered that Oswego County sheriff’s deputies held immigrants at traffic stops until Border Patrol agents arrived, residents packed a meeting of the county legislature to call for police to stop working with immigration authorities. A woman named Connie Alpeter brought up Stonegarden.

“Even counties without formal ICE agreements can still contribute to immigration enforcement activities,” she said. “This is why Operation Stonegarden deserves closer public scrutiny.”

On Wednesday evening, the chair of the party, Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, announced a plan to dramatically expand who would vote in an upcoming internal party election to choose its chair. New York Focus obtained and is publishing the full text of that plan, the details of which have not been previously reported.

The shift comes after a reform-minded coalition of local Democratic clubs and politicians called Brooklyn Can’t Wait picked up eight district leader seats during the June Democratic Party elections. That grew the coalition to include 22 of the borough’s 42 district leaders — just enough to unseat Bichotte Hermelyn in the election. In July, the coalition announced that it had united behind District Leader Julio Peña III for the role.

Peña III has promised to focus on defeating Republicans in elections across Brooklyn and to reform the borough’s patronage-laden judicial system.

Bichotte Hermelyn sent a text to district leaders late Wednesday announcing a special meeting to consider her proposed bylaw changes. The meeting will take place on August 25 at the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club.

The eight challengers elected in June have not yet taken office, so votes would instead be cast by district leaders who lost to them. If all 42 district leaders vote, the proposal would need 22 votes to pass. (New York Focus called the district leaders who lost to challengers; most did not answer, and one, Heriberto Mateo, said he didn’t know how he’d vote.)

In an interview Wednesday on NY1’s Inside City Hall, Bichotte Hermelyn said the proposal would make the party more inclusive and combat “backroom politics.”

“We know that we are the largest Democratic Party in the entire nation,” she said. “However, we realize that we have the fewest number of people making major decisions. We only have 42 district leaders who are making decisions for 1.2 million Democrats.”

She also said that under the current rules, it’s far from clear that the coalition supporting Peña III would deliver the 22 votes needed to elect him, since the district leaders pledged to him could waver.

On Wednesday, Bichotte Hermelyn said the amendments would now newly give 26 county committee executive officers voting rights in the leadership election this fall. A copy of the proposal obtained by New York Focus shows that includes a dozen newly created positions, as well as giving such rights to officers whose positions had been ceremonial.

The new leadership positions would be chosen by the party’s county committee, but Bichotte Hermelyn’s control over that committee and the practice of proxy voting would make the outcome a “fait accompli,” according to Bryan Maygers, a spokesperson for the New Kings Democrats, a political club that led the charge to unseat Bichotte Hermelyn. The chair would also likely exert major influence over a more complex process to add 21 new voting members in December, he said. 

The additions would leave the chair in control of more voting members than there are elected district leaders, making future leadership elections ‘meaningless,’ Maygers said.

The proposal would also grant any former party leader permanent voting rights. That could give a vote to former district leader and Assemblymember Clarence Norman, a convicted felon.

Another proposal states that any future amendment to the party rules concerning “proxies” would require a supermajority vote to pass. Current proxy voting rules give the chair significant control over the county committee.

The Brooklyn Democratic Party did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Maygers predicted that reformers would challenge the plan in court. 

“I think it’s very likely that a lawsuit would come out of this,” Maygers said. “It’s disenfranchising all of the district leaders who won their elections. It’s essentially neutralizing all of those elected leaders and reassigning that power to a bunch of de facto appointments from the chair.”

This isn’t the first time a party chair has been accused of packing the party executive committee. Former Assemblymember Vito Lopez installed 11 new executive committee members, strengthening his grip on power. He eventually was forced to step down amid a sexual harassment and groping scandal. Lopez, who is now deceased, denied the allegations at the time.

Bichotte Hermelyn’s new proposal, which goes well beyond Lopez’s maneuver, would undo a reform reportedly passed in 2020 at the same meeting where she was elected chair. That reform barred county committee members from voting in internal elections, according to a blog post at the time by the New Kings Democrats.

Our investigation into the union — International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, or IBOTU — found that it enriches its leaders at the expense of its members, who are low-wage workers in grocery stores, ambulance companies, and home health care, among other industries. The union has repeatedly been targeted by federal regulators for labor law violations, and some of its leaders have been arrested for criminal activity.

IBOTU is also a family business: three of its current top officers married the founding president’s daughters. All three currently make about $1 million per year.

Our investigation is the first deep dive into the union, and its two chapters, Local 713 and Local 7. Here are a few of our key findings. 

1. IBOTU’s leaders make millions. Its members barely scrape by.

Last year, nine union officials in the entire country made more than $1 million. Four of them were part of IBOTU. The union has paid its leaders over $27 million dollars in the past decade.

Meanwhile, the union signs contracts that hardly benefit the workers whose dues pay those massive salaries. Some of those contracts limit annual raises to 25 cents per hour, while others grant workers just a few days to file grievances.

When IBOTU Local 713 unionized the home care company Caring Professionals, for example, nothing much improved for workers.

“My workers probably didn’t even feel anything different whatsoever, to be perfectly honest with you,” Julian Hagmann, the chief operating officer of Caring Professionals, told New York Focus.

Those workers now make “up to” $21 per hour, according to the company’s website — slightly above the legal minimum for their profession.

2. The union has repeatedly sided with bosses against workers.

Both the federal government and former union members have repeatedly accused IBOTU of collaborating with bosses, rather than helping workers.

Twice, the National Labor Relations Board, the federal body that regulates unions, ruled that Local 713 illegally collaborated with bosses to unionize workers who had not asked for it. In three other cases, the NLRB alleged similar behavior. All five ended with Local 713 disbanding the union chapters it had formed.

Arisnelda Rodriguez, a room cleaner at a Manhattan hotel, was involved in one of those cases in 2017 and 2018. Local 713 is “a union for bosses, for management only,” she told New York Focus. “Not for workers.”

3. Its leaders are tied to illegal and sketchy behavior.

The union’s founding president, Peter Hasho, who died in 2021, was indicted twice in connection with union corruption schemes, including one to steal $350,000 from a union welfare fund. He was eventually cleared in that case.

In 2014, Robert Scalza, Local 713’s director of organizing, was sentenced to six months of house arrest after enlisting the Genovese mob family to threaten a rival union.

And in 1994, Former Vice President Perry Scalza — Robert’s brother — was booted out of the Teamsters after signing friends and family up for a union health plan and rejecting members’ insurance claims, in a plot that was investigated by federal regulators.

The union’s current finances raise questions, too.

Since 2021, Local 713 has sent over $1.4 million to an entity called IFWU Local 345, which financial records refer to as an “independent union.” But the US Department of Labor, which tracks unions, told New York Focus that it has no record of any union with that name, and New York Focus could not find any evidence that IFWU actually exists. It’s not clear what happened to the $1.4 million.

IBOTU did not respond to detailed questions from New York Focus and refused requests for comment by phone, email, letter, and in person.

And then there were four officers of an obscure union based on Long Island whose 23,000 members include grocery store clerks, home health aides, paramedics, and other low-wage workers.

The union, called the International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, or IBOTU, is a family business. Three of its top officers married daughters of the union’s founding president, Peter Hasho, who died in 2021.

Last year, each of those sons-in-law made about $1 million. In the past decade, IBOTU has paid them and two other officers over $27 million — a sum equal to nearly half of the dues that union members paid in that time span.

Workers and other unions have repeatedly accused IBOTU of preying on the members whose dues pay their lavish salaries: forcing them into unions they didn’t ask for, signing contracts that hardly benefit them, and failing to fight back against firings and wage theft.

The National Labor Relations Board has ordered IBOTU to disband at workplaces on four separate occasions and accused it of plotting with employers to sign union contracts without workers’ consent. In a fifth case, the union agreed to disband in a settlement. 

IBOTU leaders have been arrested or investigated on suspicion of bribery, theft, and fraud. Its organizing director, Robert Scalza, once conspired with the Genovese crime family to extort a rival union. A federal judge banned him from being a union officer for three years, but once the ban expired, he was welcomed back to IBOTU with a raise. Last year, his salary crossed $1 million.

Some of the union’s dealings remain mysterious. Since 2021, it has sent over $1.4 million to an entity that its paperwork describes as a union but that the US Department of Labor has no record of. 

IBOTU did not respond to detailed questions from New York Focus and refused requests for comment by phone, email, letter, and in person.

Employers have often allied with IBOTU to block more worker-friendly unions, interviews and records obtained by New York Focus reveal.

Are you a current or former member of IBOTU Local 713 or Local 7, or do you have other knowledge about the union? We want to hear from you. Reach out to sam@nysfocus.com. You can remain anonymous.

One example: the New York City-based company Caring Professionals, which employs home health aides to care for elderly and disabled New Yorkers. In the early 2010s, the company sought out a branch of IBOTU called Local 713 in order to prevent a union drive by the powerful New York health care union 1199SEIU, according to Julian Hagmann, chief operating officer of Caring Professionals.

“We knew we needed a union, but we didn’t want to be forced into 1199,” Hagmann told New York Focus. “So we shopped around.”

1199 frequently wins significant raises and benefits for its members. But when Local 713 unionized Caring Professionals, it didn’t rock the boat.

“My workers probably didn’t even feel anything different whatsoever, to be perfectly honest with you,” Hagmann said.

A similar pattern played out at a New York City hotel several years ago. 

In June 2017, Arisnelda Rodriguez, a room cleaner at the then-non-union Cassa Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, was fired after mentioning potentially getting union benefits, according to allegations by the NLRB regional office and an interview with Rodriguez. 

This led to the remaining workers getting a union — but not one that they had asked for. 

A few days after Rodriguez was fired, management made employees sign union cards for Local 713, despite federal law barring employers from telling their workers to join a specific union.

The following week, Local 713 and the Cassa Hotel’s property manager inked a contract that allowed the hotel to begin deducting union dues and fees from workers’ paychecks. Employees got some modest benefits: a 50-cent-per-hour raise and a low-quality health plan that didn’t cover costs for family members.

But the scheme quickly unwound. After hearing about the weak benefits, a former Cassa employee told the workers there about the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, or HTC, New York’s influential hotel workers’ union. 

When workers heard about HTC’s gold-standard contracts and the huge raises it often wins for members, they realized they’d been duped, Rodriguez told New York Focus.

Soon after, she and other Cassa workers met with HTC organizers in a Starbucks near the hotel. After hearing their stories, the union filed a complaint with the NLRB, alleging that Cassa and Local 713 had violated federal labor law.

Local 713 “was being used by the employer to prevent the workers from signing up with a legitimate union,” said Rich Maroko, president of HTC, who was the union’s general counsel at the time. “I thought it was disgusting.”

HTC won the case: The NLRB ordered the hotel to cease dealing with Local 713 and void the union contract, rehire Rodriguez and give her $16,000 in back pay, and reimburse employees for all union dues and fees that had been deducted from their paychecks.

Then, in June 2018, workers at the Cassa Hotel voted to join HTC, and in 2019, the hotel agreed to the union’s top-quality contract. Every worker got at least a $5-per-hour raise and became eligible for a pension, severance pay, and a free, premium health plan that covered their whole families. Rodriguez’s hourly pay nearly doubled, from $12.50 when she was fired to about $24. 

Rodriguez still cleans rooms at the hotel, which is now called the Truss. As an HTC member, she makes over $42 per hour. She told New York Focus that she and her family have “the best benefits in the world.”

She’s still angry at Local 713, though. 

“It’s a union for bosses, for management only,” she said. “Not for workers.”

The contract that Local 713 signed in this case wasn’t unusual. Other IBOTU contracts cap annual raises at 25 cents per hour or give workers just days to file grievances. After reviewing several examples, labor lawyer Daniel Bright said that the agreements “give management a lot of unfettered powers” and “seem to be mostly about protecting management’s rights.”

A few years before it unionized Cassa, Local 713 tried something similar a few miles to the north, according to NLRB findings. 

In 2012, Sprain Brook Manor, a Scarsdale nursing home, fired its entire staff, which was unionized with 1199, and then rehired them through nonunion contractors.

1199 attempted to negotiate with the new management, but the home instead struck a deal with Local 713 that lowered wages and benefits for many workers. Workers were told they had to sign Local 713 cards to keep their jobs, and several pro-1199 workers were fired. 

1199 filed unfair labor practice charges against its rival union and the nursing home. In 2017, after four years of litigation, the NLRB reinstated 1199 and ordered Local 713 to dissolve its union at the nursing home. Representatives of Sprain Brook and 1199 declined to comment.

In three other cases in the 2010s, rival unions filed charges with the NLRB accusing Local 713 of illegally collaborating with management or accepting management’s help to promote the union. At one home care company in Brooklyn, according to NLRB records, Local 713 agents were invited to solicit union cards during a mandatory staff meeting. The company threatened to withhold health and retirement benefits if employees did not sign. Like the Sprain Brook and Cassa Hotel cases, all three ended with Local 713 disbanding its chapters at those workplaces.

Workers are still complaining about IBOTU. In multiple lawsuits, former IBOTU members have said that Local 713 did nothing to help them keep their jobs when they were fired.

Last November, Joseph Franqui was fired from his job as the food service director of a Staten Island assisted living facility, where he was a Local 713 member, according to allegations in an ongoing lawsuit. His colleague, union representative Jeff Elkins, was present at the meeting where Franqui was fired. Elkins didn’t do anything to defend him and instead “aligned with management’s position,” Franqui claimed. Reached by phone, Elkins declined to comment and referred New York Focus to the home’s administrator, Patrice Ficco, who also declined to comment. None of the defendants have yet responded to Franqui’s claims in court.

In the suit, Franqui says he was never given a reason for his termination. A month earlier, he claims, the nursing home’s management had warned him to stop raising concerns about workplace conditions and said that he could lose his job if he continued.

After being fired, Franqui, who declined to speak with New York Focus for this story, sent a written complaint to Local 713’s leaders, alleging that the union had failed to represent him. The union replied to say that Franqui was not a union member — even though Franqui claims his employment papers stated that he was a member and he had been paying union dues throughout his tenure.

The union promised to refund his dues and other payments, but never did, Franqui claims. Local 713 did not respond to questions from New York Focus about the suit.

Founded in 1995, IBOTU is currently led by union presidents Richard Dombrowski and Robert Vella Jr. It’s headquartered in a small, one-story building in Carle Place, Long Island, an inner suburb of New York City.

For several years in the 2000s, it allied with another notorious management-friendly union, the International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades, which was the subject of a 2024 investigation by The City Reporter. But IBOTU went too far even for that union: in 2011, IBOTU was expelled after violating a labor peace agreement by attempting to poach members from a rival. Since 2017, IBOTU’s financial disclosures have claimed an association with the powerful International Longshoremen’s Association, but it is not clear what that relationship entails. ILA did not respond to a request for comment.

Local 713 most recently attracted attention in 2022, when it quickly abandoned an effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey amid negative reporting on the union by the New York Post. The following year, the union’s former bookkeeper pleaded guilty to stealing over $120,000 from the union in a case that made Long Island news. 

Several of its leaders have checkered pasts.

After Robert Scalza, the union’s organizing director, pleaded guilty to mob-related extortion in 2014, his lawyer submitted a batch of letters asking the judge for a lenient sentence. Three came from the heads of companies unionized by Local 713, and three more came from Scalza’s subordinates in the union’s administration. Not one came from a rank-and-file union member.

Peter Hasho, IBOTU’s founder and former president, was arrested and indicted in 1975 in connection with a union bribery scheme, and indicted again in 2003 in connection with a scheme to steal $350,000 from a union welfare fund. Hasho was cleared in the second case. Records don’t indicate what happened in the first.

Hasho’s salary peaked in 2018, when he made just over $1 million as the union’s “president emeritus.” A memorial plaque on the wall of IBOTU’s Carle Place office praises his “exemplary leadership” and “dedication and tireless devotion,” which “provided the foundation upon which this organization now stands.”

Former Vice President Perry Scalza, Robert’s brother, was ejected from the Teamsters in 1994 after enrolling friends and family in a union health plan while denying insurance claims from actual union members. 

Besides Local 713, IBOTU’s other sub-union is known as Local 7. There is little information available about its activities, what workers it represents, or what benefits it has won for them.

It has collected $18 million in dues since it was founded in 2018, and paid two-thirds of that money, taken straight from workers’ paychecks, to its leaders. All six are also on the payroll of Local 713. Beyond those salaries, Local 7 has spent nothing on typical union activities like contract negotiations and political organizing.

Two other IBOTU officers — Alfred Napolitano and Robert P. Vella — join Dombrowski, Vella Jr., and Scalza among the best-paid union officials in the country, each earning about $1 million in 2025, according to data from the US Department of Labor.

Other major New York unions spend far less on leadership salaries.

New York Focus’s attempts to interview union leadership were unsuccessful. A man who answered the phone at IBOTU offices declined to comment. When asked his name, he said, “That’s irrelevant,” and hung up the call shortly afterward.

When New York Focus visited the Carle Place office on a recent Thursday, a receptionist initially said that no union representatives were available because they only come to the office on Mondays. Eventually, a man who introduced himself as Robert Vella Jr., who made over $1 million last year as president of Local 7 and Secretary/Treasurer of Local 713, came to the front desk. He declined to answer any questions.

IBOTU also refused to answer questions about the large cash sums it has sent to a “union” that appears not to exist. Since 2021, Local 713 has sent over $1.4 million to an entity called IFWU Local 345, according to financial disclosures. The documents refer to IFWU as an “Independent Union,” but a US Department of Labor spokesperson said that the department “could not identify” any union with that name. New York Focus was unable to find any record of IFWU’s existence other than the cash it has received from Local 713. 

The address listed for IFWU on Local 713’s financial disclosure forms points to a single-family house in Far Rockaway. 

Amit Angel, a real estate investor who owns the house, told New York Focus by phone that he has “no idea” what IFWU is, and that he has rented the house for several years to a “regular family” who are “very quiet, nice people.” He declined to share the tenants’ contact information. On a recent Friday, no one responded when this reporter rang the doorbell several times, and an inquiry letter mailed to the house did not receive a reply. IBOTU did not answer questions about why it has sent over $1.4 million to IFWU.

Meanwhile, unionized home health aides at Caring Professionals — the company that invited IBOTU to block a more aggressive rival union — make “up to” $21 per hour, according to the company’s website, just above the legal minimum for New York City home care workers.

Local 713 and Caring Professionals have renewed the union’s contract several times. This is a contentious process in many workplaces, as unions seek raises and working conditions that management doesn’t want to grant. But for Caring Professionals and Local 713, it’s easy.

“It’s the template of the previous [contract], and you’re just updating it,” said Hagmann, the company’s COO. “It’s not a strenuous activity.”

As for the union making demands like big raises or benefit sweeteners, “that doesn’t happen here,” he said.

Hagmann doesn’t think Local 713’s leaders would ask for anything he’s unwilling to grant.

“They don’t strike me as the shakedown kind of people,” he said.

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The guards had accused Brown of hiding contraband in his rectum, though they didn’t say what the contraband was, and Brown denied having anything. Still, he says they replaced his prison uniform with a hospital gown — which he said was stained and smelled like feces — gave him what he described as a “bucket,” and told him to pass the banned item and give it to them.

Brown says he spent the next eight days in the room, giving officers stool after stool. None had any foreign objects in them, but he says the guards told him the stool was always an “insufficient amount” and thus didn’t prove his innocence. They gave him cups of water, but it was barely enough to drink and clean himself. “You can’t shower, I got defecation all over my body,” he said. As the days passed, the room’s overhead lights never turned off.

“I was literally losing my mind in there,” Brown said.

Do you or your loved one have experience with DOCCS's "defecation rooms"? New York Focus wants to hear from you. Reach out to reporters Chris Gelardi and Raina Lipsitz at chris@nysfocus.com and raina.lipsitz@gmail.com.

Corrections officers keep incarcerated people in similar rooms across New York’s state prison system. According to a prison agency directive, officers can confine someone in one of the rooms if they have “probable cause” to believe they’ve swallowed contraband or inserted it into their rectal cavity. Officially called “special watch” or “contraband watch” rooms, they’re meant to facilitate the safe recovery of drugs, weapons, or other prohibited items that prisoners have hidden in their bodies.

Incarcerated people call them by a different name — “shit rooms” — and say they’re ripe for abuse.

“It is part and parcel of the torture, brutality, and abuse endemic to New York’s prisons,” said Jerome Wright, the formerly incarcerated co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, a New York-based advocacy group.

The rooms stirred up limited controversy in 2019, when a formerly incarcerated man sued Elmira Correctional Facility for holding him in a “defecation room” for 61 days. Officers claimed that X-rays showed a “razor-type weapon” in his rectum, but they never recovered one. (Federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, asserting that the prison was maintaining “security.”)

Since then, the rooms have eluded public scrutiny, though prisoners have continued to allege mistreatment within them. In 2021, another man sued the state for keeping him in a watch room in Elmira for over two months without recovering any contraband; a court ruled in his favor, awarding him $6,390 for wrongful confinement. Yet another man claimed that officers at the now-closed Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in northeastern New York, locked him in a special watch room for five days with no food or water. He was hospitalized for dehydration, he alleged in a lawsuit — then locked back in the room for another week. (Officers said they later found drugs in the Great Meadow watch room; the man claimed they planted them. The prison agency denied the allegations in the lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds.)

In a statement, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state prison system, said that “special watch is a security measure designed to prevent the introduction of dangerous contraband into correctional facilities and to protect incarcerated individuals, staff, and visitors.” It said that prisoners on special watch are given hygiene items and a basin of water to wash themselves, and that “lighting is maintained throughout the watch to facilitate continuous observation and ensure the safety and security of the individual and staff.”

Critics argue that the rooms are cruel overkill.

“It’s a completely inhumane practice,” said state Senator Julia Salazar, who heads her chamber’s corrections committee. While drugs remain a particularly serious safety issue in prisons, she said, the rooms are a misguided way of intercepting them.

“The response is crazy and no longer about mitigating harm,” Salazar said. “They’ve really lost the thread.”

In 2023, Jayquan Griffin was in a recreation yard at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, in the Catskills, when a fellow prisoner punched him, breaking his jaw.

Officers took him to a hospital, where a CT scan revealed a metallic object in his “rectal area.” He later told medical providers that he had accidentally swallowed a razor blade that he had wrapped in plastic and stowed in his mouth. Prison records indicate that DOCCS staff were convinced that he had inserted the weapon into his rectum.

Whatever the case, guards then transported Griffin, still with a broken jaw and a razor in his body, to nearby Eastern Correctional Facility, and placed him in a special watch room, according to two lawsuits he filed against DOCCS and the state.

Griffin tried to pass the weapon, but couldn’t. He told guards that the razor wouldn’t come out, but they insisted that he defecate it. After a day, officers took him to another outside hospital for X-rays, which showed that the blade was still inside him, but left without getting him treatment and took him back to the defecation room.

Hours passed, then days. As with Brown, Griffin wore a hospital gown in the room and couldn’t leave. There was no running water, and the lights stayed on at night. He was caught in a cycle of misery.

“I’m shitting, I’m giving it to them. My jaw is broke, I can’t eat. I’m in pain, I’m crying,” he told New York Focus. With the razor still in his intestines, he began to panic.

“I got something in me that could potentially take my life,” he said.

Griffin says he began complaining about everything he could think of, like chest pains, hoping officers would take him back to the hospital. After six nights under contraband watch at Eastern, they finally took him to Albany Medical Center, where doctors performed a colonoscopy to remove the blade and inserted titanium plates in his face. He remained hospitalized for nine days.

DOCCS said that it “does not comment on the specific circumstances of an individual case.”

During his ordeal, officers filed disciplinary tickets against Griffin for fighting, “violent conduct,” smuggling, and other infractions. He fought the charges and eventually got them reversed — but only after he’d spent most of the three months after his hospital stay serving out an isolation sentence, according to the lawsuits.

To Griffin, the experience illustrates a broader pattern of inhumane practices across the prison system.

“You can’t just treat people like animals,” he said.

According to DOCCS’s directive, prisons should generally release people from contraband watch within 48 hours, unless they fail to submit two “negative defecations” — though it doesn’t define that term nor limit how long staff can extend the watch period. If staff are relying on an X-ray or other radiological scan to accuse someone of holding contraband, the directive allows them to keep prisoners in watch rooms for up to seven days.

In practice, the convoluted parameters offer prisons wide discretion in determining how long to keep prisoners on watch. In response to the 2019 lawsuit against Elmira prison, a federal judge determined that DOCCS staff were allowed to repeatedly restart the special watch process each time they discovered “new evidence” that the incarcerated man was holding a razor in his rectum, resulting in his 61-day stint in the defecation room that ended with no contraband recovered.

In the years after that lawsuit, New York overhauled the laws governing isolation in prisons and jails. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, which went into effect in 2022, strictly limits the scenarios in which facilities can keep incarcerated people locked in a room for more than 17 hours a day. Under HALT, that severe form of isolation can’t last longer than 15 days, and it must include at least four hours of daily out-of-cell time. Prisons also can’t hold incarcerated people in those strict conditions unless they’ve scheduled a prompt hearing to determine whether the person violated a rule that makes them eligible for punitive isolation.

Extended contraband watch violates those requirements, according to both Salazar, who sponsored the HALT bill, and the HALT Solitary Campaign, which led the movement to pass it. It’s one of many instances over the past four years in which DOCCS either ignored the law or sought to carve out exceptions to it, the advocates allege.

In its statement, DOCCS said that “contraband watch is a security and safety measure, not a disciplinary action.”

“The procedures are separate from the disciplinary confinement process addressed by HALT,” the agency said.

That’s not a distinction that exists in the law, advocates argue. While HALT carves out exceptions for medical care and facility-wide emergencies, its limits on isolation apply to “any form of cell confinement,” according to the text of the law.

Brown’s first trip to the Green Haven defecation room came after a visit with his wife, Megan Murtagh.

In 2025, DOCCS enacted a policy requiring most visitors to pass through advanced imaging body scanners before seeing their incarcerated loved ones. Countless visitors — particularly women — have alleged that DOCCS staff misread their scans, banning them from facilities after mistaking tampons, contraceptive devices, piercings, scars, and other bodily anomalies as hidden contraband, as New York Focus reported last December.

If they want to avoid a strip search, incarcerated people must also go through the body scanners after visits. On May 27, when Brown passed through a scanner after a visit with Murtagh, he says guards claimed to see something. Throughout his eight days in the defecation room, he says he asked the guards to scan him again, but they refused.

A week after he was released from contraband watch, Murtagh returned to Green Haven. No longer trusting the body scanners, Brown chose to end the visit with a strip frisk. This time, an officer who searched him reported that he “suspected” that Brown was “hiding contraband in his rectum area,” according to a memo the officer wrote. When guards told Brown they were taking him back to contraband watch, he got upset and pulled away, at which point seven officers shoved him against the wall and forced him to the ground, according to a use of force report.

Brown says he then spent another week in the defecation room. Again, prison staff didn’t say what the alleged contraband was and never recovered anything. They charged Brown with assaulting staff and refusing an order, among other violations, and released him from contraband watch directly to solitary confinement. Jeffrey Parks, a paralegal from Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, represented Brown in his disciplinary proceedings and was later able to get most of those charges overturned.

Separately, Murtagh received a letter from DOCCS in mid-June stating that the agency was indefinitely suspending her visitation privileges because her husband had allegedly “failed to clear the body scanner and was later found to be in possession of contraband,” then was “again found to be in possession of contraband.” Murtagh is appealing the suspension. She and Brown both deny possessing or hiding any contraband, and Parks said that the prison never substantiated any of its claims that Brown was attempting to smuggle banned items.

Asked about the lack of evidence, DOCCS alleged that a woman who visited Brown at a different facility in 2024 was caught with 22 grams of marijuana. It didn’t comment on the allegations from May and June.

“I have never once seen any articulation of what the contraband was supposed to have been,” Parks wrote in an email, “probably because it never existed.”

The settlement was the result of a 2023 lawsuit by Attorney General Letitia James against the chain, called Centers Health Care, and its owners. James accused them of siphoning over $83 million out of four nursing homes in the chain, and allowing severe patient abuse and neglect.

New York Focus recently investigated the aftermath of the settlement, which required the company to implement major reforms, and found that dangerous and degrading conditions have persisted at one of the homes, the Buffalo Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing. The monitor’s report acknowledged those challenges, but also found that the settlement led to many improvements for residents at all four target homes.

New York Focus also found that following the settlement, staffing levels dropped at other nursing homes in the chain, and that serious harm to patients sometimes followed. The monitor was not tasked with overseeing conditions at those homes, since they weren’t part of the settlement.

The settlement required Centers and its owners, Kenneth Rozenberg and Daryl Hagler, to commit to boosting nurse staffing levels, improve treatment and conditions, and pay a $45 million dollar penalty, most of which went into a fund to pay for improvements in the nursing homes. It also barred Centers from reducing nursing levels at the other homes due to the cost of the settlement.

The attorney general appointed David Hoffman and Associates, a Philadelphia-based health care consultancy, as an independent monitor to ensure that Centers complied with the medical parts of the settlement. 

Hoffman’s work ended last month, and the firm issued a final report last week summing up its work.

Hoffman said that the settlement had led to “real and sustained care improvements” for “over 1,100 residents on a daily basis,” and that it “should serve as a model” for other states.

The monitor worked closely with Centers staff to revamp everything from wound care to food preparation. This included visiting each of the homes between three and seven times, meeting regularly with Centers staff, and studying how to reduce falls and improve residents’ mental health. 

Over the course of the monitor’s term, registered nurse staffing nearly doubled, falls happened less frequently at all four homes, residents developed far fewer new wounds, and were more satisfied with their food, according to Hoffman’s report.

One of the settlement’s key requirements was that the four homes had to boost their nurse staffing levels to 3.5 hours per patient per day. That number was similar to a minimum that President Joe Biden’s administration moved to impose nationwide but that President Donald Trump’s repealed before it could take effect.

New York Focus’s investigation found that Buffalo Center violated that requirement on 82 separate occasions. (The other three homes very rarely violated it.) Of the four homes, Buffalo Center had the worst conditions since the settlement, with residents suffering pest infestations, verbal abuse, and nonconsensual photography, among other incidents. 

Hoffman’s report acknowledged these failures, saying that the firm and Buffalo staff worked together to find solutions. One challenge was that the lack of public transportation near the home on weekends made it difficult for staff to get to work. Using settlement dollars to pay for rideshares to and from the nursing home, offering low-cost staff meals, and not allowing new patients on weekends all helped alleviate the staffing shortages. 

As of mid-2026, all four homes were in compliance with the 3.5 hour requirement, the report found.

Buffalo has also had the greatest struggles with nursing staff turnover. Currently at 56 percent annually, its turnover rate is still far better than it was before the settlement, when it was near 100 percent, Hoffman’s report noted.

As a condition of the settlement, Centers, Rozenberg, and Hagler paid $35 million to create a “resident care fund” that could be spent on making improvements to the homes. That money paid for things including new beds, an on-staff dietician, and education programs for nurses.

Once all outstanding bills are paid, there will be less than $1 million remaining in the fund. It’s unclear if Centers will continue to pay for the improvements and maintenance once the money is depleted, and without an independent monitor watching.

Attorney general spokesperson Grant Fox noted that since the settlement put an end to financial fraud at Centers, more money will now be available for patient care.

Going forward, the report recommends hiring more staff for psychiatric care, keeping better track of residents’ belongings, maintaining and replacing new food service equipment, and ensuring that emergency physicians are available around the clock.

It’s not clear whether these recommendations will be implemented, now that Hoffman’s oversight has ended. But the report was optimistic that Centers will continue its positive trajectory, saying that the “culture change” and “management responsiveness” at Centers means that improvements are “not likely to disappear once external oversight ends.”

Centers Health Care did not respond to a request for comment.

“A lot of teenagers don’t want to talk to adults because they don’t want to be judged,” she said. 

Ortega is a peer mentor with the teen pregnancy prevention initiative at Children’s Aid, which provides sexual health education to New York City youth in schools, community centers, and foster care facilities. But parts of the initiative will soon come to an end. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration launched an effort to gut and reshape an Obama-era federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy, which Children’s Aid had relied on for over 10 years to provide sexual education in vulnerable communities.

As part of that overhaul, the federal Department of Health and Human Services notified the nonprofit that it was terminating its grant effective immediately, two years before it was set to expire. “The reason provided was that the initiative no longer aligned with HHS’s priorities,” said Rhonda Braxton, a vice president at Children’s Aid. 

The organization is among three New York grantees that are losing over $4.3 million in annual federal funding to support evidence-based sexual health education for over 19,000 young people each year.

The funding cuts come at what reproductive health advocates describe as a critical time. Although the national teen birth rate remains near a historic low, teen pregnancy rates in New York state and New York City rose between 2021 and 2023 — the first increase in two decades, according to the latest available state and city data. (A vast body of research has linked teen pregnancy and birth to difficulty completing high school, pursuing higher education, and getting well-paying jobs.)

Of 67 federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, all but 14 have been terminated as HHS shifts its focus to abstinence-based initiatives. 

Last week, members of New York’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. urging him to reinstate funding to the three programs that lost it.

Braxton said Children’s Aid’s initiative relies on building trust with youth, and goes beyond pregnancy prevention to address positive body image, sexually transmitted infections, and healthy decision-making. 

Now, Braxton said, “young people are losing those trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and mistrust.”

Children’s Aid is looking for more funding to make up for the loss of the $936,700 annual grant. If it can’t find it, the nonprofit will have to eliminate most of its programming, including many of its peer mentors and sex ed at the city’s Children’s Center, a temporary intake facility for children awaiting placement in foster care. (Youth in foster care experience higher rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth than their peers, research shows.) 

In their letter to HHS, lawmakers wrote that Children’s Aid was the only organization providing sexual health education “to a highly vulnerable population that may be at increased risk of trafficking, sexual abuse, and unplanned teen pregnancy.” 

HHS also canceled funding for NYC Teens Connection, a city program that partners with schools, foster care agencies, and juvenile justice programs to improve teens’ decision-making skills and connect them with local health clinics. Since 2010, the initiative has worked with over 400 organizations and served nearly 130,000 teenagers across the five boroughs.

It’s now set to lose $3.9 million in funding over the next two years, putting 15 staff members at risk of losing their jobs. New York City Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said in a statement that the initiative and others like it have helped contribute to a 79 percent decrease in teen pregnancies in New York City over the last three decades. 

“Teenagers want truth and honesty from the adults in their lives, and programs that center the real-world experience of the young people they serve,” Vick said.

There were over 20,000 fewer teen pregnancies in New York City in 2023 than in 2000. But lawmakers and advocates say that post-pandemic increases in the city’s teen pregnancy rate underscore the need for comprehensive sex ed: Between 2022 and 2023, teen pregnancy rates increased across all boroughs other than Brooklyn. It’s unclear what exactly drove the trend, but the city’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey reflected an increase in the number of sexually active students not using contraception since 2021.

The cuts also eliminate $1.4 million annually for the HOPE Buffalo program, run by health care nonprofit Cicatelli Associates. The program helped drive a 36 percent decline in teen pregnancy rates across high-poverty Buffalo neighborhoods from 2015 to 2020, according to the group. 

Cicatelli Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

Meredith Ouderkirk, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York, which partnered with Cicatelli to offer the program, said that because New York is run by Democrats, people may assume that everyone has access to comprehensive sex ed. But the state’s sex ed mandate is limited and gives school districts significant discretion, she said, making a child’s access to evidence-based sex education dependent on where they live. 

The state Department of Health, which does not currently receive funding through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said it may be able to fill gaps left by the federal cuts through its own initiatives that fund community-based projects. 

Reproductive health organizations are less optimistic. 

“If this changes the ability to reach even one young person and that results in an unintended pregnancy, that can be life-changing and devastating,” Ouderkirk said.

In the past, incarcerated people’s friends and loved ones could send fresh produce in care packages, or even pick it up before visits from farm stands just outside the gates of some facilities. But in 2022, New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) banned most outside packages from friends and family, closing off crucial sources of fresh fruits and vegetables. (Disclosure: One of the authors helped found the Sing Sing Family Collective, which distributed produce to families visiting loved ones at that prison and fought the ban.) 

In a statement provided to New York Focus, a DOCCS spokesperson wrote that the department had moved to limit packages except from private vendors at the recommendation of the Prison Violence Task Force, in an effort to address “the significant increase in the number of packages found to contain contraband drugs and weapons.”

DOCCS data shows that while contraband seizures in the package room have fallen 96 percent since the package ban took effect, violence in New York prisons has continued to increase. The lack of fresh produce may be making the problem worse, as a growing body of research links poor nutrition to mood disorders and increased levels of aggression in institutionalized populations. 

A 2024 law that sought to expand access to farm-fresh produce in state prisons has proven toothless in practice. As a result, a recent report by the Correctional Association of New York (CANY), an independent state prison oversight body, found that incarcerated New Yorkers are fed a diet that fails to meet nutritional standards and contains nearly twice the recommended amount of sodium, risking their long-term health.

DOCCS maintains that its standardized menu and portion list are reviewed by trained dieticians to ensure compliance with dietary guidelines. In response to written questions, a spokesperson for DOCCS wrote, “The Department’s accredited food production center supplies food to all state correctional facilities in compliance with state law that requires incarcerated individuals be provided with a sufficient quantity of wholesome and nutritious food. This includes daily fresh fruits and vegetables.” 

The department’s online cafeteria menu appears to contradict this claim, showing no more than three to four servings of fresh fruit or vegetables most weeks. And while the spokesperson noted that “DOCCS procures a very large amount of fresh produce from NYS farms,” they also explained that “Fresh produce may be served as a standalone item or incorporated into meals as prepared by the Food Production Center.” In other words, the department counts produce used as ingredients in meals that are cooked in a central processing facility, then frozen, distributed to correctional facilities across the state, and reheated as fulfilling its mandate to provide fresh produce. 

The agency acknowledged that sodium levels in DOCCS meals exceed nutritional recommendations but told New York Focus that they’re only 42 percent higher than the maximum recommended quantity if “minimum portions of starches are consumed.”

Since DOCCS instituted its package ban, incarcerated people looking to supplement the limited produce options in the mess hall or commissary have had to pre-order packages of fruits and vegetables from private vendors. Those packages offer a wider variety. For instance, one vendor offers avocados, pineapples, and mangos, among other options. But perishable food can sit in prison package rooms for as long as three weeks before staff deliver it. Nearly half of all incarcerated people surveyed by CANY reported that their food packages had spoiled as a result of delays. Others told CANY they had experienced inconsistent access, thanks to suspected theft or allegedly arbitrary denials by correctional officers.

“I’ll never order a fresh produce package again. They always are spoiled,” said Samuel Bush, who said he ordered produce packages four times while incarcerated at Green Haven, a men’s prison in Dutchess County. “They turned fruit into contraband.”

The DOCCS spokesperson said that incarcerated people should use established grievance procedures if they receive spoiled produce, but described the program as a success.

New York lawmakers tried to address the broader problem in 2024. A bill sponsored by Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs and Senator Cordell Cleare required the state corrections commissioner to create a program purchasing fresh produce from New York farms and distributing it to prisons for “wholesome and nutritious food.”

The law took effect immediately when Governor Kathy Hochul signed it that November. But the bill set no minimum purchase, no mandatory frequency for serving fresh produce, and no public reporting requirements. Consequently, the current statewide menu remains identical to the one in effect before the law passed.

“Even if they’re getting two apples, they’re in compliance with the law,” said Sumeet Sharma, CANY’s director of policy and communications. “The legislator gets to claim a win, but it’s not a win—it’s just the status quo.”

Assemblymember Gibbs did not respond to calls for comment.

The impacts of substandard prison nutrition are difficult to quantify. DOCCS does not publicly disclose the prevalence of chronic health conditions in its prisons. Nonetheless, the link between nutrition and long-term health outcomes is well-established. The American Heart Association advises that overconsumption of processed foods and inadequate access to fresh produce can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, including heart attacks and strokes. And that’s just as much the case in prisons as on the outside. 

“People’s bodies don’t respond differently just because they’re in prison,” said Leslie Soble, an ethnographer and co-author of a 2025 book on food in prison.

Christopher Wynn, who is incarcerated at Green Haven, has high blood pressure and recently had a stroke — conditions he attributes partly to the food available to him in prison.

“Everything in the cafeteria is soy, or ultra-processed in the commissary,” he said, and he doesn’t have the money to regularly order produce packages. “I can’t afford it. Most of us can’t.”

It’s impossible to conclusively connect a particular stroke to a prison menu. But medical experts, including the Centers for Disease Control, note that eating fresh produce is a key factor in reducing the risk of strokes and improving recovery outcomes.

Exacerbating the problem, said Sharma, is the lack of transparency around the nutritional content of food in DOCCS facilities. New York’s law that requires restaurants and other food providers to publish the nutritional content of their meals does not apply to state prisons.

The lack of nutritious food might also be affecting the health of prison facilities themselves. Recent studies have found that providing improved nutrition through diet or supplements can lead to reductions in reported incidents of misconduct and violence by as much as 37 percent.

“If a new, high-tech security system promised to reduce prison stabbings and assaults by over 30 percent, legislatures would eagerly allocate millions to procure it. Yet, a significantly more effective remedy is already within arm’s reach, hiding in plain sight inside the facility cafeteria,” wrote John Koufos, project lead of the Correctional Leaders Association’s Healthy Prisons, Healthy Communities initiative, in a recent op-ed for The Hill. His organization is working with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to encourage “Make America Healthy Again” policies behind bars.

“When you look at diets inside, you see that they are impairing people’s ability to heal from trauma and make good decisions and participate in community in the best way possible,” added Soble.

This is a fixable problem. Other prison systems have shown that fresh produce can be served at scale. California’s Harvest of the Month program, which partners with small- and medium-sized farms to bring locally-grown fruits and vegetables into prison meals, was piloted at three prisons in 2023 and now operates statewide.

“We could get things in that would never show up on prison trays, and we were able to get them served,” said Soble, who helped launch the program while working as a program manager for Impact Justice, a nonprofit focused on prison reform.

New York already runs horticulture programs at some prisons. At least 13 DOCCS facilities participate in the Harvest Now program, which has contributed more than 300,000 pounds of produce grown at state prisons to New York food pantries since 2016. None of the produce grown at DOCCS facilities is served to incarcerated people.

More immediately, DOCCS could restore avenues for produce access that existed before the 2022 package policy, such as allowing families to bring produce during visitation. DOCCS could also increase the number of fresh produce items served in facility cafeterias.

“They need to change the policy, at least let us receive produce through the package room during visits,” Bush said. “I did not get sentenced to malnutrition.”

This year, the chief enforcement counsel at the state Division of Election Law Enforcement, Michael L. Johnson, issued a determination letter stating that an inquiry spurred by New York Focus’s reporting had been closed. After clarifying a minor duplicate filing error with the party’s treasurer, he wrote, the office would take “no further enforcement action.” 

Over the past five years, Johnson has sued hundreds of political committees’ treasurers for failing to file a single disclosure report, obtaining court judgments against some that carried $1,000 penalties. But he did not sue the Bronx Democrats’ treasurer, Assemblymember Michael Benedetto, even though Johnson’s office knew two party-controlled committees had repeatedly committed the same violation. Benedetto did not respond to a request for comment.

Prior to New York Focus’s article, Johnson had sent the party’s treasurer five “notices of violation” stemming from failure to file reports or to respond to subsequent warning letters. Still, Johnson never filed a lawsuit seeking to force the party to comply with the law, according to state court records. 

Johnson’s office did not respond to questions about why.

The Bronx disclosures were instead missing until October 2024, when New York Focus contacted the party for comment. The party then submitted seven reports it had never filed — some more than four years late — and amended five others.

Some question whether the office’s lighter treatment of the Bronx Democrats could be perceived as favoritism. 

The Board of Elections enforcement counsel’s office “should have pursued penalties in court against the Bronx Democratic Party just as they did for other non-filers,” said Alex Camarda, senior policy adviser at the government reform group Reinvent Albany. “Not doing so makes the public perceive a double standard exists, with the party being granted leniency no other committee receives.”

When the Division of Election Law Enforcement was created in 2014, it was touted as a major reform for a body with a history of “bipartisan agreement to do nothing,” according to a report issued by an anti-corruption commission. The office was set up to be independent of the two major political parties, though the appointment of its chief counsel is subject to a political process.

The first person to hold the position, Risa Sugarman, angered a wide swath of the legislature with high-profile investigations into campaign committees covering the entire state Senate — Democrats, Republicans, and the now-defunct Independent Democratic Conference.

In 2021, Cuomo appointed Johnson as the state’s new election law watchdog, and both houses of the legislature quickly confirmed him. He had previously been a longtime aide for the Democrat-controlled Assembly, led by the former chair of the Bronx Democratic Party, Speaker Carl Heastie. During his tenure, Johnson’s highest-profile known investigations have focused on establishment Democrats’ political rivals, who have leveled accusations of bias. 

After beating Johnson’s case in court, Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, accused Johnson of “politically motivated governmental overreach.” A campaign manager for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin raised similar concerns over a $900,000 settlement to end a long-running inquiry into his campaign’s potential illegal coordination with two super PACs that supported him. Zeldin’s campaign manager called the office’s actions “political extortion.” 

Johnson has filed at least 11 lawsuits against hundreds of committees over alleged failure to file timely campaign disclosures. In one case, his office argued that a campaign for Mount Vernon City Council “ignored and mocked” transparency requirements and “deprived voters of the opportunity to examine the sources of the campaign’s funding.”

But Johnson did not take the same tack with the Bronx Democratic Party. 

In 2023, Johnson sent multiple letters to the Bronx Democratic Party’s treasurer, Assemblymember Benedetto, about its committees’ failures to file required disclosure reports. Benedetto often failed to respond.

One, stamped “Notice of Violation,” warned that if one committee did not promptly file a July 2023 disclosure report, his office could begin an enforcement action seeking penalties.

Johnson’s office sent the same letters on the same dates to nearly 200 political committees. In late 2023 and early 2024, Johnson filed two lawsuits against their treasurers. But the Bronx Democratic Party’s treasurer was not included. 

Among those sued were an array of little-known candidates; several town and city Democratic and Republican committees; and the treasurer for former Assemblymember Marcos Crespo, who had at one point been the chair of the Bronx Democratic Party but no longer held political office.

After being sued, one treasurer for a judicial candidate did file a missing July 2023 report. Even so, Johnson’s office continued to seek a fine against the treasurer because the filing had come in over nine months late.

It’s unclear why the Bronx Democrats’ treasurer, Benedetto, was spared from such litigation — and there’s no record of Johnson pursuing fines over reports the party filed up to four years late. 

The Bronx Democratic Party chair, Senator Jamaal Bailey, told New York Focus in 2024 that the party’s lax approach to timely filing was due to inaccurate record-keeping.

“There’s no impropriety. There’s nothing wrong. We simply didn’t file when we were supposed to,” Bailey said. He said the party would improve its practices, and it has since routinely filed disclosure reports as required.

The litigation, filed this week by two public housing tenant associations, adds to the city’s extended legal fallout from the Adams administration, whose former aides and agency chiefs are facing old and new corruption charges pursued by local authorities and the feds. It also presents an opportunity for the courts to reassert oversight of the city’s sprawling surveillance tech, which has been exported to other municipalities around the country over the last decade.  

The tenant associations allege that the Adams-era effort continues to violate multiple laws governing the use of surveillance technology and civil rights. New York City law requires the NYPD to publish comprehensive documents outlining how the department uses surveillance technologies months before they’re deployed. In this case, the NYPD never published those documents. Local law also explicitly prohibits “bias-based policing” practices, a reform that took effect after public outrage and judicial action on the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policies, which disproportionately subjected Black and Latino youth to warrantless searches on the street.  

The lawsuit claims that the public housing surveillance expansion flies in the face of all that precedent. “This constant surveillance of public housing residents is not supported by individualized suspicion, nor has it received judicial approval,” the filing, submitted on behalf of the Langston Hughes and Samuel J. Tilden tenant associations, reads. “This warrantless activity constitutes an unlawful search.”  

By focusing on public housing complexes in particular, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black or Latino, the lawsuit also alleges that the surveillance expansion “evinces a discriminatory intent against Black and Latino families, producing a foreseeable disparate impact on these communities.” 

Years ago, the NYPD and the Adams administration went to elaborate lengths to hide this surveillance expansion from public view. Dipping into the contracting budget of the city’s technology agency, they covertly used infrastructure established under Adams’s much-hyped $100 million Big Apple Connect program, which eliminated the cost of basic internet plans for public housing residents. Under that program, the city installed new internet routers in common spaces throughout the city’s public housing complexes, allowing the NYPD to connect roughly 20,000 CCTV cameras operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) directly to the police department’s real-time surveillance system. 

The NYPD had sought to tap into NYCHA camera feeds for more than a decade without any luck. Instead, police officers previously had to request permission from the housing authority to review footage from those cameras on-site when investigating crimes.  

The real-time video surveillance component of the free internet program remained under wraps until a New York Focus investigation last summer. Four committees of the New York City Council held an emergency oversight hearing on the program a couple months later, where NYPD and NYCHA officials confirmed that police were using the new internet connections to stream footage from a select number of public housing security cameras, a number that, the officials said, would soon grow to encompass nearly the entire NYCHA CCTV portfolio over the ensuing months. 

The footage, the police department confirmed, now goes straight to the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a counterterrorism and anti-crime data fusion tool that the city developed after 9/11. The system collects an enormous amount of information from surveillance cameras, license plate readers, emergency call logs, and legal databases, and syncs it with pattern-matching and facial recognition tools to support the NYPD’s “predictive policing” approach, informing where and how to allocate police resources.

Advocates have challenged the system before, arguing it infringes on privacy, reinforces racial bias in policing, chills freedom of expression, and may be used to support the federal government’s immigration crackdown. But details of how the program has been used thus far have been hard to come by. One of the lawsuit’s goals, in addition to halting the program, is to compel the NYPD to provide information about how it has used data collected through its expanded real-time surveillance footprint in police work and in court. “We’ve tried to get that information and we haven’t been able to,” said Anca Grigore, a senior attorney at the Brooklyn Defender Services and lead counsel on the case. “We can’t possibly know what discovery and what footage has been part of this program.”   

Public housing tenants say they’ve also been kept in the dark about the program. Ciprian Noel, who serves as president of the tenant association at NYCHA’s Langston Hughes Houses and as vice president of one of the NYPD’s local community councils in Brooklyn, wrote in a sworn affirmation that despite his leadership role liaising with NYCHA and the police he was never informed of the surveillance expansion. He worries that the program, developed as it was with no independent oversight or room for public discussion, “will destroy bridges rather than build them” between police and public housing residents. 

“I would prefer in person presence to them watching us behind cameras,” Noel wrote. “We want young people and officers to try to talk to and understand one another.”  

Gina Boatright, who leads the tenant association at NYCHA’s Samuel J. Tilden Houses in Brooklyn, voiced similar concerns in another sworn affirmation submitted in the New York Supreme Court this week. “If I had been timely informed of this new surveillance arrangement and given an opportunity to do so, I would have personally submitted a public comment expressing my concern that residents will be harassed as a result of this access and surveillance,” she wrote. “When a crime has been committed, law enforcement can already obtain NYCHA’s permission to review the cameras. In my view, if law enforcement is given unrestricted access, officers will take advantage of that access.”  

The NYPD and New York City’s Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Almost six years later, I’m happy to say that the answer to both questions is a resounding yes! Every investigation, every explainer, and every action taken in response to our work only happened because readers like you supported us along the way.

Today, I’m excited to share something we’ve been working on to make sure our supporters feel even more a part of our work: a redesigned membership program. We want supporting our work to feel like joining a community, not just donating online or cutting a check.

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And despite a plank of the settlement meant to protect patients in the chain’s other facilities, levels of care have fallen in multiple homes, coinciding with serious harms to residents. 

Here are four key findings from that investigation:

1. THE SETTLEMENT WAS SUPPOSED TO FIX UNDERSTAFFING AND POOR CONDITIONS AT FOUR NURSING HOMES. BUT IN ONE, BOTH PERSIST.

Buffalo Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, a facility in Western New York, was one of the four homes specifically targeted by the attorney general’s lawsuit. One condition of the settlement was that Buffalo Center provide at least 3.5 hours of nursing care per patient, per day — a number still significantly below the 4.1 hours recommended in a federally sponsored 2001 study.

Even so, the facility has fallen short of this goal on at least 82 days since the settlement. During that time, patients have suffered falls, flies crawling on their bodies, verbal abuse, and nonconsensual photography while exposed.

2. LEVELS OF CARE HAVE DECLINED AT OTHER CENTERS HEALTH CARE NURSING HOMES SINCE THE SETTLEMENT. 

While the settlement primarily targeted four specific nursing homes, it also barred Centers from reducing levels of care at its other facilities as a response to the cost of complying with the settlement.

But staffing records analyzed by New York Focus show that nursing care has dropped at multiple Centers Health Care facilities since the settlement. Those drops have coincided with serious incidents including falls, injuries, and in one case, death of a resident after medical staff failed to administer CPR. Three times, staff initially failed to report the incidents to state authorities, in apparent violation of state law.

3. FINES LEVIED AGAINST THE CHAIN HAVE MADE LITTLE DIFFERENCE.

Centers Health Care has faced federal and state fines of more than $340,000 total since the settlement, but with Centers facilities making millions of dollars a year each, experts say the fines likely aren’t large enough to force the company to change course. “These companies are making so much money that the fines just don’t mean anything to them,” said Charlene Harrington, an emeritus professor of sociology and nursing at the University of California, San Francisco.

4. IT’S NOT CLEAR WHETHER THE ATTORNEY GENERAL WILL TAKE FURTHER ACTION. 

So far, Centers has not faced consequences for its apparent violations of the 2024 settlement. The deal allowed the attorney general to reopen the lawsuit or seek to impose additional fines if Centers violated its terms, but so far neither of those things has happened. Last month, the term of a court-appointed independent monitor charged with improving health conditions at the targeted nursing homes expired, and the attorney general’s office is not seeking to extend it, a spokesperson said. Another monitor, who was appointed to oversee the nursing homes’ finances, will remain in place until $10 million remaining in a “resident care fund” established by the settlement is depleted, the spokesperson added.

Kaminsky cited reporting about Sepúlveda’s legal failings from New York Focus and other media outlets to argue that he should not be allowed to continue on the case.

In April, New York Focus reported that since 2017, Sepúlveda, who chairs the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee, has repeatedly failed his clients. His mistakes include missing court appearances, failing to file documents on time, and submitting faulty paperwork to the court. 

These mistakes have caused his clients to lose cases by default and suffer consequences, including evictions.

The case in question revolves around outstanding water bills for a building in the Bronx that the plaintiff sold to the defendants last year. In his letter, Kaminsky said that Sepúlveda’s previous failures represent a “pattern of concerning behavior” that creates doubts about whether the politician “can dedicate adequate time and attention to his clients.” Sepúlveda’s clients, the defendants in the case, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Kaminsky’s letter also raised another concern. This spring, Manhattan Housing Court Judge Jason Vendzules issued a ruling against one of Sepúlveda’s clients, a building superintendent facing eviction, after Sepúlveda failed to show up for a scheduled court date. 

Following the ruling, Sepúlveda made a complaint against Vendzules to the Office of Court Administration, the agency that runs New York’s court system, according to a document filed in the case by Vendzules. This caused Vendzules to recuse himself from the case to avoid “any appearance of impropriety or bias that this complaint has colored my decision.”

Kaminsky’s letter argued that since Sepúlveda chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the state’s judges, his filing a complaint against a sitting judge would run afoul of legal professional rules, which bar lawyers from claiming the ability to improperly influence government officials.

Last month, Sepúlveda told the news site Hell Gate that he “cannot confirm or deny” filing a complaint against Vendzules. 

On Tuesday, Sepúlveda’s spokesperson Mike Nieves told New York Focus that Sepúlveda “did not file a complaint.”

Asked for comment on Kaminsky’s letter, Nieves said Sepúlveda “doesn’t have any issues” with Kaminsky “putting in whatever letter he put in.”

“That’s for the court to decide, and so he has no comment on it,” Nieves said.

Kaminsky, through a representative at his office, declined to comment.

Since his legal missteps came to light, Sepúlveda has faced calls to resign as chair of the Judiciary Committee but has rejected them, and maintains the support of state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who controls committee chair assignments.

“The DA’s fed up, they say you belong in prison,” Judge Matthew D’Emic told the man. “I’m not saying that. I’m trying to help you.”

D’Emic runs the Brooklyn Mental Health Court. Instead of sending the man back to jail, he was releasing him to a residential treatment facility. Colorful decorations softened the courtroom. A banner on D’Emic’s bench read, “Hello summer,” and images of tropical fruit adorned the walls. 

“The question is,” D’Emic said, “How do we give you a foundation for the rest of your life that is built on bedrock and not on sand?” 

The defendants on D’Emic’s docket typically live with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Most arrive in his courtroom facing felony charges related to assault, robbery, or burglary. In exchange for a guilty plea, they can access community-based mental health treatment, supportive housing, and other services. If they complete the court-supervised program, their charges are generally reduced or dismissed. 

For many participants, it pays off. Recent graduation rates from the program have ranged from 73 to 87 percent, according to data from the Center for Justice Innovation, which runs the court in partnership with the state judicial system. An evaluation of the court found that participants tend to see significant reductions in re-arrest. 

More than 40 mental health courts like D’Emic’s have sprung up across New York state since the early 2000s, part of a growing effort to provide alternatives to incarceration. Their goal, proponents say, is to stabilize vulnerable New Yorkers, interrupt cycles of hospitalization and incarceration, and create safer communities. Research, though limited, suggests that they can be effective at reducing recidivism and driving increased use of mental health services.

But while New York state’s network of mental health courts has expanded in recent years, its reach remains modest. Roughly 1,700 people were active, compliant participants in mental health courts statewide last year, according to data from the Office of Court Administration for the New York State Unified Court System obtained through a FOIL request.

About half of New York’s 62 counties still don’t have a mental health court. Unlike drug courts, which serve people with substance use issues, mental health courts aren’t required by state law. “You walk over an invisible line that divides two counties, and the legal outcomes are completely different,” said Leanne Lapp, the public defender in Ontario County, near Rochester. (A law signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December provides a stopgap, allowing a case to be transferred from a county that doesn’t have a mental health court to a neighboring one that does.)

Graphic: Eliza Fawcett / New York Focus

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, widely seen as a model for judicial diversion, a total of 1,560 people have graduated from the program from when it opened in 2002 to the end of last year. Meanwhile, about 1,600 people with a serious mental illness were incarcerated in New York City jails in December alone. Judicial diversion can be powerfully effective, participants and advocates say, but it’s a path that’s open to very few New Yorkers who might benefit from it.

In a statement, Al Baker, spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, said that the court system “relies on deep, differentiated assessments of every individual” to determine eligibility for mental health courts. Many incarcerated people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness don’t meet the criteria for diversion, he noted, and some who would be eligible for diversion choose to litigate their cases.  

The leadership of the state’s court system has pledged to expand access to these courts. A dozen counties have mental health courts in development, in addition to the 30 counties with existing programs, according to Baker.

“Our goal is to have one in every county as soon as we possibly can,” Judge Debra Young, who coordinates statewide problem-solving courts, told New York Focus during an interview in her Troy courtroom. “I’m approving documents for new courts on an almost daily basis.”

Proponents of mental health courts say the legislature needs to invest more resources in this system and enshrine it in state law to maximize its impact. A proposed reform, the Treatment Court Expansion Act, would standardize mental health courts, widen eligibility for diversion, and reduce plea requirements, among other changes. The bill has repeatedly stalled in the state legislature in recent years, despite support from Court of Appeals Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has also expressed support for the measure, which he described earlier this year as “one part of what it can look like to ensure that we are closing Rikers Island.” His office did not respond to requests for comment.

At a rally at the state capitol in May, Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, who represents parts of Brooklyn and has sponsored the Assembly version of the bill, urged the governor to support the bill. “It’s a damn shame,” she said, “that when we have somebody facing a psychotic break, or they’re struggling with depression, or they’re struggling with trauma, we say at this time, ‘The only answer that you’ll get is punishment.’” 

While mental health courts can be life-altering, routing a defendant into treatment can be an exceedingly slow process. Some delays in the diversion process are inevitable, like waiting for the right services to come together. But extending incarceration has a serious cost, and can exacerbate symptoms of mental illness.

In early 2019, Tracy Barber, a longtime Manhattan resident, was in a destabilizing period of her life. She was in a troubled relationship, struggling with alcoholism, and had uneven access to her antipsychotic medication. One night, she pushed an acquaintance during a dispute and landed on Rikers Island with a felony assault charge.

While incarcerated, her mental health sharply declined. 

“I just was not in touch with reality,” said Barber, 48, who has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. “The social workers would come by to see me, and I would just stare at them.”

Barber had difficulty accessing the right medication and spent a couple months at a jail psychiatric ward. She started hearing voices, stopped eating, and lost a significant amount of weight.

Many months later, a reprieve arrived: diversion into the Manhattan Mental Health Court. Over the next year, she participated in an outpatient rehabilitation program, worked with a therapist, and attended regular court dates.

“Mental health court is wonderful,” Barber said. “Obviously, what brings people into mental health court is not. But it’s the process of mentorship, and within the community, which is where I think change can really happen. I don’t know if jail really reforms anyone, rehabilitates anyone. I think it just breaks people.”

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, it can take more than a year to divert a case from jail, according to Center for Justice Innovation data. Last year, the median time from arrest date to first contact with mental health court clinical staff was 265 days — nearly nine months. For the typical participant, it took another 104 days to find out if they were eligible for the court, followed by an additional 56 days to actually start the program. 

Demand for the court has been increasing. Aside from a dip during the pandemic, the court’s number of active participants has grown modestly but steadily, from 308 in 2019 to 364 last year. Referrals — typically from public defenders — are also up, and have increasingly outpaced the number of new participants the court accepts each year.

Graphic: Eliza Fawcett / New York Focus

In Manhattan, the drawn-out process can be “very discouraging” for people with serious mental illness, said Rebecca Azuga, a trial attorney at New York County Defender Services. 

One of Azuga’s clients, a woman with schizophrenia facing multiple felony charges, recently spent about 10 months on Rikers Island, waiting to see if she could enter the Manhattan Mental Health Court. She was motivated to access treatment and wanted to be reunited with her young daughter, Azuga said. But leaving jail hinged on how a prosecutor evaluated her case. Diversion typically involves a risk assessment and the victim’s consent.

In April, Azuga said that her client often felt “hopeless,” because it seemed like nothing was happening. The following month, after nearly a year in jail, she was able to enter the Manhattan Mental Health Court.

“She was almost in disbelief that it was going to happen because of how much it had been pushed back,” Azuga said.

When Azuga’s client was released, she had one request: that her mother bring her Chipotle. In the months since then, she has settled into her residential treatment program, consistently following her treatment plan. Her daughter has been able to come for visits. 

Baker, spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, said in a statement that the court system “works closely with all our partners to streamline procedures and reduce delays wherever possible while ensuring that each case is carefully reviewed to protect the safety and security of participants and preserve the integrity of our court initiatives.”

In a late June New York City Council hearing focused on addressing delays in case processing across the court system, Chief Administrative Judge Zayas emphasized the importance of efficient diversion into mental health courts and other specialized programs.

“The faster we engage these individuals with the services and treatments they need, the more likely these interventions are able to be effective,” he said.

Mental health courts aren’t universally accepted as a solution to the significant proportion of people with mental illness in jails and prisons. Critics point to the risk of making access to treatment contingent on arrest and the reality that some participants don’t graduate and are ultimately sentenced to incarceration. Ira Burnim, senior counsel at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said that instead of bolstering judicial systems, deeper investments should be made in earlier interventions like crisis services, wraparound outpatient treatment programs, supportive housing, and employment assistance. 

Advocates of these courts, like Nathan McLaughlin, the executive director of NAMI New York State, agree that early interventions are critical. But they argue that some people with serious mental illness will still land in jail — and deserve an off-ramp.

“Mental health court provides that sort of final diversion point that can actually be transformative because of its intensity,” McLaughlin said.

Still, even the most well-intentioned efforts to divert vulnerable people from jail hinge on the availability of local providers — residential treatment programs, supportive housing placements, and other services to which diversion courts refer their participants.

Dr. J. Steven Lamberti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said he sees mental health courts as an important option for people with serious mental disorders facing criminal charges. But the expansion of diversion programs must be matched with investments in community mental health systems, he emphasized. 

“Any diversion approach is only as effective as the services that people are diverted to,” Lamberti said. 

The mental health court in Ontario County, perched near one of the Finger Lakes, sees just a few cases each week. The county doesn’t have the service resources of nearby Rochester, said Lapp, the public defender. 

Finding housing for mental health court program participants can be a challenge, Lapp said, as can identifying treatment options for people with complex cases. 

“It’s my hope that when we expand mental health courts — and I think we will — that treatment providers will rise up to meet that need,” said Lapp, who supports the Treatment Court Expansion Act.

Similar hurdles persist in New York City, including significant waitlists for supportive housing, which offers tenants health care and social services in addition to a place to live, and the limited availability of beds in residential treatment programs. 

Harbor House is a rare program that offers residential treatment for people with both serious mental illness and substance use disorders. Mental health court participants fill many of its 116 beds in the Bronx, said Miriam Vega, the CEO of Argus Community, the social services provider that runs the program. Harbor House clients receive integrated mental health treatment and substance use disorder counseling, as well as trauma-informed therapy, she said. 

A typical stay at Harbor House is about 350 days, reflecting the significance of clients’ needs, she noted, and clients are often discharged to family or to supportive housing — which is often in short supply. As of late June, there were 36 people on Harbor House’s waitlist, according to Vega. 

“If we could, we would open up one in every borough,” she said.

Experts and clinicians say that New York state needs deeper investments in treatment and housing programs for those in mental health court programs — and to ensure continued access to support after court supervision ends.

“Diversion is just the off-ramp from the criminal justice system,” said Ruth O’Sullivan, senior director of clinical practice at the Center for Justice Innovation. “But recovery is a lifelong process.”

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, participants often spend a year or more in the program, and their progress rarely follows a straight line. Some turn up in the emergency room, or disappear on their way to supportive housing. But the court is a place of second, third — and fourth — chances.

Judge D’Emic described a case of a woman who seemed to thrive in a residential treatment program for half a year, only to disappear and later resurface with a petty theft charge. She’ll receive another chance at diversion, he said, “because the balance between public safety and trying to do right by her hasn’t tipped to public safety.”

David Kelly, chief of the mental health unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, pointed to the community benefit of helping people manage their mental illness and the cost-effectiveness of judicial diversion. But some time ago, he said, he had “a little bit of an epiphany.”

“I said to myself, ‘You know what? This is just the fair, the right way to resolve a lot of cases,’” he said. “I’m not so sure that I think it’s really the most important cost-saving thing to do. It might be the thing that’s most right and just.”

Salamanca City Central School District was set to become one of the first in the nation to bring a humanoid robot into the classroom this fall, as part of a partnership with a tech company called Realbotix. The robot, named Sally, would have lifelike silicone skin, long hair, and a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions. The robot and an accompanying digital avatar, both powered by artificial intelligence, would have given students personalized learning support.

New York Focus’s reporting on the plan drew national attention and backlash from local parents over the use of AI and robotics in schools. On July 24, state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa sent the district a letter expressing concern about “the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high school classroom.” Hours later, Salamanca announced it was putting the project on hold while it worked through student data privacy agreements with the state. 

Now, some lawmakers want to prevent Salamanca or any other school district from making similar investments. 

The bill would require school districts and charter schools to adopt a written policy prohibiting AI-enabled humanoid robots from performing the responsibilities of a teacher, including delivering classroom or one-on-one instruction, tutoring students, and grading work. 

Senate Education Chair Shelley Mayer said she introduced the legislation after reading the New York Focus article, and that she’s shocked by Salamanca’s “glaring mistake of judgment.” 

“As someone who cares about kids and education and how we learn — not just academically, but socially — that all requires human interaction,” she said. “This is absolutely replacing a human being with a machine for instruction and other functions of education, and it shouldn’t be marketed to any school in the United States.”

In a statement, Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel told New York Focus that the technology is intended to assist educators, not replace them. 

“What concerns us about [the bill] is that it appears to have been introduced without anyone involved having seen the technology in action or evaluated a live pilot,” Kiguel said. “The Salamanca project that prompted this bill has not even been deployed. Making a sweeping statewide prohibition on that basis, before any facts or evidence exists, is a premature step.” 

Are you a teacher, parent, or student with a story about technology in your classroom? We want to hear from you. Reach out at melissa@nysfocus.com.

Kiguel said he welcomes the chance to demonstrate and discuss the technology with legislators “so policy can be based on knowledge, not assumption.” 

Salamanca did not respond to requests for comment before publication. 

The robot saga has unfolded amid growing scrutiny of educational technology in New York and across the country. Parents have formed groups to push for stronger oversight of AI, clearer guidelines to limit screen time, and more opportunities to weigh in before districts purchase new tech products. In May, the New York State United Teachers union called for strict limits on AI and screen time in schools. And last month, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced an educational technology purchasing freeze until the school system finalizes guidance on technology procurement.

Mayer said that she is not opposed to AI in classrooms, but that its use should be guided by clear state standards that help districts evaluate when the technology is beneficial and when it poses concerns. 

“This is the first step in what’s going to be a much larger conversation about AI in New York schools,” she said.

Senator Kristen Gonzalez, a co-sponsor of the bill, said schools should only adopt new technologies that are supported by evidence — and that there is no research on how AI-powered robots affect the social and emotional development of children. 

“Clearly, it will take many bills before our school districts are acting appropriately,” she said. 

Earlier this summer, the state Senate and Assembly both unanimously passed Gonzalez’s legislation to restrict AI chatbots from interacting with minors when they contain certain unsafe features. Gonzalez said the measure, which is now awaiting the governor’s approval, would have required Salamanca to ensure its AI-powered avatar program was safe for children and did not have any features that encourage the development of emotional attachments with minors. (Salamanca and Realbotix have emphasized that the avatar is only programmed to talk about education and would alert administrators to flagged topics like suicide and self-harm.)

“This would not only have helped prevent the situation, but in the future, it would also help slow down the adoption of unregulated chatbots in the classroom,” Gonzalez said. 

The legislature will consider the new bill when it reconvenes in January. Both bills are supported by the state teachers union, which is also calling for the legislature to establish clear, enforceable statewide guardrails for AI in schools. That’s a priority for Mayer, who is leading a legislative effort to curb rapid adoption of new education technologies. 

“This is as personal as it gets” for parents and teachers, Mayer said. “People like myself, who’ve fought tooth and nail to get funding for all these schools, want to know where this money is going. And if it is going to for-profit tech companies, there needs to be far greater scrutiny.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has begun rapidly scheduling large numbers of asylum interviews for unaccompanied children, lawyers representing them told New York Focus, leaving kids and their attorneys with little time to prepare for sessions in which they could win the right to stay in the United States. For some legal organizations, what’s normally a trickle of perhaps one interview per month has turned into a deluge of dozens.

Interviews take place after asylum seekers submit a written application; they can sometimes take years to schedule. Over several hours, officers with US Citizenship and Immigration Services try to tease out whether immigrants faced any of the specific types of persecution in their home countries that would qualify them for the protected status. If successful, applicants are protected from deportation and can soon apply for permanent residency. If not, the only remaining path to asylum runs through an immigration court system that has become increasingly hostile to it.

The Trump administration also issued a new rule this week that will allow asylum officers to send claims straight to immigration court without conducting that initial interview. It applies to children as well as adults, and its effects remain to be seen.

Meanwhile, the administration has refused to pay out a contract that funds legal providers to represent unaccompanied kids — and the contract is set to expire Friday, raising the prospect of more children having to navigate deportation proceedings alone.

All told, children and teenagers in New York and across the country are facing a much quicker path to potential deportation.

“It really does seem to be a targeted push against unaccompanied children to speed up their removal proceedings in any way possible,” said Rachel Jordan, managing attorney at the nonprofit Safe Passage Project, which serves immigrant and refugee kids.

For clients of the Safe Passage Project, USCIS scheduled about 30 interviews between late July and August, compared to four or five total from 2024 through earlier this year, Jordan said.

Emily Norman, East Coast regional director for Kids in Need of Defense, said her organization had recently received notice that the government scheduled more than 50 asylum interviews for clients in the New York City area for August and September. In the past, she said, the organization saw fewer than one interview a month. A large volume of asylum interviews have also been scheduled soon for clients in Houston, Newark, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, Norman said.

And at The Door, a New York City-based nonprofit that represents immigrant kids, staff have gone from preparing for one or two asylum cases every six months to three or four per month, said Meena Shah, managing director of legal services.

USCIS did not answer questions about the flurry of scheduled interviews. “Making official decisions on asylum applications filed by Unaccompanied Alien Children is part of the agency’s overall backlog reduction strategy,” the agency said in a statement.

Typically, attorneys said, they prepare for their clients’ interviews by consulting experts on conditions in their home countries. They may spend hours conducting practice interviews with an interpreter to get their clients comfortable with the format. Asylum officers often ask detailed questions in an effort to draw out a child or teenager’s account of persecution, but also to find inconsistencies or evolving explanations. The officer may probe for the details of a harmful experience a child claims to have had, or ask the same question in multiple ways.

“Sometimes you can get officers who start to ask, ‘Why can’t you tell me this?’ — really pushing the kid,” Norman said. “An attorney can step in and say, ‘Stop. You need to give the child a moment. They are confused.’”

While giving lawyers less time to prepare their clients for interviews, the Trump administration has also withheld funding for their work. 

No one in immigration proceedings is guaranteed an attorney, but under federal law, the government is supposed to ensure that children who cross the border alone have access to counsel to the “greatest extent practicable.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which takes custody of unaccompanied children when they arrive in the United States, provides nonprofits with hundreds of millions of dollars annually to pay for legal services.

That funding has lingered in uncertainty for months. In early 2025, the Trump administration canceled the contract for legal services, prompting some organizations to lay off staff. A federal judge ordered the administration to reinstate the contract but, earlier this year, HHS said in court filings that its Office of Refugee Resettlement had identified issues with invoices and demanded additional documentation before paying it out.

Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that administers the contract and passes money to providers, said it couldn’t retroactively create that documentation. HHS has refused to pay and owes $65 million for legal services so far, according to Acacia. A lawsuit over the lack of payment is ongoing.

The contract is set to expire after July 31. In a statement, the Office of Refugee Resettlement said it had proposed extending it, but that Acacia had been unwilling to agree to provide certain information about clients. Acacia counters that the information the government is demanding would compromise clients’ confidentiality, at the same time that ORR has been sharing information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The federal government has not announced what will happen with the contract after this week.

The end of the contract means that New York’s legal aid organizations will face difficult decisions. State and local funding that also helps pay for attorneys for some children will continue, but the organizations may be unable to take on new clients. Shah said that lawyers should still be able to visit their existing clients at federally contracted shelters, but won’t be able to conduct legal trainings after Friday, leaving kids who arrive after that date potentially cut off from attorneys.

“That’s going to be a class of kids that could be subjected to abuse, harm, neglect in these facilities with nobody there that’s independent of these systems to talk to them,” Shah said.

If USCIS doesn’t grant a child asylum following their interview, they still have a chance to win it from an immigration judge. But that process has become its own assembly line, as judges have been speeding up court proceedings for minors.

On Tuesday, New York City-based Immigration Judge Lisa Ling conducted a hearing for 41 unaccompanied children in federal custody, including a 3-year-old for whom attorneys were trying to put together an asylum application. Ling sat at the dais in her courtroom, while the children, their advocates, a Department of Homeland Security lawyer, and a Spanish interpreter appeared on a screen behind her. The respondents, most of whom were teenagers, sat in front of web cameras in offices and conference rooms at their shelters, sometimes alone and other times shoulder to shoulder with another teen.

Until recently, it was common for judges in these kinds of hearings to offer children months to prepare their cases. For more than 30 of the kids, Ling set new hearing dates within three weeks, telling those without attorneys to use the time to find representation.

She asked a boy named Benjamin, who looked around 16 years old, if he had completed an asylum application she told him to submit by that day.

“I still haven’t done it because I haven’t found an attorney yet,” he said in Spanish, with an interpreter translating for the judge.

“With or without an attorney, you have to fill it out,” she told him, adding that it had to be written in English. If it wasn’t completed by the date of his next hearing, which she set for August 18, it wouldn’t be considered.

Many of the kids appearing before Ling had already submitted applications for asylum with USCIS. In the past, immigration judges often terminated or paused deportation proceedings, effectively stopping the court process while they waited for their interviews. No longer.

“The court does not terminate proceedings, as stated at the last hearing,” Ling told the advocate for a child who had recently applied for asylum. She scheduled a new hearing for mid-August.

The approach means Ling can close cases more quickly. Of 133 minors’ cases she resolved between January and June, she ordered deportation more than 60 percent of the time, up from 45 percent in 2024. Facing narrowing options for deportation protection and growing hurdles to reuniting with their family members in the US, another 9 percent of the kids chose to leave the country voluntarily, up from less than 1 percent in 2024.

A spokesperson for the immigration court system said the courts “prioritize the timely completion of all cases, including those of unaccompanied alien children, and make scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish.” 

Most of the kids appearing before Ling had no attorney, and it was unclear whether they had received any one-on-one legal counsel. Just under 40 percent of minors in immigration proceedings in New York lack an attorney, compared to 56 percent nationally, said Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice.

A boy named Edgar, who looked to be in his early teens, had black hair that flopped across his forehead and wore a blue T-shirt as he sat in front of a camera at the shelter where he was staying. Ling asked him if he was afraid of returning to Guatemala. No, he told her. She asked him if there was anything or anyone that he was afraid of there. 

“No, I don’t have anyone that I fear,” he answered in Spanish through an interpreter, not seeming to realize that, as he shared more about his hopes and motivations, his chances of staying in the United States were dwindling. “I just always wanted to be in this country since I was little, and now that I’m here, I don’t want to leave.”

Later, she asked again: Had he been fleeing anyone or anything when he left Guatemala? No, he responded. 

“Here, maybe I can go to school, and back home there was very little work,” he said. 

“Edgar, I’m sorry, but it does not appear that you are eligible for any relief but voluntary departure,” Ling told him, referencing a process by which he’d have to leave the US of his own accord. The boy was still. He asked what would happen if he did not accept. Ling explained she would then order him deported.

“So do you want voluntary departure?” she asked.

He looked down at his hands. “Voluntary departure,” he answered quietly.

The disclosures were the result of an inventory under the state’s 2024 policy governing AI use, part of Governor Kathy Hochul’s efforts to boost transparency around the technology. But several high-profile AI programs do not appear in the inventory, New York Focus found. 

Agencies began self-reporting their AI use to the state’s Office of Information Technology Services, or ITS, last March, and the results were published on December 30. As agencies prepare to start their second round of reporting in the coming months, critics say, the inconsistencies raise questions about the state’s ability to effectively track and disclose its use of the rapidly growing technology.

The state broadly defines AI as any machine-based system that directly impacts the public by making predictions, recommendations, or decisions. This includes analyses used by law enforcement and to determine eligibility for public benefits, and natural language processing.

The 13 agencies in the inventory reported 19 computer programs in total, ranging from common apps like Google Translate — which the Department of State uses to translate forms — to AI companion robots deployed by the Office for the Aging to combat loneliness among seniors. 

In a February budget hearing, ITS Director Dru Rai acknowledged the 19 inventory disclosures seemed low, but said he wasn’t sure if that was because submissions were withheld for safety or privacy concerns. “That’s why I would guess the list is smaller than it should be,” he said. A note published with the inventory mentions that “back-office or purely internal AI tools” were not included. A disclaimer also warns the disclosures haven’t been “independently validated” by ITS. 

Reporting guidelines allow agencies to request their AI tools be withheld from disclosure for privacy or safety concerns, but it’s unclear how many submissions were omitted from the 2025 inventory for those reasons.

Several programs that have been publicized elsewhere did not appear in the inventory. For instance, the inventory includes two AI tools that the Department of Motor Vehicles uses to verify documents and translate forms, but does not include AI-powered facial recognition technology that the department has been using since 2010 to detect fraud. The DMV did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York State Police and the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, meanwhile, currently use Dataminr — an AI-powered threat monitor that has received backlash for surveilling protesters — according to state contract records. Only the latter agency’s use of the platform appears in the AI inventory. The New York State Police doesn’t appear on the inventory at all, though reports have shown that it has heavily invested in various forms of AI over the past decade.

Spokespeople for the State Police and ITS did not clarify whether the State Police submitted programs to ITS for review.

In an email, a State Police spokesperson did not outline which programs the agency was using and wrote that “any systems that State Police use with artificial intelligence components are used in accordance with the State’s Acceptable AI Use Policy,” also noting that the department uses Dataminr “for notifications only, not for criminal investigations.”

The state Office of Children and Family Services is also absent from the inventory despite having publicized its subcontractor’s use of AI software to monitor and train its caseworkers. The reporting mandate should cover contractors that work with state agencies. The inventory also did not include proprietary AI chatbots used by at least seven county social services departments, which work closely with the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. The chatbots have helped county departments manage increased call volumes as a result of eligibility changes to public benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

OCFS did not provide comment. In an email, a spokesperson for Onondaga County said that it did not participate in the 2025 inventory, but plans to participate in the upcoming reporting round. The spokesperson noted that it has notified state officials at OTDA about its AI chatbot. The six other county social services departments — Chenango, Clinton, Greene, Jefferson, Oswego, and Orleans — did not respond to requests for comment. 

The state’s policy is ambiguous, said Clara Langevin, senior manager of AI policy at the Federation of American Scientists. 

“I could see state agencies having difficulties interpreting this guidance,” she said. “Internal uses of AI that may seem routine, such as prioritizing grant or permit applications, flagging cases for investigation, or helping triage child welfare cases, could reasonably be considered to affect the public.” 

“Without additional guidance or examples, agencies could reach different conclusions about whether these systems fall within the reporting requirements,” she said.

ITS updated its AI policy in June, but those changes still leave questions. For instance, the inventory reporting requirement previously applied to “state entities” but has been narrowed to “state agencies.” But the agency hasn’t clarified whether other types of government bodies, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are subject to reporting. ITS did not respond to a request for comment on the updates.

The reporting gaps didn’t come as a surprise to state Senator Kristen Gonzalez, who has advocated for stricter, more transparent AI safeguards.

Gonzalez pointed to an April 2025 State Comptroller audit, which found that the state’s AI governance policy as of late 2024 contained inadequate guidance and left agencies ill-equipped to fully and accurately identify the technology due to “non-existent training.” The same report predicted the upcoming inventory would not identify “all AI use cases.”  (ITS updated its policy in March 2025 in response to the comptroller’s findings). 

ITS spokesperson Scott Reif told New York Focus that the agency recently provided additional documentation and training to agencies to improve future reporting, but did not provide more details. He also did not say how many agencies submitted AI programs for review or specify which agencies are required to participate.

Gonzalez blamed Hochul, who she said watered down AI transparency provisions originally proposed by lawmakers a few years ago. Gonzalez introduced the LOADing Act, which oversees AI use by state agencies, in 2023; the final version Hochul signed in late 2024 allows the state to redact details in the public version of the inventory. “When trust in government is at an all time low, transparency has to be a priority,” Gonzalez said.

Other states have also struggled with incomplete AI inventories. California reported that none of its government agencies used AI in a high-risk way last year, despite public controversies with several programs.

Both Gonzalez and Langevin pointed to the federal government’s more successful efforts at an AI inventory. Langevin outlined the federal government’s more “robust” reporting criteria, which requires agencies to determine whether the AI being used could negatively impact people’s civil rights, privacy, health, or safety. Federal agencies also go through a more detailed multi-stage review process, she noted, where AI systems are evaluated for higher-impact uses. 

In an email, Reif defended the agency. “New York State has an extraordinary record when it comes to promoting the safe, responsible, and transparent deployment of artificial intelligence technologies,” he wrote. “ITS takes its responsibility in this area very seriously and we remain fully engaged with our agency partners in supporting the safe, responsible, and transparent adoption of AI.”

While the reporting mandate applies to some local governments that work closely with state agencies, like county social services departments, it doesn’t appear to cover other cases like the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. The agency runs LETECH, a popular grant program that provides state funds to local counties for a wide array of pricey and controversial police tech, ranging from drones to gunshot detection devices. Earlier this month, Hochul announced $75 million in new LETECH funding. 

AI-powered license plate readers funded by the state program have sparked intense community backlash across the state, including in Suffolk County, Ithaca, Newburgh, and Saranac Lake. The company behind the cameras, Flock Safety, has been under heightened scrutiny nationwide amid the federal government’s ongoing immigration crackdown. Local police departments have accessed the camera feeds to aid agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Data gathered from the tech devices feed into criminal intelligence hubs maintained by DCJS across the state, but DCJS does not appear in the AI inventory. Aaron Cagwin, director of public information for the criminal justice agency, said that ITS determined it “did not employ any technology products that met the state’s definition of AI.”

“Decisions about how grant funds are used are made by the individual agencies within program guidelines,” he wrote. “While DCJS generally monitors emerging technologies and trends in law enforcement, it does not currently track or evaluate the use of AI technologies by grant recipients.” 

Hochul has emphasized the importance of AI disclosure in maintaining public trust, mitigating risk, and cementing the state’s trailblazing reputation. “New York is once again leading the nation in setting a strong and sensible standard for frontier AI safety,” Hochul said in December, while announcing new reporting guidelines for AI developers. 

“Governor Hochul remains committed to ensuring that NY remains at the forefront of the AI revolution,” Hochul spokesperson Kassie White wrote in an email. “That includes better serving New Yorkers by both expanding AI education and training to the NYS workforce as well as ensuring that agencies are transparent about the uses of AI systems that directly impact the public.”

Several of the AI programs that were disclosed in the inventory have been embroiled in lawsuits. Eightfold, an AI-powered hiring platform contracted by the Labor Department to help job seekers, is being sued for potentially illegal screening practices. AI-generated narration used in instructional materials by the state’s Higher Education Services Corporation is part of a class action suit alleging voice theft. Software used by the state’s Office for People With Developmental Disabilities to detect distracted driving was at the center of a $4.25 million privacy settlement in 2025. 

In an email, the Labor Department said it is using Eightfold to “augment the job matching the Department has always done, helping make the employment search smarter and broader for jobseekers and businesses.” Lisa Pink, a public information officer for DOL, noted the agency completed a risk assessment to ensure that Eightfold complies with the state’s AI policy, but did not say whether it was taking additional precautions or received direction from ITS on how to move forward in light of the lawsuit. HESC and OPWDD did not respond to requests for comment.

When Gonzalez pressed ITS Director Rai during a budget hearing in February about how his agency was managing potential risks like Eightfold, he put the onus on the Labor Department. “We are there to help, but they are responsible for taking the risk,” he said.

The recently updated ITS guidelines require agencies to conduct risk assessments of AI tools largely on their own and eliminated a provision that would have required certain state agencies — including the Labor Department — to conduct those assessments in conjunction with ITS. 

The next reporting round starts this fall and will be posted online on December 30. Langevin called accurate AI inventories critical to any meaningful oversight. She urged New York to adopt a clearer definition for reportable AI use, outline specific procedures, and provide sector-specific guidance to ensure all agencies are well-equipped to govern their AI systems as the technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous.

“You can’t meaningfully evaluate the benefits or risks of government AI if you don’t know where it’s being used,” she said. “Inventories enable oversight bodies, researchers, and the public to ask informed questions, identify patterns across agencies, and evaluate whether governance frameworks are working as intended.”

A nurse aide who worked at the facility and was concerned about the care residents were receiving texted the photos to their supervisor and posted them on social media. The inspector’s report expressed deep concern about the treatment of the residents, noting that graphic photos of them had been shared online, and that the home didn’t report the incident for three days. 

Conditions like this aren’t supposed to happen anywhere, but they especially aren’t supposed to happen at this home, the Buffalo Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing. 

In November 2024, Centers Health Care — the 37-facility nursing home chain that owns Buffalo Center — settled a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that accused the chain of chronic neglect, understaffing, and running a years-long scheme in which its owners pocketed over $80 million in Medicaid funds meant for patient care. The settlement required the chain and its owners — healthcare moguls Daryl Hagler and Kenneth Rozenberg — to pay a $45 million fine, increase staffing to safe levels, and hire independent monitors to protect residents and prevent fraud. It did not seek to remove Hagler or Rozenberg from the company, and neither admitted wrongdoing under the settlement.

At the time, James said that the settlement would lead to “major reforms” that would “ensure residents receive the care they deserve.”

Under the agreement, Buffalo Center and three other nursing homes with especially egregious records are required to provide at least 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. That amount is still well below the roughly four hours that a landmark 2001 study sponsored by the federal government found was necessary for safe, top quality care. 

But Buffalo Center has missed the target on 82 separate occasions from November 2024 to December 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. During that time span, at least three instances of abuse and unsanitary conditions have been reported at the facility.

“Folks living under 3.5 hours of care are living in deadly places,” said Sam Brooks, who studies nursing home policy at the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy group for residents’ rights. “You’ll see people unable to eat, people that don’t get out of bed, pressure ulcers that are gaping wounds.”

(The other three homes targeted in the lawsuit have complied with the 3.5-hour requirement, with only very occasional misses.)

The settlement also barred Centers Health Care from reducing the “staffing level or quality of care” at its other nursing homes in order to boost care at the four targeted facilities.

But in the 20 months since the settlement, multiple homes across the chain that weren’t part of the settlement reduced the amount of nursing care they provide. The lack of staff has coincided with at least six serious incidents including falls, injuries, and in one case, death of a resident. In three instances, staff initially failed to report the harms to state authorities, in apparent violation of state law. 

New York Focus reached out to Centers Health Care, the individual homes, Hagler, Rozenberg, and their lawyers. None responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Abuse allegations and unlivable conditions aren’t unique to the Centers Health Care chain. In 2025 alone, dozens of New York nursing homes were cited for conditions that placed residents in “immediate jeopardy” of injury or death, the most serious category of violation.

Still, Centers Health Care stands out. Despite its apparent violations of the settlement with the attorney general, it has not faced any punishment.

In response to questions, attorney general spokesperson Grant Fox said that the office is “actively reviewing Centers’ compliance with our settlement.”

“We will continue to investigate facilities to protect vulnerable New Yorkers,” Fox said.

The 2024 settlement specified that if Centers failed to improve, the attorney general could impose fines, reopen the lawsuit, or “take any other action authorized by law.” None of those things have happened. Instead, Centers nursing homes have continued to receive taxpayer money and accept new patients, while the same patterns of neglect that prompted the lawsuit continue.

These findings come from dozens of inspection reports and spreadsheets of employment data analyzed by New York Focus. The records do not contain worker or patient names or identifying details, but do provide daily staffing data and detailed accounts of failures in care.

Since its founding in 1996, Centers Health Care has grown into one of the largest nursing home chains in New York, with facilities in every region of the state. It is a massive recipient of public money: From 2014 to 2021, the four nursing homes targeted in the attorney general’s lawsuit received hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, the government insurance programs for elderly and low-income Americans. 

Those millions continue to flow into Centers’s nursing homes. And for residents whose stays are not covered by the government, Centers charges up to $725 per day, far above the roughly $500 average New York rate. The chain frequently sues patients who don’t pay up.

State regulators have the authority to bar dangerous nursing home operators from receiving Medicaid money, the largest source of funding for nursing homes. But this runs the risk of leaving patients without other options, and it’s only happened five times in New York since 2005, according to data from the state Medicaid office.

New York isn’t the only state where Centers and its owners stand accused of fraudulently pocketing public funds and leaving patients to suffer. In January, New Jersey’s state comptroller sued Hagler and Rozenberg, after accusing them and numerous codefendants of diverting $124 million in Medicaid payments to themselves at two facilities where residents endured neglect, sexual assault, and death. The case remains pending. 

At Buffalo Center, the same month that the photographs of exposed residents were taken, inspectors documented dozens of flies in patients’ rooms, crawling on residents’ bodies. A nurse said she believed flies were attracted to one particular unit because of a resident urinating on their mattress and floor. In an interview, the facility’s maintenance director told the state inspector that the facility had been working with an exterminator to address the issue.

New York law guarantees “individual dignity” to nursing home residents, but an administrator told an inspector that the flies were “not a dignity concern,” the inspector recorded. The administrator admitted that the environment was “not homelike,” a standard required by federal regulation.

The low staffing levels appear to have contributed to physical injuries as well. 

In August, a resident suffered a deep gash to their face after a nurse aide rolled them out of their bed and onto the floor. When the accident occurred, a nurse aide was attempting to change the resident, who was incontinent, despite documentation that the task required two staff to be performed safely. The resident was “severely cognitively impaired” and could only rarely communicate with others. Their care plan noted that they were at risk of falls.

They were taken to the hospital, where they received surgery for the wound, which stretched from their mouth to their eye.

In September, Buffalo Center failed to report alleged abuse. In an email to an administrator, a resident’s guardian said that a nurse aide threatened to give the resident a cold shower and withhold food, and stepped on their foot, all as punishment for vomiting.

The email claimed that the aide’s behavior was “a form of abuse,” but Buffalo Center did not investigate the incident or report it to authorities. When questioned by inspectors, the administrator who received the emails said they “inadvertently missed the allegation of abuse,” and admitted that they “should have read the e-mails more closely.”

“When I think about that place it brings tears to my eyes because of the way they treated me,” Buffalo resident Tanica Johnson, 39, told New York Focus. She didn’t receive wound care or rehab for weeks on end, she said, despite having been sent to Buffalo Center to recover from an amputation of part of her leg due to complications from diabetes. She thinks her stay there lasted a year, but as one identical day after another slipped by, she lost track of time. “I don’t know how long I was in the place,” she said. “I just know it traumatized me.” 

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said that in July 2025, Buffalo Center submitted plans to address the nonconsensual photography, fly infestation, and failures to report abuse, and that the facility was in compliance with the state Department of Health by September 2025. The attorney general was not aware of the fall or verbal abuse incidents, the spokesperson said. 

Buffalo Center did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an article about recent incidents and fines, the facility told The Buffalo News that it “takes resident care, safety, and dignity very seriously,” and that it “continues to work closely with regulatory agencies and internal compliance leadership to ensure ongoing adherence to all standards of care and resident rights.”

The independent monitors that Centers was required to hire are set to cease operation on July 31, according to the terms of the settlement. But that can be extended if any of the nursing homes fail to comply with the monitors’ recommendations.

The attorney general’s spokesperson did not say whether the office plans to seek an extension of the monitor’s term. 

Federal and state regulators issued multiple fines against Buffalo Center in response to the incidents. The state Department of Health fined the facility $8,000 over the nonconsensual photography of exposed and soiled residents — $2,000 for each resident — and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services issued fines totaling $139,471 over the inspections that revealed the fly infestations and the ignored abuse allegations. 

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the facility made nearly $5 million in net income. The 2025 fines are less than four percent of that sum.

“These companies are making so much money that the fines just don’t mean anything to them,” said Charlene Harrington, an emeritus professor of sociology and nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. “They’re saving a lot of money by their understaffing.”

The legal actions that New York has taken against Centers and other nursing homes are some of the most aggressive efforts in the country, experts told New York Focus.

James’s office “has really been the leader in terms of holding nursing homes accountable,” said Richard Mollot, director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, which advocates for nursing home residents.

But the persistence of poor conditions and patient neglect at Centers facilities, even after the settlement, is “beyond depressing,” he said, and shows that lawsuits “can’t be our only strategy as a society to hold nursing homes accountable.”

New York’s health department can require nursing homes to hire independent monitors to protect patients, but this tool has only been used twice since the law took effect in 2020.

The state Department of Health did not respond to detailed questions for this article. “The Department is committed to holding nursing homes and their operators accountable for the quality of care they provide, and we remain aggressive in assessing the maximum fines permissible by law in every instance,” spokesperson John Emery said in a statement.

There are other tools available to states to try to hold chains like Centers accountable, but each has drawbacks, experts say. 

The state could try to rescind Centers’s license to operate nursing homes or bar the company from receiving Medicaid and Medicare funding, which is the main source of cash for most nursing homes. But there’s a reason states are often reluctant to pursue this path: It’s not easy to find better options.

In fact, when faced with aggressive enforcement, a common response by nursing homes is to threaten to close, and leave their patients with nowhere to go, multiple experts told New York Focus.

“The operators have a bit of a stranglehold on states,” Brooks said. “There aren’t a bunch of really good actors out there waiting to swoop in and buy these homes.”

In extreme cases, federal and state prosecutors have brought criminal charges against nursing home operators.

Unfortunately, that route can also endanger vulnerable nursing home patients. When a health care operator is criminally convicted of health care fraud, they are automatically barred from receiving money from the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs. Since losing Medicaid money can force a nursing home to close and effectively evict its patients, regulators may be reluctant to pursue criminal charges against operators without a plan in place to protect the residents. 

“What’s frustrating to me is that the regulatory system and legal system is very slow, and these are life and death issues,” Harrington said.

As Centers’s business has boomed, so have the personal fortunes of Hagler and Rozenberg. In 2021, Rozenberg took control of Israel national airline El Al, allegedly using money that he and Hagler siphoned out of the nursing homes, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit. Both men currently serve on the airline’s board.

Buffalo wasn’t the only Centers facility where residents continued to suffer. Federal data analyzed by New York Focus shows that the amount of nursing care at some other Centers Health Care facilities has dropped significantly in the year-and-a-half following the agreement. 

For one resident of the Onondaga Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, that lack of care may have proved fatal. 

On July 21, 2025, the resident fell in the bathroom and told staff they felt dizzy. While there was a licensed practical nurse on duty, there wasn’t a more highly trained registered nurse, who might have been able to assess that the falls were a symptom of something more serious.

That night, a care aide noted that the resident’s breathing was “wet sounding,” and later said that it “sounded like the resident was having trouble breathing.” A nurse said they would “let the right staff know.” If that happened, there is no indication in the incident report that anyone followed up with the resident. 

At around 5:30 am, a different nurse found the resident in bed, nonresponsive, with no pulse or breath. The patient’s records showed that they wanted to be resuscitated in the event of an emergency, but the nurse did not have documented CPR certification and did not perform CPR, a violation of state and federal regulations.

Instead, they called 911. Emergency medical workers arrived about 15 minutes later, and soon after, they pronounced the patient dead.

The morning before the death, the resident’s lab results had shown that they were at serious risk for seizures and coma, according to a physician who later assessed the records. But no one reviewed the results until two days later — after the resident had died.

After failing to catch the warning signs, Onondaga Center also neglected to notify the authorities about what had happened. State regulations required the nursing home to report the failure to provide CPR to state regulators. But an unsigned investigation by the facility concluded there was “no evidence” of any “neglect, exploitation, or mistreatment” of the dead patient, so it did not need to be reported.

Calls and emails from New York Focus to Onondaga Center and Centers Health Care about this incident went unreturned.

In a phone call two months later, the director of nursing who was on staff at the time of the death told state investigators that the facility’s staff knew that they were required to report it, but chose not to act after “conversations with corporate staff who did not want it reported.” 

After the inspection that revealed this failure, the federal government fined Onondaga Center $177,790, and the state issued a $10,000 fine for the failure to provide CPR. The attorney general’s spokesperson said that the office was not aware of the incident. 

When asked about the drop in nursing hours at other Centers facilities after the settlement, the attorney general’s spokesperson said, “Centers is not required by the settlement agreement to implement recommendations from the [Independent Health Monitor] in facilities other than the four subject homes.”

The month of the death, residents at Onondaga Center received less than ten minutes of skilled nurse care per day, on average, and less than three hours of total care — both sharp decreases from the average in the months before the settlement. 

Onondaga isn’t the only Centers facility to see a drop in nursing care, or to see that drop coincide with serious harm to residents. 

At Washington Center for Rehab and Healthcare, in New York’s capital region, average daily nursing care at the facility has reached new lows since the settlement, dropping below three hours in January 2025 and remaining well below 3.5. In February 2025, a dementia patient fell out of bed after being left unattended and unsecured, bloodying their head and bruising both knees.

The injured patient was a known fall risk. Their care plan called for keeping their bed in a lowered position, placing barriers on both sides of the mattress, and putting protective mats on the floor. On February 12, after the patient had a bowel movement, the nurse aide attending to them went to get fresh linens, leaving the patient alone while the bed was elevated and barriers and mats were missing on one side. Soon after, a nurse heard the patient shouting, and entered the room to find them sprawled on the floor, with a bruised and bloodied head. Washington Center was fined $9,620 by the federal government and $2,000 by the state. 

Staffing decreases coincided with dangerous and degrading conditions at the Ontario Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare, too. 

During a March 2026 inspection of the Centers facility in New York’s Finger Lakes region, two residents were found in rooms so cold that they were at risk of hypothermia. One was actively shivering, and another was in bed covered only by a sheet, while the heating unit blew cold air into their room. The outside temperature on the day of the inspection averaged 23 degrees.

During a January 2025 inspection, incontinent residents reported waiting up to 21 hours to be changed after urinating or defecating in adult diapers. They said they had to dump a container holding urine out the window when it overflowed. Two patients said that when they called for help changing out of soiled clothing, nursing staff came to their bedsides, said that they were too short-staffed to provide aid, and left.

On multiple days, nurses also failed to change the bandages for two residents with wounds on their legs. Unchanged bandages can lead to infection and permanent tissue damage.

When questioned, multiple staff members explicitly cited understaffing as the cause of the issues. A nurse aide said that their floor, which housed 48 patients, was staffed by two or three workers. Staffing records showed multiple night shifts where two nurses had staffed the entire 98-bed facility.

High-ranking staff did not provide any indication that they had taken steps to address the shortages. An administrator told inspectors that in response to resident complaints, some staff had been fired.

The egregious treatment recorded in the January 2025 inspection was a departure from the pre-settlement norm: Several inspections in the two years before the settlement had not resulted in any serious citations or fines.

Even if the monitor’s oversight is extended, it’s unclear that anything would change significantly for residents of the chain. 

For Toby Edelman, an attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the recent troubles at Centers Health Care highlight the need for more vigorous action by the Department of Health and attorney general’s office. 

Edelman suggested that the health department should aggressively issue citations against the troubled Centers facilities, and that the attorney general should reopen the case and seek to impose fines.

“They have a good settlement, but if they’re not really doing follow up, that’s a problem,” she said. “What’s the point of having a settlement?” 

This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style.

A student being bullied at school. Struggling with their homework. Bringing a gun to school. These are familiar scenarios, but what happens when the person encountering them first isn’t a person at all but an AI-programmed teaching assistant? 

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to interview Sally, an artificial intelligence-powered tool that Salamanca City Central School District had planned to introduce to students this fall alongside a humanoid robot. After a New York Focus report on the plan sparked fierce debate over the use of artificial intelligence in schools, Salamanca announced that it was putting the project on hold to “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” with the state education agency. 

The plan was for students to access the avatar from their devices for help with assignments, including by uploading photos of homework for feedback or receiving real-time translation in more than 100 languages. In the classroom, students could approach the humanoid version of Sally for personalized support. The robot would have a “lifelike” appearance —silicone skin, long, brown hair and a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

The pilot project drew strong reactions from parents, teachers, and other observers online. Some praised the district for embracing innovation and giving students access to cutting-edge technology. Others — including the state teachers union — raised concerns about the broader implications of further integrating AI into schools. 

“Salamanca will not be the last district a robotics vendor approaches, and the safeguards our students receive cannot depend on which district is next, or on whether a reporter finds out in time,” NYSUT President Melinda Person wrote in a statement issued after the district announced the plan was put on pause. 

When I first learned about the $57,590 investment, I knew I wanted to speak with Sally directly to better understand how the program would work  — and, more specifically, what its conversations with students would actually sound like. Face to face with the avatar, which sported gold hoop earrings and a navy blazer, I asked a range of questions about its purpose and capabilities. 

Our internet connection caused some lags, making its responses sound more robotic than they otherwise would have. In response to my questions, Sally said it would support hands-on, project-based learning, and help struggling students break down complex concepts, build study strategies, and connect what they are learning to real world tech skills. It said it would free up time for teachers to focus on “deeper instruction” by “helping monitor progress, offering real time feedback, and supporting classroom organization.” 

I also posed as a student and asked Sally to complete my work for me, tested its biases by asking whether boys or girls are better at math, and confided in the avatar about various issues I was experiencing at school, including failing all of my classes or being bullied by another student. 

“Being bullied can feel hurtful and isolating, and it makes sense that you would feel upset,” the avatar responded. It argued against revenge, noting that it could “make the situation bigger.”  Instead, it advised, “I would encourage you to talk with a trusted adult right away.”

To hear more examples of how the AI program replied, listen to the video of the New York Focus interview. 

Have a tip about educational technology in your school district? Contact Melissa Manno at melissa@nysfocus.com or on Signal at melissamanno.38. 

“They were like alligators. They swooped in and devoured them,” said one of the plant workers.

Area residents say the arrests are part of the largest wave of immigration enforcement activity they’ve seen in recent memory. For workers, driving is now a gamble. Even the five-minute trip from the plant to their motel has become risky.

Similar arrests have transformed life for agricultural laborers across western New York. Agents have ramped up operations in the region as Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently increased its national arrest target to 2,000 per day. They have searched farms, arrested dairy workers leaving Latin American grocery stores, and pulled over vans of roofers, in one case sending several men fleeing into the woods. Fear has prompted workers to either leave the area or go into hiding.

At the tomato plant, the most recent arrest took place on July 8, when Border Patrol agents trailed two cars of laborers to the motel after they left work. The occupants got out and fled, but agents arrested one of them, a Venezuelan man. A spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said he had been ordered deported in 2023 and had a “criminal record” but declined to share additional details.

Marialice Rodriguez, who was riding in one of the cars, said that after she got out, an agent pointed a pistol at her chest. “I said, ‘Please don’t shoot me, I am an American,’” she said.

The spokesperson confirmed that the agent pointed a gun at Rodriguez. “Once the individual was identified as a U.S. citizen and posed no threat, the agent lowered their weapon,” he said.

After the arrest, workers staying at the motel spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what to do. Some bought bus tickets out of Rochester. The next morning, the motel’s owner, Chandrakanth Patel, told New York Focus that most of the workers staying there had fled. Fewer than half of the plant’s roughly 120 workers showed up for their shift that day, said one employee, who asked to be identified as J to avoid retaliation by immigration authorities.

“They are targeting anyone,” he said.

An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that its enforcement at workplaces targets “illegal employment networks that undermine American workers” and “remains a cornerstone of ICE’s efforts to protect public safety, national security, and economic stability.”

The targeted workers say authorities are harassing the lifeblood of the region’s agricultural economy. Many of those who remain are indignant.

“The engine of this company is the immigrant,” said a tomato plant worker in her 60s who said she has a work permit. “They make money for this country.”

The day after the most recent arrest, those who hadn’t fled worked from 5 am until 6 pm, praying they’d make it home at the end of their shifts. The tomato vines in the greenhouse had to be pruned. The newly ripe fruit had to be examined for blemishes and packaged into plastic containers labeled “FLAVOR BOMBS.” The containers had to be loaded onto trucks for distribution to Tops and Wal-Mart stores. If the work stopped, the tomatoes would rot.

To reach the tomato plant, turn off Route 104 and wind through a quiet industrial park, past a sheet metal manufacturer and a trucking depot where a Charlie Kirk memorial emblazoned on a big rig declares, “Legends Never Die.” At the end of the road, translucent, gabled greenhouses loom behind scrubby trees.

A company called Intergrow built the facility nearly a decade ago, and in 2023, Mastronardi Produce, the biggest greenhouse produce grower in the country, acquired it. Workers at the plant estimated that half or more of the employees are Latino immigrants from Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and elsewhere. Many are hired through labor contractors that also coordinate their housing in local hotels or apartments.

Some tend the hydroponic plants in the greenhouse, harvesting cherry and beefsteak tomatoes in hot temperatures. Others work in the packhouse, preparing the tomatoes for delivery to grocery stores. They wear hairnets and thick black rubber gloves to shield their hands from chemicals. They weigh the tomatoes and set them on trays to be vacuum sealed, with the vines still attached to signal their freshness to supermarket browsers.

J, who has worked at the plant for about five years, said he couldn’t recall ICE arresting its workers before this year. Then, in mid-June, agents arrested a man as he was heading home from work for the day. They soon arrested two other workers nearby.

Supervisors at the plant assured the workers that ICE was only targeting those three laborers and wouldn’t return, a former worker named Nando told New York Focus. So Nando kept going to work, though he didn’t have legal authorization to do so. During his 15 months at the company, he had moved up from working as a packer to handling a machine that unloaded boxes of tomatoes from the greenhouse. He liked the work because he did it mostly on his own, and his machine ran at a set speed, so no one could tell him to hurry up.

About a week after the first arrests, Nando finished his shift and got in his car to head home with his wife and another couple. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he noticed unmarked vehicles idling near the exit. He suspected it was ICE. He drove the speed limit, he said, trying to stay calm as they followed him. When they flashed their lights, he pulled to the side of the road. A man in civilian clothes came up to the driver’s window.

“Just getting off work?” the agent asked in Mexican-accented Spanish, Nando recalled. “Yep, just fighting to make a living as always,” he replied. Then the agent asked: “Do you have permission to be here?”

Nando offered his New York driver’s license, but the agent said it was no good and told him to get out of the car. When he hesitated, the agent threatened to break the glass, Nando said. The agents arrested him and the other man and let their partners leave in the car.

ICE took Nando to the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, then to a detention center in Louisiana, before deporting him and the other man to Guatemala in early July.

Now home with his parents in a rural area without cell service, Nando is trying to keep in touch with his wife and figure out what to do next. His WhatsApp profile picture still shows him smiling in front of a fountain in Rochester.

“I’m trying to adjust,” he said. “I haven’t managed to find a way to make a living here yet. I don’t feel that great, but I’m trying to find a way to adapt, since this is my country.”

The tomato plant arrests represent a small proportion of ramped-up ICE and Border Patrol activity in western New York and the Finger Lakes since late May, according to interviews with five immigrant rights advocates, all of whom described increased enforcement.

“They’re here, hiding, as if surveilling the Latinos who go out to the store, to cash a check, to send money to their families,” said a longtime community advocate who asked not to be identified to avoid drawing attention to the undocumented immigrants with whom he works. The advocate, who immigrated to upstate New York in the early 2000s, said the presence of federal immigration agents was more pronounced in June than at any point he could remember.

Melina Ivanchikova, a founding member of the Finger Lakes Rapid Response Network, which works to protect immigrants, said the recent arrests have largely involved ICE agents pulling people over as they drive major highways or leave Latin grocery stores. The pattern contrasts with one of the region’s highest-profile ICE raids, at a nutrition bar factory outside of Syracuse last year, which resulted in the detention of 57 people and drew condemnation from Governor Kathy Hochul.

Ivanchikova describes the recent activity as a different tactic. “Maybe they’re trying to just pick people off in a way that won’t cause a ruckus, and not do a big flashy workplace raid that riles up the public, but just take people silently one by one,” Ivanchikova said.

The quiet operations have stoked anxiety among immigrants and volunteers, who try to warn one another about potential ICE activity. They now see any vehicles, especially US-made SUVs and pickup trucks, as potential threats.

“They’re afraid to leave here,” one tomato plant worker said on a recent evening as he waited near the facility’s glass doors. He gestured across the parking lot toward the road, where ICE had pulled over and arrested several of his fellow workers.

The worker was waiting for Anthony Rosas, who works for a labor contractor and gives workers rides to and from the plant. He used to pick them up in a large white van, but immigration agents began targeting white vans, he said, so he swapped it out for a more discreet passenger vehicle. Rosas said he now keeps an eye out for cars with tinted windows. He makes extra turns if another car follows behind him for too long.

“It’s literally like Jason Bourne-type mode,” he said. “You gotta be on the lookout.”

As Rosas pulled up to the tomato plant, about 10 workers rushed toward him, all hoping to claim a seat. The new vehicle didn’t have enough room for everyone, so four workers trudged back across the parking lot, clutching backpacks and lunch boxes, some still wearing their hairnets. They sat down at picnic tables in the late June evening sun and settled in for the hour it would take for Rosas to return.

One woman whose brother was recently detained as he left a Latin grocery store in Cayuga County insisted that the men who arrested him were not federal agents but bounty hunters. From detention, he told her that the men followed him in his car, then flashed their lights to get him to pull over. When he did, they asked for his ID and social security card. He was reluctant to give them his driver’s license, because they didn’t look like law enforcement.

ICE told New York Focus that “all immigration arrests are made by sworn federal law enforcement,” not private contractors. The spokesperson said agents always wear a badge and verbally identify themselves as law enforcement, even when wearing civilian clothes.

The ICE activity has led many immigrants in the region to limit their travel as much as possible. Volunteers are dropping off groceries and escorting people to medical appointments

“Workers don’t really leave much anymore,” said Jessica Maxwell, executive director of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a nonprofit that organizes low-wage, mostly immigrant workers. Some farm owners have even asked their employees not to leave the property, she said.

At the Hernandez Mexican Store in Sodus, about 20 minutes east of the tomato plant, an employee named Melissa said there had been days recently when almost no one came to shop. She pulled up a video on her phone showing several men frantically sprinting out of a white van and across a grassy slope toward a forest, federal agents in green chasing behind them.

“It was all over social media,” she said. That same day, June 23, she heard about arrests at a farm, along Highway 88, and at the tomato plant.

Wayne County Sheriff Robert Milby said that ICE told him they arrested at least four people in the county that day. Milby said the agency gives him a heads-up when they plan to work in the county.

What happened to the men who ran into the forest is unclear. ICE told New York Focus that it tried to stop the van during a “targeted enforcement operation.” After six people fled on foot, officers arrested “a 20-year-old illegal alien from Mexico,” a spokesperson said.

Western New York’s agricultural companies have mostly been silent as ICE arrests have escalated in the region. Mastronardi, the New York State Vegetable Growers Association, and the Wayne County Farm Bureau did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the county’s core agricultural industries — apple farms — are unlikely to be affected by the immigration arrests because they have nearly all joined the H-2A visa program, which allows them to hire temporary workers from other countries for seasonal jobs, especially during the harvest from August to November, with federal approval. That move happened in part because previous rounds of enforcement, particularly during the Obama administration, ensnared undocumented farmworkers and led farm owners to join the program. Melissa said the store is also counting on the arrival of H-2A workers from Mexico in a few weeks to lift sales.

When the Finger Lakes Rapid Response Network coordinated volunteers to patrol the Sungrow tomato plant parking lot and surrounding streets in the late afternoons, looking out for signs of ICE, the plant’s leaders were initially supportive, the advocates said. But they soon asked the volunteers to stay out of their parking lot, citing advice from their lawyers, members of the group said.

Sungrow has struggled to fully staff its shifts since the arrests began, but workers keep coming, thanks in part to the recruiting efforts of labor contractors.

On a recent Sunday — the only day the plant is closed — four young men kicked a blue soccer ball around the parking lot of their motel. They’d met shortly after they all arrived in the United States a few years ago. With their partners and children back home in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Honduras, they had formed a kind of family and often traveled to jobs together.

“If they tell us that tomorrow we have to be in New York doing whatever, and we have a job there, okay, we’ll be there,” said one of the men.

A few days earlier, a labor recruiter had messaged one of them on WhatsApp: Jobs available at a tomato packing plant in Ontario. Steady work, not seasonal. Lodging provided. Must have papers.

What she didn’t mention was that at least some of the openings were created by ICE arrests. The men didn’t learn about that until they showed up for work. And although they all had work permits, they didn’t know if those would protect them.

“They told me at work that the guys who got detained had their papers in order,” one said. “You know you’re in compliance, but with them coming after us, I don’t know how we’ll end up. I’m scared anyway.”

Salamanca City Central School District announced in a Facebook post Friday afternoon that its pilot project with tech company Realbotix has been put on hold as school officials “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” with the state education agency and engage with community members.

The news comes hours after state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa sent a letter informing Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler that “the Department remains concerned about  the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high school classroom.” According to the letter, the department met with the district to discuss the robot plan earlier this week. 

“Many parents, teachers, and stakeholders are understandably concerned about the presence of artificial intelligence technology in classrooms, particularly when it involves robots that resemble humans,” Rosa wrote.

The district had planned to introduce the robot to high school students this fall, along with an artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program that allowed students to interact with an avatar of the robot on laptops. The $57,590 investment was approved at a local school board meeting last month.

In a statement provided to New York Focus, Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel said, “We fully respect any decision the school makes and encourage thorough due diligence by all parties involved.” 

“We want the program to be demonstrably safe, fully district-approved, and strongly supported by teachers,” he said. “We stand firmly behind [the program] as a supportive tool designed to assist teachers and students, not replace them.” 

Salamanca and the Education Department could not be immediately reached for comment.

Realbotix had been in the process of building the robot, which it named Sally. According to the company, it would have a “lifelike” appearance, with silicone skin, long, brown hair, and a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions, though it would remain seated in a stationary position. 

Kiguel previously told New York Focus that students would be able to access the avatar from their devices during or after class for help with their assignments, including by uploading photos of homework for feedback or receiving real-time translation in more than 100 languages. When approaching Sally during class, students would use a unique identification code so that the robot could access their conversations with the avatar.

After the district first publicized the plan, it drew strong reactions from parents, teachers, and other observers online. Some praised the district for embracing innovation and giving students access to cutting-edge technology. Others — including the state teachers union — raised concerns about student privacy, increasing screen time, and Realbotix’s ties to the adult entertainment industry.

Education is an entirely new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based company formerly known as Tokens.com. In April 2024, it acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which creates hyperrealistic sex dolls.

In a statement released this week, New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person said “a robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms,” emphasizing that robots — no matter how “lifelike” — are incapable of the human connection students require in order to thrive. 

“NYSUT is committed to fighting thoughtless expansion of this technology, and we will explore every avenue necessary to protect human-centered learning in Salamanca and in every classroom across the state,” the statement reads.

At a Salamanca board meeting on Tuesday, before the program was halted, Superintendent Beehler reiterated the district’s commitment to student safety. During a presentation to trustees, he noted that the robot and avatar would operate on a closed system that is not connected to the internet, and that Realbotix would not have access to personally identifiable student information.

After the district posted a recording of the meeting on Facebook, the comment section quickly filled with debate between local parents and community members who backed the investment and those who criticized it.

“Excited for this opportunity for our kids,” one user commented. “As someone who uses AI in my corporate career, this is a skill that will make them more employable.” 

“You couldn’t just hire another normal teacher?” wrote another. “AI is killing our planet, and gets information incorrect all the time.”

Kara started at Focus this month and will be working to bring a community around our work and enliven New York civic life. She’ll create events from intimate member salons and neighborhood storytelling nights to public forums, teach-ins, and live journalism. Kara previously produced events featuring top government, business, and advocacy leaders at the Washington, DC-based outlet The Hill.

Meet Kara and other Focus staff at our summer happy hour next Tuesday, July 28! And if you have ideas for Kara — events we should put on, speakers you’d want to hear from, organizations we should partner with — reach out at kara@nysfocus.com.

We’re also thrilled to welcome Cassi Feldman as our permanent managing editor. Cassi has served as interim managing editor since January and has become an indispensable part of the team. She has previously served as editor-in-chief at Type Investigations and senior enterprise editor at NBC News Digital, and she’s also worked at newsrooms including 60 Minutes, Chalkbeat New York, and City Limits.

Cassi would love to hear from you! Reach out at cassi@nysfocus.com.

“Getting groceries, getting medication — delivery isn’t a luxury for us,” a woman identified as Miss Dawn tells the viewer. “So the last thing I need is politicians making delivery more expensive or harder to get. The Delivery Protection Act is not protecting me or my neighbors, it’s making our lives harder.”

The ad was posted by a group called New York Delivers, which describes itself as a coalition of small businesses, workers, and some “national carriers.” The group and the bill’s other opponents have made small businesses the face of their campaign, highlighting its potential impact on local business owners.

In fact, however, the delivery giant Amazon appears to have funded most of the group’s opposition, according to new disclosures filed with the state last week.

A disclaimer says the ad was paid for by the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, a longstanding coalition of industry groups and chambers of commerce, affiliated with the Real Estate Board of New York, that pushes for pro-business policies. Nearly all of the group’s funding this year has come from Amazon.

Amazon’s donations to the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, which amount to $5 million, are by far the biggest that the company has ever reported making to a lobbying effort in New York state.

The bill would require Amazon and other companies that own so-called last-mile delivery facilities — smaller warehouses where packages are prepared for delivery — to directly employ their drivers and some warehouse workers. It would also require the facilities to be licensed by the city, which would make New York the first city in the country to impose such a policy. As it stands, Amazon does not directly employ its more than 200,000 drivers nationwide, even as they wear the company’s branded uniforms and drive branded trucks. Instead, it contracts with third-party companies called delivery service providers, or DSPs, who employ the workers.

Critics say that setup allows Amazon to escape liability for crashes and worker injuries and to suppress union organizing; they argue that direct employment would make the company more accountable for working conditions. Amazon says the bill would threaten the existence of more than 40 locally owned DSPs in the city and the jobs of their 5,000 employees, because it may not rehire them, and that it would consider moving its delivery facilities out of the city if the bill passes.

Between February and mid-May, Amazon made five payments totaling $5,001,377 to the Five Borough Jobs Campaign, the new disclosures show. 

In turn, the Five Borough Jobs Campaign reported spending $4.7 million between March and June under the banner of New York Delivers and another $316,000 that did not go to the coalition. No other group has reported spending on behalf of New York Delivers.

Nearly all of that money appears to have come from Amazon: The Five Borough Jobs Campaign had only $121,405 in assets at the end of 2024, and only received $161,800 in donations last year, from a different REBNY-affiliated group.

The result has been a monthslong media blitz. On behalf of New York Delivers, the Five Borough Jobs Campaign has run ads on social media and sponsored newsletters, including Politico’s New York Playbook, claiming that the legislation would cost the average New York household $664 in additional delivery fees each year. (That figure came from a study by the consulting firm AKRF, which was paid $52,500 by Five Borough Jobs Campaign this year, the disclosures show.)

The bill has momentum, with support from 31 of the City Council’s 51 members — enough for it to pass if it went up for a vote. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration voiced support at an April hearing, and Council Speaker Julie Menin signed onto a previous version of the bill last year, though she has not yet taken a position this year. Menin’s office said the bill is still moving through the legislative process and did not say when a vote might be scheduled.

Amazon has not been shy about its opposition to the bill, which it testified against at the April hearing. But the bill’s opponents have also suggested that small businesses are leading the campaign. The website for the New York Delivers coalition did not list Amazon as a member as recently as May 19, by which point it had received at least $1.9 million from the Amazon-funded group. It was updated to include Amazon at some point since then.

“We’re proud to stand with our partners and oppose legislation that would hurt New York consumers, small businesses, and their employees,” Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly said in a statement. 

A spokesperson for New York Delivers said in a statement that the bill’s impacts “will fall hardest not on large corporations, but on the workers it claims to protect, local small business owners, and the 78% of New Yorkers who rely on delivery of essential goods each week.”

“Of course national companies, like Amazon and FedEx, are supporting the New Yorkers speaking out against a bill that would destabilize an integral infrastructure system for NYC, putting jobs at risk and raising costs for New Yorkers,” added the spokesperson, Tommy Kaelin.

New York Delivers has foregrounded DSP owners like Rudy Cazares, who owns a Bronx-based logistics company that contracts with Amazon. Cazares said the bill would “destroy” his business, since it would prohibit the third-party model his company relies on. He argued that there was no guarantee that Amazon would rehire his more than 100 employees.

“We were fortunate in that we had the support of Amazon, and we’ve got the support of other companies that are against this bill,” Cazares said. 

Other donors to the Five Borough Jobs Campaign this year include FedEx, the logistics company Prologis, and the Trucking Association of New York, which all oppose the bill. Those other donations totaled about $173,000, or the equivalent of about 3 percent of Amazon’s contributions. The campaign has reported lobbying all 51 council members on the bill this year, disclosures show.

Tiffany Cabán, the Queens city councilmember who sponsors the bill, said Amazon has tried to obscure its involvement by making the opposition appear grassroots.

“They use this sort of PR campaign to try to say, ‘Well, no, we’re not the big bad corporation. We’re actually a group of small businesses,’” Cabán said. “We’re seeing what was clear all along: that one of the most powerful and profitable companies in the world is spending millions and millions of dollars to block common-sense regulations that would, writ large, make New Yorkers safer.”

Cabán dismissed Amazon’s threat that the bill could slash driver jobs or prompt the company to move its last-mile facilities out of the city, noting that such a move would run counter to Amazon’s goal of increasingly rapid deliveries.

“Their entire business model is predicated on being as close to the consumer as possible,” Cabán said.

The bill’s most active backer has been the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has already helped to unionize two Amazon facilities in Queens. The union hopes to organize more workers if the bill passes, since it could give workers more bargaining power by letting them negotiate wages and benefits directly with Amazon, according to the Teamsters.

José Huerta, a delivery driver who helped lead the union drive at an Amazon facility in Woodside, said that he has seen Facebook and Instagram ads by New York Delivers and suspected that Amazon was behind them.

Huerta said he has commented on the posts to warn his colleagues “that this is a lie, what they’re saying about the law.”

“I’ve posted in the comments that we need to support the law, because it’s a law for the workers and not for the DSPs,” he said.

Strive Charter School was proposed by Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy, the state’s largest charter school network, and her husband Eric Grannis. The union contends that opening it would violate a state law that limits the number of charter schools statewide; Moskowitz and Grannis argue it would instead be transforming an existing charter school.

The dispute is the latest salvo in a long-running battle in Albany over who should approve and regulate charter schools: the legislature-elected Board of Regents, which is housed under the state education agency, or the governor-appointed State University of New York trustees.

State law allows both bodies to approve new charter schools, but it also gives SUNY the power to overrule objections by the Board of Regents — as it did with Strive.

SUNY approved the Bronx school even though state education officials warned it could violate state law and recommended abandoning the project. A New York Focus analysis of state charter school decisions found that since 2017, the Board of Regents has rejected 58 SUNY-approved charter actions. In at least 51 of those cases, SUNY resubmitted the application without making any modifications, permitting dozens of charter schools to open, expand, relocate, merge, or receive early renewal against the guidance of the state’s top education policymaking body.

To advocates for traditional public schools, including teachers unions, that discrepancy indicates that SUNY simply rubber-stamps charter school proposals, even those that the state education officials find lacking.

Charter school proponents say the system is working as intended. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” wrote Grannis, Strive’s executive director, in an op-ed for the New York Post about the lawsuit.

Charter schools, funded with tax dollars but run by independent organizations, have been the source of fierce debate since New York enacted its first charter school law in 1998.

New York law requires school districts to pay charter schools for every local student enrolled — on average, about $16,600 per student — which decreases the budget available for traditional schools. Public school districts also pay for charter school transportation, along with health and welfare services. This past school year, for example, Buffalo Public Schools budgeted $195 million for payments to 22 area charter schools educating over 10,000 local students.

State law limits the number of charters to maintain quality control, to manage the financial burden on local school districts, and to allow public school administrators to have some predictability in their budgets.

Proponents see charter schools as a free, high-quality alternative to low-performing schools, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. But opponents say they drain resources from traditional public schools without the same level of oversight and accountability as public schools.

Teachers unions have traditionally opposed charter schools because they are not typically unionized and receive public funding while operating under different rules than traditional public school districts, with greater autonomy over staffing and governance. In New York, the teachers union has opposed efforts to lift the state’s charter cap, while pushing for bills to tighten oversight, increase transparency, require community engagement, and ultimately eliminate SUNY’s charter-authorizing power.

The conflict between SUNY and the Board of Regents is an extension of that debate. Under state law, proposals for charter schools may be submitted to either the Board of Regents or SUNY. The Board of Regents must review charter proposals submitted to SUNY, but SUNY has the final word on whether they are approved. Of the roughly 352 operating charter schools statewide, 220 were authorized by SUNY, while 92 were authorized by the Board of Regents. (The remaining were granted by NYC DOE or the Buffalo Board of Education.)

Under state law, New York City is at its charter school cap, with around 285 currently in operation. To create a new school without exceeding the cap, Success Academy asked SUNY to transfer the charter of one of its existing schools to a newly created entity led by Grannis, Moskowitz’s husband. In the application, Moskowitz wrote that the school would operate independently of Success Academy with a separate board and distinct mission.

Last October, SUNY approved the transfer and forwarded it to the Board of Regents for review. In January, the Board of Regents voted to send the request back to SUNY and urged trustees to withdraw the approval, warning that it could violate state law. They argued that the request amounted to the creation of a new school without going through the proper approval process, circumventing the state’s charter cap.

“It seems like they just ignore what we have to say,” said Shino Tanikawa, a member of the Board of Regents. “We have educators and school leaders on the board, we are the educational management entity for the state, we know what we’re doing and we know when something isn’t right.”

Joseph Belluck, chair of SUNY’s Charter Schools Committee, said the committee always reviews the board’s comment, “but most of the time, it’s completely lacking in merit.”

He and Grannis maintain that Strive does not violate the law because they are not increasing the number of charter schools in the city; they are simply taking over an existing charter school and operating in the same building.

“We are trying to make it easier for people who want a good quality charter school education to get it by being more flexible,” Grannis told New York Focus.

The school will open this fall with grades K–4. Grannis said the school has received about 270 applications and plans eventually to serve 540 students. It will operate on a year-round, flexible schedule from 7 am to 7 pm seven days a week, with classes from 9 am to 4:30 pm on weekdays from September to June and the extended hours offered as an option for families who want them.

Grannis said the school is already fully staffed with lead teachers, who will work weekdays year-round, and teaching assistants, who are not required to have a bachelor’s degree and will work roughly 50 hours per week to cover the extended schedule. The program is free for students, supported by funds from the city Department of Education for the school day and private philanthropy for the extended hours.

In its lawsuit, filed last month, New York State United Teachers argues that SUNY’s approval of Strive Charter “disregards the plain purpose of the cap” and “wreaks havoc” on the city’s budget for traditional public schools. “We’ve tried to change the law, and now we’re going to the courts,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person.

Belluck, the SUNY Charter Schools Committee chair, said the lawsuit and the union’s push to take away SUNY’s authority over charter schools are an attempt to put “charter schools in New York out of business.”

“I don’t know if charter schools can save the educational system, but what I do know is that it’s grossly unfair to say to families and kids who have a shot at a free education that might be transformative for them and their families that they’re now not going to get that opportunity,” Belluck said.

Last month, a coalition of the state’s most powerful charter school founders and CEOs, including Moskowitz, sent a letter to State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa expressing concern about “the increasingly adversarial posture NYSED and the Board of Regents have taken” toward SUNY’s role as an independent charter school authorizer.

The letter boasted that SUNY-authorized schools consistently outperform both traditional public schools and charter schools authorized by the Board of Regents, and urged the state to recognize its “extraordinary record.”

In a June 29 response, NYSED counsel Daniel Morton-Bentley said the Regents only return applications for reconsideration when they raise concerns about potential legal issues. He also attached an appendix outlining concerns about the charter schools and networks that signed the letter, including high rates of student suspensions, persistent under-enrollment, a lack of certified teachers, and inadequate services for children with disabilities and English language learners.

Local school officials in the Hudson Valley and Long Island have also weighed in.

The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents, which represents leaders of 78 school districts, has proposed an amendment to the state education law that would give the Board of Regents final authority to approve charter schools. It would also ensure that the fiscal impact on affected school districts is a critical consideration.

“Public schools are the absolute engine of a thriving democracy,” said Louis Wool, president of the organization and superintendent of Westchester County’s Harrison Central School District.

On Long Island, some local officials complain the growth of charters has strained the budget of traditional public schools.

In January, the teacher’s union joined local education and community partners in suing over SUNY’s approval of three new charter schools that the Board of Regents had objected to: The Academy Charter School Brentwood Elementary, The Academy Charter School Brentwood Middle, and the Academy Charter School Central Islip Regional High. The lawsuit, which is pending in Albany County Supreme Court, claims applications failed to address strong community opposition.

At a town hall last June hosted by Brentwood Union Free School District to discuss the new schools, former Hempstead school board president Victor Pratt said the district’s payments to charter schools grew from $9 million in 2009, when the area’s first Academy Charter School opened, to more than $107 million during the 2024–25 school year. The funding loss has left the district unable to address needs like air conditioning upgrades, he said. (Charter school advocates contend that per-pupil funding should follow the student rather than stay with the institution the student is no longer enrolled in.)

“Charter schools do not coexist with public schools, they operate at the expense of public schools” said Pratt.

State Assemblymember Phil Ramos, who represents Brentwood and Central Islip, called SUNY a “backdoor approval system” for charter schools that ignores overwhelming community opposition. He previously sponsored unsuccessful legislation that would have removed SUNY as an authorizer. This year, he introduced a bill that would require hearings and, outside New York City, a local vote before a charter school can be established, expanded, or renewed.

NYSUT supports the bill, which was also sponsored by Senate Education Chair Shelley Mayer but failed to advance out of committee in either chamber. Despite previous challenges passing charter school reform legislation, Mayer said she is optimistic that the state will heed public educators’ calls to strengthen communities’ ability to challenge charter school proposals because “there’s a serious movement of legislators who are very troubled by this process.”

“I think the pressure is on, and we’re moving toward some meaningful change,” she said. 

Two years ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office almost entirely ignored a dozen phone calls and five emails from the victim, Pamela Brown, she said. After New York Focus reached out for comment last October, a spokesperson said her case would be reopened. 

In 2017, Brown paid lawyer Daphna Zekaria $15,000 to bring a lawsuit against her Brooklyn landlord. Brown was required to place more than $50,000 into an escrow account controlled by Zekaria while the case unfolded. She later paid the attorney $20,000 more for a lawsuit aimed at unlocking the escrow funds. Unbeknownst to Brown, Zekaria had already stolen the money herself.

Last year, Zekaria pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $400,000 from three other clients in a case prosecuted in Suffolk County. She was recently sentenced to serve six months in jail and was ordered to pay $373,500 in restitution to a state fund that compensates victims of attorney theft.

At the time of Brown’s escrow transaction, Zekaria’s law firm was located in Manhattan. A Suffolk County prosecutor told Brown to reach out to Bragg’s office — which ignored her until after New York Focus contacted the office about the case, more than a year later. (Brown was more recently told that the case had “slipped through the cracks” after a Manhattan assistant district attorney left for a job in the private sector, she said.)

After the case was reopened, the district attorney sought to obtain the proof needed for Brown to successfully apply for repayment from the state fund that compensates victims of attorney theft. The office secured a felony plea in Manhattan, but did not seek additional jail time.

“The goal of the DA was to help us to get the money back — because they were caught not really doing their job,” Brown said.

The evidence was hiding in plain sight. To prove the escrow theft, a Manhattan assistant district attorney, Kelly Thomas, listened to a recording of a 2018 appearance by Zekaria in Brooklyn Civil Court during which she acknowledged the receipt of more than $50,000 into an account she controlled.

According to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Zekaria pleaded guilty to grand larceny in the second degree in June. She made a detailed admission to the court confessing to taking more than $50,000 in escrow funds as well as a $20,000 legal fee for a lawsuit that, at least in part, was related to releasing escrow funds that Zekaria had already taken.

Zekaria could not immediately be reached for comment.

Brown says Zekaria stole more from her than the amount that will be repaid. She’s relieved the years-long ordeal has ended — and that she’s been made partially whole — but worries about the labyrinthine system for compensating other victims of lawyer theft. 

“A lot of people don’t have my persistence and are not going to go and seek a journalist to write a story about wrongdoing,” Brown told New York Focus. “How many people are really going to do something like that? Very few.”

Zekaria, who has lost her law license, is not the one repaying the money to her former client. 

Brown will be repaid by The Lawyer’s Fund for Client Protection, an independent public trust meant to help maintain public confidence in New York’s legal profession that’s funded through a small portion of registration fees paid by attorneys in the state.

Until recently, the fund had refused to pay Brown anything. The Manhattan district attorney’s office hadn’t investigated, and Brown’s bank no longer had records of Brown’s original deposit into the escrow account. Brown had considerable other evidence of the escrow payment, but she was still denied. The fund has investigatory powers — including to issue subpoenas — but has a small staff, and generally relies on law enforcement to gather evidence.

Brown recently received a letter stating the fund would repay more than $70,000, she said. 

But the fund is declining to compensate Brown for the $15,000 she paid to Zekaria to bring the original case against her landlord, she said. The law firm did some work in that lawsuit but also missed court appearances and deadlines, earning a reprimand from the judge, who cited the “history of plaintiffs’ non-compliance with court mandated orders.” Citing a “woefully deficient” legal filing, the judge precluded Brown’s side from pursuing a number of key claims against her landlord.

The fund’s resources have become strained in recent years. In December, Newsday highlighted the prevalence of escrow account theft in downstate New York real estate transactions, which eats up a significant portion of the fund’s annual payments. And for decades, state legislators have not increased the portion of the attorney registration fee — $60 — that pays for the fund.

In 2024, the fund approved about 26 percent of claims, paying out $11.6 million. Claimants had alleged losses that year of $54.7 million — nearly five times the amount that was paid out. The fund ended the year with a $11.7 million balance.

Asked if the fund faced fiscal constraints that required rejecting a certain number of claims, chairman Eric Seiff told New York Focus last year that “we try to be careful.”

“We don’t want to overspend, but we would like to recompense the victims to the extent of their loss, to the extent we can,” he said.

For decades, the Lawyer’s Fund has stressed in annual reports the need to reform downstate real estate transactions in which lawyers often hold significant sums related to closing costs in escrow. 

Brown believes a neutral third party, such as a bank, should be entrusted to hold escrow funds instead of attorneys.

In the meantime, “the consumer should know when they put money into escrow that it is not safe,” Brown told New York Focus. “It is only as safe as the individual whose name is on the account.”

Looking out at the distant Adirondacks and Catskill Mountains, he thought back to the years when he could run up the hill with ease.

“Things just don’t work as well as they used to. In fact, sometimes they don’t work at all,” said Chaplin, 81, who has owned the farm for over 40 years. “There’s nothing worse than having your whole life … falling apart.”

Nearly a decade ago, he began experiencing symptoms he couldn’t explain. His once-pristine handwriting became unreadable, his face took on a permanent look of worry, and he acted out his dreams while he slept. After years of inconclusive test results from various doctors, he received a diagnosis: He had Parkinson’s disease, an incurable degenerative brain disease that affects motor functions and causes cognitive impairment. He had no family history or genetic predisposition to the disease.

Chaplin and his wife, Sarah Teale, believe the cause lay hidden under the idyllic hills of their 200-acre cattle and corn farm. For decades, a tenant farmer sprayed the land with paraquat, a herbicide that’s used to kill broadleaf weeds and grasses — and that research has linked to Parkinson’s.

The couple lives in Hebron, a rural farming town of about 1,800 residents in Washington County. After Chaplin’s diagnosis, Teale discovered that 14 people near their home had the disease, too. She calls the 7-mile stretch of highway between east and west Hebron “Parkinson’s Valley.” In nearby towns, she found dozens more. And she believes there’s a common culprit.

Paraquat is banned in dozens of countries and is coming under heavier scrutiny in the US. This year, 14 states introduced bills to restrict or ban its use. Vermont was the only state to pass a ban. New York lawmakers sought to be the second, but the bill died on the floor amid a prolonged budget standoff that crowded out other legislation.

“Hundreds of bills that we would normally pass never got a vote because we ran out of time,” said assemblymember and bill sponsor Linda Rosenthal. “More people will suffer between now and when this bill becomes law. You can bet I’m going to work really hard to make sure it passes the next session.”

Paraquat was first registered for use in the 1960s. Since then, its popularity has ballooned.

Between 2014 and 2018, paraquat use across the country doubled to at least 11 million pounds a year, according to the latest available data from the US Geological Survey. It’s most commonly sprayed on crops including corn, soybeans, cotton, and grapes.

In some years in the early 2000s, New York’s paraquat use ranked in the top 10 nationally. According to 2018 USGS data, the latest available, growers in New York sprayed a total of nearly 149,000 pounds of paraquat, ranking 31st in the country.

The scientific debate over paraquat’s safety has been building for decades. Studies dating back to the late 1990s have linked paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease. A 2002 study found that mice injected with paraquat lost dopamine neurons, a hallmark of Parkinson’s. A 2011 study found that farmers who sprayed paraquat were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson’s as those who did not. A 2024 study found that people living or working near areas sprayed with paraquat had double the risk of developing Parkinson’s.

Research linking paraquat to Parkinson’s is “one of the strongest databases out there linking a chemical exposure to a disease,” said Deborah Cory-Slechta, a University of Rochester neurotoxicologist.

Ray Dorsey, a neurologist at the Atria Research and Global Health Institute, said it’s a common misconception that people with Parkinson’s developed it primarily because of aging or genetics. About 85 percent of Americans with Parkinson’s carry no known genetic risk factor for the disease, he said.

“The principal causes of Parkinson’s disease are not inside of us, not in our DNA, but outside of us, in our environment,” said Dorsey, who published a book on the disease last year that identified Hebron as a hotspot. “The continued use of paraquat is likely sowing the future seeds of Parkinson’s disease.”

The herbicide has been banned in over 70 countries, including China, Brazil, and the entire European Union. But not the United States.

Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that it needed more time to examine the health risks of paraquat use. The agency has warned about the herbicide’s toxicity, noting that “one small accidental sip can be fatal,” and requires sprayers to undergo special training. The agency has stopped short of linking exposure to Parkinson’s disease, as other government health bodies have done abroad.

Last November, the agency said it would require paraquat manufacturers to study how far paraquat vapors travel from the initial spray site. That announcement came after Syngenta, one of the world’s largest producers of paraquat, submitted new data that suggested vapors may travel miles farther than previously thought.

The company, based in Switzerland, stood by the product’s safety.

“While Syngenta has great sympathy for those suffering from Parkinson’s, we reject the claim that our product is the cause,” said Syngenta spokesperson Dimitri Houtart in a statement to New York Focus.

Houtart pointed to a 2013 study conducted by the company’s scientists that found that paraquat did not cause the neuron damage associated with Parkinson’s, even with high doses in the brain. He also cited recent research conducted by the California and Australian governments that did not find a causal link between Parkinson’s and paraquat exposure.

Just about everyone in Hebron knows someone touched by Parkinson’s, residents told New York Focus during a visit to the town last month.

In 2024, Teale, who is working on a documentary about her neighbors’ experiences, hosted a town hall for families in the area affected by the disease. The room had a maximum occupancy of 60 people. About 85 people piled in.

“They just started coming in, and coming in, and coming in,” Teale recalled. “They didn’t know all the people that had it. They were really shocked.”

Sharon “Sally” Giambatista was among them.

Growing up, summers in Hebron for Giambatista often meant hours in her family’s strawberry fields, plucking and munching her way through row after row of fruit.

No one in her family dreamed pesticides could be toxic. Her father mixed them with his bare hands, and cropdusters sprayed them overhead from their cabs.

“The pilot would tip the wings and wave and spray us with his poison,” Giambatista remembered.

That exposure, she believes, changed the course of her life. Hours after getting engaged in the fall of 2009, imagining the future ahead of her, she received a call: she had Parkinson’s disease. She was 56 years old. 

A few years later, one of her older sisters was diagnosed, too. They had no family history of the disease. Of her four siblings, Giambatista and that older sister spent the most time in the fields.

“We thought we are lucky to live out here in the fresh air,” Giambatista said, her shoulders and arms trembling in waves that never fully stop. “We just didn’t know.”

New York state doesn’t publish town-level Parkinson’s data. But Brian Campbell, Hebron’s town supervisor, said there are far more cases than there should be. His own father died of Parkinson’s after living with the disease for more than 30 years.

Campbell believes a herbicide or pesticide is the culprit, though he’s not sure which. “I’ve got to believe it’s things we sprayed that were in the valley,” he said.

“[I’m] fortunate at this point that I don’t have it yet. That’s about all you can say,” he added with an uneasy laugh.

Thousands of Americans have filed lawsuits against Syngenta, which sells paraquat under the brand name Gramoxone, alleging that the company failed to warn consumers about paraquat’s substantial health risks. Neither Chaplin nor Giambatista is currently seeking damages.

In 2025, Syngenta raised $792 million to cover settlement costs; the company said its goal was to “end the cost and distraction of lawsuits which Syngenta believes are without merit.”

In 2022, The Guardian and The New Lede published internal documents revealing that Syngenta was aware of the mounting research linking the herbicide to Parkinson’s disease. The company monitored scientists studying the links, lobbied the EPA to bar critical scientists from sitting on advisory panels, strategized ways to “influence academia, and regulatory and NGO environments,” and created a team to respond to external scientific publications.

The overall goal, the internal documents revealed, was “to protect people and our reputation.” 

This March, Syngenta announced that it would stop making paraquat by the end of June. The company cited “significant competition from generic producers” as the reason; a spokesperson said that the change was not made in response to litigation or safety concerns.

Generic paraquat produced by other companies poses similar risks. 

“Without a ban, there’s nothing stopping another company from swooping in and filling the void,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist and pesticide expert at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.

When New York lawmakers try to enact a ban next year, they’ll go up against the New York Farm Bureau, the state’s largest agriculture advocacy group and one of the lead opponents of the bill. The group did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

A week before the legislative session ended, Renée St. Jacques, the Farm Bureau’s director of public policy, told “The Capitol Pressroom,” a radio show, that if paraquat is “used with the safety precautions in place, farmers are safe.”

Now 73 years old, Giambatista wonders what her life would be like if Parkinson’s hadn’t taken the things she loved most. Would she still be singing if the disease hadn’t reduced her voice to just above a whisper? Would she paint more if her trembling hands could hold a brush?

She struggles to understand why manufacturers continue to sell something so seemingly toxic, and why lawmakers haven’t done more to stop them.

“Knowing what you know now, how can you not fight against that? How can you not strive to find something better, or give up some of the big profit?” Giambatista asked. 

The disease’s slow creep has touched every corner of Chaplin’s life, too. He gave up his cows when running and walking became too difficult. He used to roam the woods for hours on end; he now depends on a cane and a caregiver, after a fall left him with 60 stitches. He was a writer and wanted to finish his sixth book; he now struggles to hold a pen or remember his thoughts.

“It’s stripped me of half of my life or more,” Chaplin said. “There’s always a hope that I’ll beat it and be able to come back. I don’t think it’s hopeless, but then, I’m pretty sure it is hopeless.”

On the eve of Teale’s birthday in early June, the couple sat at a picnic table in their backyard.

She thought about the year to come. She looked at Chaplin, who coughed after taking a bite of food, and wished simply that he would get better. 

The sun dropped behind the trees, and the pet goats retreated. Chaplin pointed at the edge of the woods. 

“Look at that tractor coming out,” he said.

There was no tractor. 

He spent the next few hours at the table with a pair of binoculars, watching a party unfold in the garden. No one was there.

Eli Northrup believes that it’s time for the political pendulum to swing once again. A public defender and policy advocate, Northrup won the June Democratic primary for the 69th state Assembly district on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He’s running unopposed in the general election.

While not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose candidates in New York City, Buffalo, and Syracuse triumphed on Primary Day, he earned endorsements from prominent socialists Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and US Senator Bernie Sanders. He’s now among a class of newly elected and existing legislators who want to rein in police, give defendants a fairer shot in court, and reduce the prison and jail populations.

“From what I’ve seen in my advocacy work, that’s when movements have a chance to be successful — when the body of a legislative house shifts,” Northrup said.

New York Focus sat down with Northrup at a table outside of his campaign office on 104th Street. In the following conversation, edited for length and clarity, he discussed his career, his campaign, and why he’s bullish about New York’s criminal justice reform movement.

New York Focus: You were one of a number of lefty candidates who trounced “establishment”-style candidates for state Assembly and Senate. Everyone has a take about what that means for the political moment. What’s yours?

Eli Northrup: I think there is a frustration with more “establishment” Democratic politics, and there’s a desire for something different and new. I’ve sensed it for a few years, but I think Zohran’s race has validated it. I think it comes from this frustration with how things have been done, and I think it’s generational. Young people are motivated and interested in politics, and they’re not beholden to this older way of doing things.

Around here — the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights — by and large, people trust and like their elected officials. It’s a highly concentrated Democratic area, and people vote. I think there were more votes in the 69th district than almost any other Assembly district.

Each neighborhood has its own story, but I think you’re starting to see it across the country. I think it’s generational, and I think it’s a movement, and I don’t think we’re going back.

NYF: You didn’t take a super traditional path to elected office. How did you go from Bronx criminal courthouses to the state Capitol?

EN: When I went to law school, I thought a lawyer was in a courtroom, and I thought a lawyer helped people. When you go to law school, you figure out that’s not what the majority of lawyers do. But when I found public defense, it totally matched with my idea of how I could use the law in an effective way and what I thought my skill set was. So I really focused on being a public defender. And I loved that work. When I first met a group of public defenders, I was like, “These are my people.” I was never thinking about politics.

I started at Bronx Defenders in 2015, and I think it was around 2017 that I got invited to go up to Albany for a lobby day around cannabis legalization. At that time, the number one case that I handled in the Bronx was low-level possession of cannabis. Even though people weren’t really going to jail at that point, many people were being arrested. And despite the fact that usage rates were equal across races, [over] 90 percent of the people being arrested were Black or brown. Fifty percent of all arrests in the city were taking place in the Bronx, and the collateral consequences were devastating for people. I mean, people had their children taken away. People lost their jobs. People lost their housing. I had clients deported. And it felt like there wasn’t urgency for legalization, even though there were these devastating consequences. People in power weren’t feeling at all that this was an issue.

I got on a bus at Union Square at like 4:30 in the morning, and went up to the Capitol, and that was my first exposure to advocacy work. It was eye-opening for me. I was like, “Oh, these people have the power to change the dynamics in court, and most of them have no idea what’s happening.” I was not super impressed with our local leaders, honestly. But I started to realize, this is how you change things so that you never have to handle a case like this again.

Our office started a policy team, and I started to take elected officials to court and sit with them and explain the bail laws and stuff like that. So I got to know a few of them, and that demystified politics. We passed bail reform, we passed discovery reform [governing the rules by which the prosecution and defense in a criminal case share information], and we legalized cannabis in this three-year period, and it profoundly impacted the lives of my clients. I saw the difference.

I took a sabbatical in 2023 — we unionized, we won sabbaticals. That was like the first time I had been able to take time off with no cases. I got to think about what I would want to do or what was next. Amanda Septimo, who’s become a friend of mine — she’s an assemblymember from the Bronx, and she encouraged me [to run]. She made me feel like it was possible.

[Northrup first ran for Assembly in 2024. The winner of that race, Assemblymember Micah Lasher, is now running for Congress instead of seeking reelection.]

There were five of us that ran in that first race, and I was really proud to have stuck with it and finished second place. It certainly ended up setting me up for this race.

NYF: It seems pretty uncommon for a legislator, especially a first-time legislator, to embrace criminal justice as their cause. How did you make it a winning issue?

EN: I think in general that this is a lefty progressive area, and they just appreciate a public defender. They know what it is, and they think that it’s a righteous job.

But I have to be honest, [criminal justice] wasn’t my main thing that I was talking about. I wasn’t talking about sentencing reform or my work on marijuana or bail reform as much, just because it was, like, Trump and immigration and affordability — and then scaffolding and  empty storefronts. But when I was asked about it, I think it was clear that I could talk about it in depth. They know that I have the expertise.

And it was not a liability — like, “Oh, he’s soft on crime.” It feels, especially after 2020 [when protests erupted after George Floyd’s murder], that people have more of an understanding of the injustice of the criminal-legal system and an understanding that public defenders are trying to work against that injustice. The attitude toward that has changed.

NYF: So tough-on-crime is not so much the attitude among your electorate, or maybe the public in general. But I think there’s a lag in Albany. How do you deal with that still often being the assumption — like, “This is the wise way to go about Democratic politics, being tough on crime”?

EN: I think it’s about being about solutions that work. And one thing I can do is speak to those solutions directly. The person in the system who has the most contact with the accused is their public defender. So we have this insight into the actual individuals and what they’re going through and — even people who have done things that are really bad and damaging and harmful — how to change their trajectory. When you’ve done this for a long time, you see what works, and I think I can speak about that with credibility within the conference.

I also think it means going to the Hudson Valley and going to Long Island and places that are seen as purple — where maybe the leadership is worried that, if we do this, it’s going to impact these marginal seats — and explaining to them, and being there to support them. You can’t just say, “This is right.” You actually have to do the work on the ground.

I think that, also, this election changed things. In my experience, the leadership within the body responds to the members.

NYF: I was going to ask you about [Assembly leadership]. I hear this all the time on my beat: You can pass things in the Senate, but ambitious legislation either dies in the Assembly or it gets watered down. How do you deal with that?

EN: With complicated issues, people are always reticent to act when they don’t understand. When I’ve had success in advocacy work up there, it’s explaining complicated issues in a way that resonates — and so once the members really get it, they can advocate for it, too. Because there’s always going to be lobbyists and advocates on the other side scaring them — and a lot of times, scaring them with misinformation. During the bail and discovery rollback fights, I was outside the room, but I saw how valuable it was to be able to be like, “No, they’re saying this, but this is how it would play out.”

I’ve been talking to Gabriella Romero [former Albany County public defender elected to the Assembly in 2024], who’s become a friend. In the two years she’s been up there, she’s been able to really make an impact on those criminal justice issues because of her ability to explain them and demystify them to people.

I don’t anticipate it being easy, but I have seen major criminal-legal system reform be passed and be successful. And I think with bail, discovery, and cannabis, now that we’re years out, if you look at data, it is an unmitigated success story. There was all this up and down and backlash, and I think part of the backlash came with not explaining it in the first place in a way that was really coherent to begin with.

I’m optimistic about sentencing reform. It’s the right thing to do. It’ll save us money as a state, it’s moral, and there’s an urgency to it.

NYF: Tell me more about sentencing reform. What are the must-pass bills?

EN: The priority bills for me would be the Earned Time Act and the Second Look Act, as well as the parole reform bills. There’s broad support for releasing elderly people, and all of these bills would go towards a more just and equitable sentencing and forgiveness system. The Marvin Mayfield Act, which would eliminate mandatory minimum sentences in New York, is also vital. Marvin [a formerly incarcerated advocate for sentencing reform] was a friend, somebody I really looked up to when I first started going up to Albany.

I think about the RAPP [Release Aging People in Prison] campaign, the Communities Not Cages [sentencing reform] campaign. I mean, we’ve got tens of thousands of community members upstate, long-serving prisoners, based on these draconian and racist sentencing laws from the ’80s and ’90s. We don’t sentence in the same way today that we did back then, and so we have people upstate serving 20-year, life sentences that never would have gotten those sentences if they had been in front of a judge today. But there’s no mechanism to right that wrong, and that’s a tragedy.

What I always get frustrated with in Albany is the lack of urgency to these fights. It’s like, “Oh yeah, well, we did criminal justice.” But if you spend 30 minutes in prison with somebody, you’re going to see how every day feels urgent.

NYF: How do you build urgency around reform? A lot of these bills have been introduced over and over and over, even with a very strong and dedicated advocacy movement behind them.

EN: Right, but I think that’s necessary. We have built every year. We gain co-sponsorship, and they pass committee. Bail, discovery, they were pending for years. Cannabis, the same thing. The moment needs to meet the campaign. These campaigns, now we have built a strong enough base and infrastructure behind them that I feel like they’re at the tipping point.

NYF: The other elephant in the room that we didn’t mention: Hochul has been pretty hostile to criminal justice reform. How do you get over that?

EN: What I’ve seen is that the governor, the executive in general, responds to politics and is responsive to the body and what people want. So you need to make it a political necessity and politically popular. That’s work you need to do. When these kinds of things happen, it’s because people are asking for it. So you just got to build. You have to build the narrative and build the power behind the campaigns. And then it’s feasible.

Home health aides the company employs have decried missed paychecks, glitchy software, and hours-long waits on the phone, among other issues. Last month, PPL agreed to a $162 million settlement to resolve claims of wage theft, and the US Department of Justice sued the company, alleging Medicaid fraud.

The powerful health care union 1199SEIU is currently seeking to unionize PPL’s roughly 200,000 workers, who care for disabled and elderly New Yorkers. But 1199 has also been working closely with the PPL for years, according to internal records obtained by New York Focus.

They show that in the months before April 2025, even as the union harbored concerns about PPL, it worked to ensure the success of the company’s takeover of the home care program, known as CDPAP. The union and the company coordinated lobbying efforts and public messaging campaigns, planned pushback against critics, and worked to give 1199 a leg up over another union seeking to unionize PPL’s workforce. 

In a statement, 1199 spokesperson Rose Ryan said the union “provided input, as a union which already represented tens of thousands of consumer-directed caregivers, on best practices for structuring the program and engaging and onboarding workers.”

Ruth Milkman, a professor of labor studies at CUNY, said it’s “par for the course” for unions and employers to work together, and having a good relationship with an employer can help unions “push for better pay and working conditions.”

But, she added, the union “shouldn’t be colluding with the company to help them with their public relations problems.”

The union has a long history of working with employers, said Joshua Freeman, a labor history professor at Queens College, since both sides “have a shared interest in increasing state funding for hospitals and medical care more generally.”

This strategy has often “radically improved the lives of 1199 members” by winning them better wages and benefits, Freeman added.

So, the marriage of convenience between 1199 and PPL isn’t entirely surprising. Unionizing home care workers is a priority for 1199, and records show that PPL was willing to support 1199’s campaign. That meant the union had a rare chance to win 200,000 members at once.

Their cooperation began before PPL even won the contract to take over the home care program. In August 2024, PPL sent the state health department a 200-page bid for the contract that touted its connection to the union. The bid document, which was obtained by New York Focus, said that PPL was conducting “regular discussions” with 1199 to “establish a collaborative working relationship.” 

PPL spokesperson Meg Fitzgerald said that the company “engaged with a broad range of stakeholders” as it prepared to take over the program, and that “1199 was one voice among many in that process.”

In September 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul announced PPL as the winning bidder. In the press release, then-1199 President George Gresham praised the governor for acting to “protect home care consumers and the workers who care for them.”

By December 2024, 1199 and PPL had struck an agreement that PPL would give the union contact information for its workers, according to records from a meeting that month. 

This agreement was essential for 1199’s unionization campaign. Since PPL’s employees work in people’s homes rather than in a store or a factory, organizers need to be able to reach them by phone.

PPL was willing to help, but there was a problem: Under federal labor law, employers cannot aid one potential union over another. And since another union — Home Healthcare Workers of America — had reached out to PPL, giving the contact list only to 1199 could have risked violating that law. 

In 2024, The City Reporter, a news site, found that HHWA paid millions to its leadership while its workers earned less than minimum wage and struggled to get paid for overtime work. HHWA and 1199 have clashed in the past, with 1199 accusing its rival of breaking labor law and failing to win real gains for workers.

According to December 2024 meeting records, 1199 proposed a solution that would ensure that PPL wouldn’t have to give aides’ contact information to HHWA or any other rival: The company would agree to give the list only to a union that had collected signed union cards from at least 10 percent of home health aides. Since 1199 had unionized thousands of home health aides before the transition to PPL, this target would be much more attainable for them, rather than for HHWA or another rival.

“We’re trying to make sure that they don’t have a basis for getting a list from you without proving anything,” 1199 lawyer Amy Gladstein told PPL representatives in the December meeting.

PPL had also given 1199 another reason to cooperate: The company agreed to maintain the wages and benefits for home care workers who had joined 1199 before PPL’s takeover.

But 1199 knew that the transition might lower wages for nonunion workers, who generally make less than their union colleagues. In at least three meetings with PPL in 2024, 1199 staff expressed concern that the transition could lead to pay cuts for some aides, since PPL’s wages would be lower than those paid by some of the companies PPL was replacing. Aides generally make about $20 per hour.

According to records from a November 2024 meeting, 1199 political director Helen Schaub warned PPL officials that aides could face wage cuts on a “significant scale” when PPL took over, and that this could cause “bad publicity.” Union representatives repeated this concern in multiple meetings the following month.

In public, though, 1199 supported PPL. In January 2025, while testifying to state lawmakers in Albany, Schaub praised their decision to seek savings by transferring the program to PPL “rather than cutting wages for workers.” Since PPL took over the program, numerous workers have complained of pay cuts.

In her statement to New York Focus, Ryan, the 1199 spokesperson, said that the union “repeatedly advocated for the retention of existing wage and benefit standards for workers” who faced wage cuts from PPL.

Despite such concerns, the union offered the PPL advice and lobbying support on multiple occasions, especially on how to counter anti-PPL messaging.

In 2024 and 2025, a shadowy nonprofit called the Alliance to Protect Home Care mounted a massive campaign against PPL. TV ads and mailers criticized PPL’s record, and called on Hochul and state lawmakers to dump the company. With over $10 million in spending in 2024 alone, it was one of the best-funded lobbying efforts in Albany that year.

Meeting records show that 1199 and PPL jointly strategized about how to hit back and reassure lawmakers. 

During a discussion about communication strategy in a November 2024 meeting, Gladstein told PPL representatives “Our whole goal is to stay parallel with you.”

The two sides closely coordinated their public messaging, and appear to have shared information and research on several occasions.

At a meeting in December 2024, Maria Perrin, then the president of PPL, thanked 1199 for information it had sent about rival companies, and said it was “really helpful.” She asked the union for “continued support on the countermessaging, because it needs to be multifaceted.”

And in another meeting that month, Perrin thanked the union for sharing “legislative research,” saying that it was “extremely helpful” in preparing for the state legislature’s upcoming 2025 session. 

The union also offered to help PPL lobby lawmakers in Albany. In the leadup to PPL’s takeover, some lawmakers loudly opposed the company, and called for the transition to be delayed or canceled. 

The union and the company spent the end of 2024 planning how to push back against these efforts. In a December 2024 meeting, Gladstein told PPL representatives, “Helen is your best advocate in Albany,” referring to Schaub, the union’s political director. 

“We need to know how you’re doing, or where there’s other help needed,” Gladstein added.

In testimony to state lawmakers the following month, Schaub said that making the transition to PPL was “the right decision” but acknowledged difficulties. 

“Making a change of this magnitude is very challenging,” she said.

The only problem: The board has just a single member, and the law requires at least seven.

The board’s job is to inspect and evaluate supportive housing centers, group homes, and other programs, providing outside oversight. In the Hudson Valley, that all falls on Charles Scheinberg, a retired mental health clinic worker.

“I can’t really get the work done that needs to be done,” said Scheinberg, 75, who joined the board two years ago. He said he was only able to inspect a fraction of the facilities in his region last year.

Scheinberg is one of roughly 100 volunteers serving on the state’s Boards of Visitors. Established in 1927, the bodies help monitor the living conditions of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who receive care from the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities and the Office of Mental Health.

Yet the boards for 22 state-run psychiatric centers and all but two of the state’s 13 regional disability offices have fewer members than the legal minimum. Two are entirely empty.

The board members are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. In this year’s legislative session — which was squeezed due to a prolonged budget battle — the Senate confirmed only one candidate, even though 30 of the governor’s nominees were waiting to be voted on.

“Politics not functioning, as it typically doesn’t, is leaving people at risk,” said Elisa Tobia, one of the applicants waiting for approval to join Elmira Psychiatric Center’s oversight board. “It’s leaving people not receiving their rights.”

The state’s disability office operates a range of services for children and adults with disabilities: clinics, group homes, other residences, and placements with caretaker families. The mental health office runs about two dozen psychiatric facilities. State agencies conduct their own inspections of these facilities, too; the boards’ role is to provide civilian oversight.

“Our responsibility is to go visit those homes unannounced, ... write reports, and present them to the [state] administration,” said Ron Lehrer, 84, a Board of Visitors member for the state’s Taconic region disability office. “We go into the home, we observe the physical condition, how the residents look. We try to talk to the residents, see if they’re happy with their situation.”

Several members told New York Focus that their region’s board doesn’t have the capacity to inspect all — or even most — facilities each year, raising questions about whether homes for people with developmental disabilities and mental illness are getting the oversight they require.

Do you live or work in mental health or disability facilities? We want to hear from you. Reach out at benjy@nysfocus.com.

Most advocates agree that state-run programs have improved in New York since the appalling conditions at Willowbrook State School, an institution for children with developmental disabilities, became a major scandal in the 1970s. Following a trend toward deinstitutionalization, facilities today are smaller and less opaque. Still, abuse and neglect of people with disabilities or psychiatric illness persist. In 2007, a staff member at a state-run group home killed a 13-year-old boy by sitting on him until he suffocated.

Last year, New Yorkers reported more than 90,000 allegations of abuse, neglect, and other issues to the Justice Center, a state organization that oversees six agencies; most of the cases appear to stem from the disability and mental health agencies.

The Board of Visitors typically deals with quality-of-life concerns such as individuals’ well-being and facility operations, and members have the opportunity to attend weekly meetings reviewing investigations into allegations of abuse or neglect. Residents will sometimes approach a member directly to report wrongdoing by staff, Lehrer said. But getting to that level of trust with a resident takes time — something that many volunteers on the short-staffed boards don’t have.

“In the early days, I would argue that the Board of Visitors had much more impact than it probably does now,” said Erik Geizer, the chief executive officer of The Arc New York, a nonprofit that provides services to people with disabilities. “Over the last decade or so, I think things have languished.”

Two years ago, The Arc New York urged Governor Kathy Hochul to take action on the Board of Visitors vacancies. Yet staffing levels appear about the same today. 

Past delays have driven away potential members, who sometimes find a different volunteer commitment to fill their time.

“People sign up, and they wait to be called,” Lehrer said. “By the time they’re contacted, they’re involved in something else.”

Susan Albamont, a member of the board for Rockland Children’s Psychiatric Center and the current president of the Association of Boards of Visitors, a statewide organization that educates and advocates for board members, said that many applicants will have to redo their paperwork. “I’m sure some people won’t go through it all again, so we’ve probably already lost a few candidates,” she said.

Beyond the logjam in Albany, finding and recruiting members to the boards has proved a challenge.

For one, the application process is cumbersome and time-consuming — taking up to two years. It involves filling out a detailed financial disclosure, undergoing a state background check with fingerprinting, and interviewing with a state senator.

“They check on your school, your college, everything,” said Fredricka Pol, 83, who has been on the Board of Visitors overseeing disability services in Manhattan and the Bronx since the early 1990s. “Even though my ex-husband is deceased, they wanted his obituary. Why would they want his obituary?”

Even getting reappointed, which a member has to do every four years, is no easy feat. Pol has had to get her fingerprints taken on Randall’s Island several times over her tenure, she said.

“With Board of Visitors members being Governor nominated, and Senate appointed, there is a background check and application process similar to that of all New York State-appointed staff,” said a spokesperson for Governor Kathy Hochul in a statement.

A spokesperson for the New York State Senate’s majority conference did not respond to requests for comment.

The Office for People With Developmental Disabilities said it was aware of the issue.

“OPWDD is actively working to fill Board of Visitors roles,” an agency spokesperson said. “OPWDD works with nominees on training and engaging them on a number of board-related activities while we await formal confirmation for voting purposes.”

The job itself can be tough. Members often travel across wide swaths of the state to inspect facilities, file regular reports with state administrators, and attend meetings to review patients’ treatment plans.

“It’s not exactly a great gig,” Geizer said. “There’s a lot of work involved, and there’s no compensation. The real benefit is simply having a desire to make sure people are receiving the best possible care.”

Every board member who spoke to New York Focus said they think the positions should remain unpaid, despite the difficulty in recruiting new volunteers. Many Board of Visitors members have a family member with a disability or psychiatric illness, adding a personal dimension to their work.

Pat Wright, a former Association of Boards of Visitors president who had two children with disabilities, said that decades ago, the boards used to be two to three times their current size.

“We have missed things that came out later,” Wright said, noting that her board — overseeing the Capital District’s disability services — had failed to catch issues at facilities that someone later reported. “It takes a lot before people will start trusting you. More members would be more eyes and ears out there. And I’m sure people would feel more heard when there’s people who come in who want to hear.”

One reason the process of appointing new members is so slow, Wright suggested, may be that facility administrators review candidates and pass on their recommendations to the governor. That effectively puts them in charge of appointing their own watchdogs.

“I know there are times when the director doesn’t want somebody because they’re a pain and they’re constantly pointing out the shortfalls of the system,” she said. “And if their name goes in, they don’t get confirmed very quickly.”

When she led the statewide association, she had difficulty getting senators’ attention.

“Truthfully, I think the Senate just kind of forgot about us,” Wright said, “because we went to three or four senators who had never even heard of the Board of Visitors.”

Still, she said, the board’s remaining members are dedicated to the work.

For instance, she contacted the state disability office when a man with a disability was denied his annual request to see the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees in Boston.

“I had put in calls and when I finished, I thought, ‘Well, I guess it didn’t work,’” Wright said. “But then somebody called me the next day and said, ‘Hey, he’s on his way to Fenway.’”

When students return to school this fall in the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York, a new kind of teacher will be ready to greet them. The small, rural district located on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to be one of the first in the country to put a humanoid robot in a classroom. It will not replace the classroom teacher, but is programmed to provide learning support to both students and educators. 

At a board meeting last month, the Cattaraugus County school district agreed to purchase the robot from Realbotix, a tech company, along with an artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program allowing students to interact with an avatar of the robot on laptops. 

“This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics,” said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. “Salamanca marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM education.” 

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, Kiguel said. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m student number 1234,’ and then the robot will be like, ‘Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?” 

Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use curriculum developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. 

Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler explained the district’s embrace of AI. “Many schools are taking the easy solution of simply banning it, but I have found that students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place,” Beehler said in a written response to questions. “I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it.” 

During and after school hours, students will be able to use the avatar to receive help with assignments. Kiguel said students could upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages. Unlike other Realbotix robots, Salamanca’s robot will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording. 

The robot will also serve as a classroom resource. If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum. 

The products cost the district $57,590, according to the contract attached to the school board agenda. Kiguel said the price was discounted; the company’s website lists the M-Series robot, the model purchased by the district, at a starting price of $95,000. 

The plan has sparked debate online, with some calling it a forward-looking, innovative step for the district and others expressing concern about the broader implications of further integrating AI into schools, particularly in an underserved area. 

Salamanca is the only incorporated city in the United States located entirely within a Native American reservation. The school district serves roughly 1,300 students, including 32 percent who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native and 79 percent who are economically disadvantaged. 

“We already have so many issues in our community, including environmental issues. I just don’t understand the concept of adding AI onto that,” said local parent Sierra Abrams, who learned about the technology in a district Facebook post. “Bringing it into the school district is contradicting everything we believe, in my opinion.” 

Have a tip about educational technology in your school district? New York Focus wants to hear from you. Please contact Melissa Manno at melissa@nysfocus.com or on Signal at melissamanno.38.

For the past few months, the company has worked to establish guardrails to ensure student safety. Kiguel said the robot and avatar were trained on the district’s curriculum and will always redirect the conversation back to education. References to suicide, self-harm, or other flagged terms would automatically alert school administrators.

In a demonstration for New York Focus, Kiguel told the avatar that he was being bullied at school and wanted to get revenge on the student. 

“I’m really sorry that happened to you. Being picked on and having rocks thrown at you is not okay, and that must have felt upsetting and maybe even scary,” the avatar responded. “The best next step is to tell a trusted adult at school right away, like a teacher, counselor or principal, and let your parent or guardian know, too.” 

Beehler emphasized the importance of safety and privacy, noting that the robot and avatar operate on a closed system that is not connected to the internet, and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI hallucinations.” 

The Trump administration has promoted the expanded use of AI and technology in education. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a taskforce to help integrate AI into curricula and teacher training. In March, First Lady Melania Trump entered a White House technology summit alongside a humanoid, AI-powered robot and invited guests to envision a future where robots educate children in literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. 

At the same time, there has been growing scrutiny of educational technology nationwide, with parents forming groups to push for stronger oversight of AI, and clearer guidelines to limit screen time and ensure digital resources are used appropriately in schools. In May, the New York State United Teachers union called for strict limits on artificial intelligence and screen time in schools, and earlier this month, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced an educational technology purchasing freeze until the school system finalizes guidance on artificial intelligence later this summer. 

The classroom marks a new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com, that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which has spent decades creating hyperrealistic sex dolls and later expanded into sex robots that remain on the market today. 

In a statement to New York Focus, a spokesperson explained that over the past two years, Realbotix has built a new team focused on education, health care, and wellness applications, and that Realbotix and RealDoll do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology. She said Realbotix “is pursuing a transaction with a Nasdaq-listed company that is intended to separate the businesses at the ownership level” with completion expected by September. 

In recent years, Realbotix has worked to expand its presence in commercial settings. Still, it is best known for its “companion robots,” which are different from sex robots and intended to address what it’s described as a “loneliness epidemic.” Kiguel has previously said the company’s goal is to produce robots and AI that are “indistinguishable from humans.” 

Beehler, Salamanca’s superintendent, said the partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector. He was initially cautious about the partnership because it represented uncharted territory for both Realbotix and the school district. But he said the company was receptive to feedback and willing to adapt its products for the unique demands of an educational setting. 

The superintendent acknowledged concerns about students’ increasing screen time and emphasized that AI and robotics should support, not replace, the human connections at the center of education. 

Beehler said the district will measure the success of the program primarily through qualitative feedback from both students and teachers. 

Ryan Schaaf, associate professor of educational technology at Notre Dame of Maryland University, said he was optimistic about the initiative, but cautioned that its success hinges on thoughtful implementation, with teachers actively monitoring and guiding students’ interactions with AI. 

Schaaf acknowledged the backlash against AI in education, but said ignoring the technology is a mistake. “It gives students a true disadvantage because once they leave school, they are going to be immersed in AI technologies.” Instead, he argued that schools should balance AI-assisted learning with traditional instruction to prepare students for life after high school.

State Senator George Borrello, who represents Salamanca and surrounding areas of Western New York, said the program could help level the playing field for students by providing tutoring access to those who might not be able to afford private options and sparking greater interest in STEM. 

Borrello said local leaders have long struggled with keeping young people from leaving Upstate New York after high school. He said investments in technology and STEM education could help show students they can pursue fulfilling, high-paying careers in tech while still building their futures in rural communities like Salamanca.

“One of the biggest things we see right now in technology is people fearing what the future will be with AI. Will it replace the workforce? Will it grow out of control?” he said. “I think this is a great way to get not just the kids but the teachers and the parents more comfortable with what the future may hold.”

The visitors, from the law firm WilmerHale, found a prison system stuck in its brutal past. Incarcerated people and current and former officers complained of frequent violence at the hands of both prisoners and guards. Only weeks into their investigation, officers killed another incarcerated man, 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi, at a prison down the road from Marcy.

This month, the state prison agency released the consultants’ long-awaited findings and recommendations in a 277-page report with dozens of recommendations. Based on facility visits, hundreds of interviews, and internal prison documents, it offers scathing new insights into the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision — and a roadmap for reform.

While lawmakers and the prison agency commissioner preach rehabilitation, guards still see themselves as stewards of punishment, the report revealed. Many adhere to an “us versus them” mentality, and corrections officers perceived to be soft on prisoners are branded “inmate lovers” and ostracized, it said.

It found that officers are able to disregard rules around use of force — by obstructing the view of body cameras, for instance, and relying too heavily on pepper spray. And DOCCS does a poor job of tracking violent incidents: Guards mostly use pen and paper to submit use of force reports, which often exclude key data points, making it difficult to detect trends and hotspots.

There are plenty of noteworthy hotspots, former officers from Brooks’s and Nantwi’s prisons told the consultants. Nearly all of those interviewed for the report acknowledged that groups of “goon squads” would beat up incarcerated people they viewed as difficult.

Outdated training likely contributes to prison violence. DOCCS’s paramilitary-style training academy “can promote aggression,” the report said. It teaches guards self-defense and includes seminars on department policy, but doesn’t adequately teach officers how to communicate with the unstable and often highly traumatized populations that they oversee.

Do you or have you worked for DOCCS? New York Focus wants to hear from you. Reach reporter Chris Gelardi at chris@nysfocus.com or on Signal at cgelardi.42.

DOCCS is a sprawling system — 41 facilities hold 34,000 incarcerated people and employ more than 11,000 officers — and its central office can barely keep tabs on it, the report authors found. In an age of cheap, sophisticated data systems, DOCCS relies on antiquated methods to track important information. The consultants discovered a “completely inefficient” system that involved one deputy superintendent tracking prisoner programming over twice daily emails. Meanwhile, DOCCS hasn’t digitized medical records, and some facilities don’t store the paper records in a central location, contributing to treatment delays.

Watchdogs, advocates, and incarcerated people have long raised alarms about many issues mentioned in the report, which highlighted DOCCS’s bureaucratic inertia. “DOCCS is reactive,” one retired officer told the investigators. “They only do anything when something gets fucked up.”

The report, plus a shorter report from a prison reform organization, together contain 77 recommendations, including naming a “chief risk officer,” adding more fixed cameras to DOCCS facilities, and addressing mental health care issues among staff. Its authors acknowledged that change won’t come easily.

“Many of our recommendations will take years of dedicated effort, operational innovation, and financial commitment, along with potential legislative action and updates to collective bargaining agreements,” they wrote.

In a statement, DOCCS said it had already implemented several of the report’s recommendations and had plans to take up most of the others. Among other improvements, it said, excessive use of force allegations had dropped by 42 percent in 2025 versus 2024.

DOCCS released that statement at the beginning of a long holiday weekend — four days after the paper’s publication date — a common way for government agencies to limit public attention on important news.

No such luck. New York Focus will be keeping tabs on which reforms actually happen and whether they lead to meaningful change.

But for at least the fourth time in almost 40 years, the state is being sued for failing to live up to this commitment by putting impoverished families at risk of homelessness.

A new lawsuit filed last month argues New York is failing for the same reason it has in the past: The welfare allowance it provides for housing, known as a shelter allowance, doesn’t come close to the cost of the state’s rents, which are among the highest in the country. The Legal Aid Society and Empire Justice Center, both nonprofits, are demanding that the state increase the allowance and provide enough financial assistance to keep families and individuals housed.

“I don’t want to sleep in the street. I don’t want to go to the shelter,” said 54-year-old Minerva Pacumio, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who is facing eviction. “I don’t want to lose everything.”

New York’s shelter allowance doesn’t cover rent for modest private housing anywhere in the state, according to the lawsuit and an independent analysis performed by New York Focus and ProPublica. The state hasn’t raised the monthly allowance for families with children since 2003 — when it was set at $450 for a family of four in New York City. And the amount has barely budged for adult-only households since 1988.

Pacumio receives a $250 monthly allowance to cover the one-bedroom apartment she rents in Queens for $1,900. She lives with her two adult daughters, one of whom is disabled; Pacumio handles her care herself five days out of the week. The other, Pacumio said, has mental health issues and has been unable to find work.

Pacumio said she owes thousands in back rent.

“When you don’t change your shelter allowance amounts for 40 years for single people and 20 years for families, I think there’s a reasonable argument that could be made that you’re not even really trying to meet your constitutional obligations to provide aid and care to the needy in New York State,” said Pavita Krishnaswamy, a supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Practice Law Reform Unit.

The lack of aid pushes people toward an emergency shelter system that cannot meet the demand of rising homelessness: New York Focus and ProPublica last year found that nearly half of the state’s unhoused families and individuals outside of New York City are placed in hotels with minimal support to help them return to permanent housing. The state regularly pays more to put someone up in a hotel than it would have cost to cover rent for modest housing, the news organizations found.

The Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the agency responsible for setting shelter allowances, has responded to past calls for an allowance increase by saying the Legislature would have to allocate more funding in the state budget. The budget is already projected to run multibillion-dollar deficits in coming years.

Over the past several legislative sessions, state lawmakers sponsored bills that would have pinned the allowance to fair market rent, the federal government’s estimate of how much it costs to rent modest private housing. Those bills have repeatedly failed, and their sponsors say little will change without the governor’s backing.

“The governor controls — any governor of New York state controls — the budget process. We can’t just fund things that the governor would not agree to,” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who chairs the housing committee and repeatedly sponsored the failed legislation in the state Assembly.

The office of Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to written questions. An Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance spokesperson did not respond to questions from New York Focus and ProPublica about whether the agency had ever requested additional funding for shelter allowances. He declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation.

In past litigation, the state has argued that the constitution doesn’t command the state to meet all of poor families’ needs.

A “Kafka-esque Situation”

For Legal Aid, this is familiar ground. This is at least the fourth lawsuit it has filed against the state accusing New York of failing to provide enough welfare assistance for rent. In the late ’80s, the nonprofit filed a landmark case on behalf of Barbara Jiggetts, a single mother of three who was renting an apartment in Queens. Jiggetts was receiving $270 a month to help cover $381 in rent — about 70 percent of what she owed each month. Legal Aid argued that the state was shirking its obligation to keep her and her children safely housed.

In the Jiggetts case, the court ordered the state to temporarily cover rent for New York City families with children facing eviction until the establishment of “a lawful” shelter allowance that would keep them housed together.

But the state waited until 2003 to raise the shelter allowance, blowing past the court’s original deadline by five years.

The state has also created a permanent supplement to fill the gap between the allowance and rent. But the supplement offered in the city is only available to families with children. So, when Pacumio’s youngest turned 18, she lost the supplement, which constituted the majority of her housing assistance. Outside New York City, that supplement is optional, and just 15 of 57 counties choose to offer it to families with children, according to the Empire Justice Center.

The new lawsuit seeks either an increase in the shelter allowance or a mandatory expansion of the supplement statewide, regardless of household composition — or both.

Since 2003, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has reviewed the allowance four times — every five years, as required. During its last review in 2023, more than 100 comments poured in, many imploring the agency to increase the benefit. Some shared personal stories from unhoused New Yorkers who said the shelter allowances weren’t enough to prevent homelessness, according to the state register.

Pleas also came from the counties themselves. Michael Iapoce, the social services commissioner for Ulster County, wrote at the time that there wasn’t a single habitable apartment available for rent that would be covered by the shelter allowance.

“The shelter allowance is totally irrational and arbitrary,” he said. “There is no reasoned justification to keep the shelter allowance and supplements so low.” His comments on the regulations were attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit.

As it stands, people poor enough to qualify for public assistance and looking for a place to rent find themselves in a “cruel Dickensian or Kafka-esque situation,” said Susan Antos, the managing attorney for public benefits at Empire Justice Center. The shelter allowance is too low to allow them to afford even a modest place, but under the rules, recipients may have their benefits cut if they stop looking.

State Senator Brian Kavanagh, the Democratic chair of the Senate’s housing committee, said it’s hard to tease out how much it would cost to increase the shelter allowance because of how public assistance caseloads may change over time. As of June 2025, the most recent month for which figures are available, nearly three-quarters of a million people were receiving public assistance.

Kimberly Maldonado is one of the recipients. She has lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn since she was 22. Now 55 and living alone, she said that she was forced to stop working in June of last year because of ongoing health issues and relies on her daughter to cover her rent. Maldonado receives $215 a month to help cover $1,114 in rent, doesn’t qualify for a state supplement because she doesn’t have minor children, and receives no other financial assistance for housing from the state.

Maldonado, a plaintiff in the new lawsuit, told New York Focus and ProPublica she was afraid that the state would never provide the help financially desperate New Yorkers need.

“As long as people are quiet and we don’t try to speak up and get help and get them to change the laws, the rules, or whatever it may be, we’re never going to get help, we’re never going to get nothing changed.”

ICE said last week that it was expanding the 650-bed Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia in response to a recent state law that will bar the agency from detaining people in county jails, which it has increasingly relied on in New York since President Donald Trump returned to office. As of March, ICE was detaining up to about 250 people a day in the state’s jails.

“ICE is constructing a new hard-sided detention facility on federal property,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how ICE will build the addition or what it means by “hard-sided.”

The phrase could refer to a normal building, but could also mean a prefabricated building or a tent with cinderblock walls set up on a concrete base, according to five former Department of Homeland Security and federal law enforcement officials who spoke to New York Focus. For example, a contractor used the term “hard-sided” to describe the trailers and prefabricated buildings at the large family immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas.

Some structures other than brick-and-mortar buildings could become operational quickly, within 60 days, the former officials said. But some designs can be difficult to manage, particularly when it comes to security and climate control at a site so far north. 

“Especially in Buffalo, it’s going to be a challenge in the wintertime,” said a former federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he now works for ICE as a consultant.

Prior to ICE’s public announcement, New York Focus learned that the agency had recently discussed building a “soft-side” tent structure to house up to 100 people at the Buffalo facility. New York Focus reviewed notes from those discussions and spoke with a source familiar with the plans. Wayne County Sheriff Rob Milby said an ICE contact confirmed the agency was considering building the tents. ICE did not respond to questions asking whether it had abandoned that plan.

People detained at the Buffalo facility, which exclusively houses men, have long described overcrowding, poor access to medical care, and the use of solitary confinement as punishment. Rosa Cohen-Cruz, immigration policy director for the Bronx Defenders, argued it was unlikely that any expansion, particularly one set up quickly, would prioritize immigrants’ safety.

“It is very hard to believe that anything that is sort of slapped together quickly will come anywhere close to meeting the needs,” she said.

In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security assured that the new facility “will provide a safe, secure, and humane environment for individuals in ICE custody and will operate in accordance with applicable National Detention Standards.”

The expansion comes as ICE is set to lose access to hundreds of beds it has used at local jails in New York in recent months. As part of the state budget passed in May, New York banned counties from detaining people for ICE. The law goes into effect August 25, and counties with existing detention agreements then have three months to terminate them.

The Department of Homeland Security’s statement said the expansion was needed “due to New York State laws prohibiting counties from contracting with ICE to house illegal aliens.” The Trump administration sued New York last month over the laws, which also prohibit local law enforcement agencies from entering into so-called 287(g) agreements that deputize their officers to perform immigration enforcement.

Cohen-Cruz pushed back against ICE’s claim that New York’s new law prompted the detention expansion plan, pointing out that the agency is trying to expand its capacity in states that do allow immigration detention in county jails.

It had also sought to expand its detention capacity in New York long before the state passed the new restrictions. The agency is building detention cells in a federal building in downtown Rochester, and the federal government has leased a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in Newburgh that documents suggest could be used by ICE, Radio Catskill recently reported. ICE abandoned plans to turn a warehouse in Chester, in the Hudson Valley, into a detention facility after local outcry. Currently, the only other federal facility in New York that houses ICE detainees is Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

Under the Trump administration, ICE has used tents and other structures to quickly expand immigration detention around the country. Florida rushed to construct “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent complex in the Everglades, last summer. (The facility recently shut down.) A massive tent camp opened last year in El Paso, Texas, is now the country’s largest immigration detention facility.

The Buffalo Federal Detention Facility is one of only a handful of ICE jails that the agency owns outright, rather than contracting with a private company or local jail. (Privately run detention facilities are illegal in New York.)

That could make it easier to build there, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who worked for ICE under the Biden, Obama, and first Trump administrations.

“They already own the land, they have more control, and they don’t have to deal with zoning issues or other things that may come up if it’s a private company or a vendor,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Milby, who has criticized Governor Kathy Hochul’s efforts to limit collaboration with ICE, applauded the expansion plan. 

“From what everybody understands, space is at a premium” at the Buffalo detention center, he said. “Now with the new law that she’s enacting, she’s taking away the ability of sheriffs to help the situation.”

Cohen-Cruz sees it differently. “There’s no reason why people cannot be at liberty while they fight their deportation cases,” she said. “If we really are trying to create a safe, just, and humane immigration system, we should not be funneling more resources into expanding detention.”

Justice for Migrant Families, a Buffalo-based nonprofit that works with immigrants in western New York, including people detained at the Buffalo detention center, said it strongly opposes the expansion plan.

“Individuals held there, who are disproportionately Black and brown — many of whom are Indigenous — are our friends, neighbors, and family,” the organization said in a statement. “They are farm workers, roofers, construction workers, cleaners, tourists, parents, children, and attendees of local churches and mosques across New York and beyond.”

Immigrant rights advocates in New York speculate that the new construction could be used to detain women. Four people involved in rapid response to ICE detentions in upstate and western New York told New York Focus that agents often quickly release women they arrest during traffic stops, apparently because they have nowhere to detain them locally.

In recent months, ICE has been detaining women at the Allegany and Niagara county jails, according to ICE data, but no more than about 20 at a time, and Niagara’s sheriff announced earlier this year that he would not detain anyone on a civil immigration violation alone. Under New York’s new law, ICE will lose access to those facilities by late November.

New York school districts with state-funded pre-K are required to hold a random lottery when the number of applicants exceeds available seats. In Suffolk County, where Muglia is a school social worker, universal pre-K access and enrollment has long lagged behind the rest of the state. Unable to gamble on an uncertain opening, she shelled out another $14,000 for private daycare. 

“If there is such a desire for the pre-K program, why is the district not looking to expand it?” she asked. “Why are we not exploring opportunities to widen the scope of this program and make it available to more families?” 

It’s not simply a lack of state funding. New York state allocated $1.4 million for pre-K in the district during the 2024-25 school year. The total funding available to a district is based on a target enrollment number set by the state when it first establishes a pre-K program. But like most state school districts, Muglia’s left a significant amount of those funds — over $580,000 — on the table.

During the 2024-25 school year, roughly $170 million of the $1.2 billion the state earmarked for public pre-K went unused, according to a State Education Department report prepared for the governor and state legislature and obtained through a FOIL request. 

“Understanding why allocations remain underutilized is critical,” the report reads. “Every dollar left unused represents a lost opportunity to expand access, enhance program quality, and advance equity for New York’s four-year-olds.” 

A New York Focus analysis found that of the 658 school districts allocated funding for the school year, over half left more than $100,000 on the table. The most extreme case was in the Hudson Valley’s Monroe-Woodbury Central School District where more than $4.7 million in available state funding went unspent. The district did not respond to requests for comment.

The reasons for that underspending vary. The report highlights administrative burdens, demographic shifts that have led to lower enrollment, and insufficient funding per seat.

Districts contacted by New York Focus largely echoed those concerns. Some said it was difficult to find space and staff for the program, thanks in part to the low reimbursement rate, which in recent years has been set at a minimum of $5,400 per child. 

In 2024, the Corning-Painted Post Area School District in the Southern Tier of the state sent out a request for proposals to more than 30 community-based providers, but with a reimbursement rate of just over $6,400, it received a response from only two. Limited seats meant 24 applicants missed out on the program. 

The state budget passed last month could change things significantly. As part of a sweeping $4.5 billion child care investment, it nearly doubles the reimbursement rate for schools to $10,000 per preschooler. 

But responses from more than a dozen districts suggest that money alone is unlikely to overcome barriers to universal access.

Several districts — including Arlington, Clarkstown, Garden City, Longwood, Ossining, Port Chester Rye, Syracuse, Suffern, and White Plains — said they simply had more open seats than applicants. In some cases, families may be opting for private care, which often has longer hours that better align with working parents’ schedules. Unlike older children who can ride a school bus, small children typically require options close to home.

Marina Marcou-O’Malley, co-executive director of education nonprofit Alliance for Quality Education, said the boost in funding is a good starting point — but the state must also address other obstacles that could impede districts as they work toward universal access. 

By the 2028–29 school year, school districts will be required by a new state law to offer a full-day pre-K seat to every eligible 4-year-old whose family applies.

“Yes, we’re putting money into the system, but we also need to go back often to see what is working, what is good enough, and what this funding actually produces,” she said. 

Guilderland County School District in the Capital District of New York had to waitlist 50 families and turn down more than $1.1 million last year because it couldn’t recruit enough partners to serve every family who applied. Rachel Anderson, the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said the mandate will require the district to double its current capacity from seven classrooms to at least 15. A higher per-pupil rate will help, she said, but “it may be difficult to secure enough partners to fully meet that need.” 

State law does not require school districts to dip into their budgets to fund pre-K, but Marcou-O’Malley said school districts should be expected to use part of their local budgets to fund high-quality pre-K programs, just as they do to fund K–12. She pointed to an October report co-published by the Alliance for Quality Education, which recommended that the state require wealthier districts to make a mandatory minimum local contribution to guarantee all families have access to high-quality universal pre-K.

State Senator James Skoufis, who represents several Hudson Valley school districts that used only part of their allotment, said that districts need to make pre-K a priority and agreed that school districts should help cover the cost. He said districts should be held accountable when state funding doesn’t translate into actual seats. He has continued to call out the Hudson Valley districts he represents for leaving millions of dollars unused.

“Those unspent funds mean families are having to choose between spending $15,000 to educate their child or not educating their child at all,” Skoufis said. “That lies squarely at the feet of school districts, their administrators, and their boards.” 

Governor Kathy Hochul announced in late June that the program, NY HELPS, would be extended through June 2028, two years past its previous expiration date. The program, which began as an emergency pandemic-era effort, allows state and local governments to hire employees more quickly by waiving civil service exams.

It has worked as intended: State agencies had hired 42,506 workers through NY HELPS through May. City, county and town governments hired an additional 17,667.

New York City tried to opt into NY HELPS in 2024 under Mayor Eric Adams, New York Focus previously reported, but that effort was dropped after city labor unions sued to stop it. Staffing shortfalls remain a big problem under Mayor Zohran Mamdani: The city’s vacancy rate has hovered around 4.5 percent since 2024, and even higher rates in some agencies have hampered city services.

The protracted exam-based hiring process is a major obstacle for agencies trying to fill those shortages. For the 80 percent of city jobs that require an exam, people must apply to take one of more than 100 different tests, often wait years for the relevant agency to schedule an exam, usually pay a fee, then wait another year for the city to release lists of people who did well enough on the exam to apply for jobs. From exam to hire, the process can often take 15 months.

Are you a government worker with a story about the hiring process? We want to hear from you. Reach out to nick@nysfocus.com.

But the Mamdani administration indicated on Thursday that it will not join NY HELPS, despite the extension.

“We’re here to help ensure city agencies have qualified pools of candidates to hire, and our priority is to modernize the civil service system,” said Dan Kastanis, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services. He declined to address the city’s short-staffing issues, but added: “We are focused on updating the system for today’s workforce and industries in partnership with labor, city agencies, and other stakeholders.”

Some advocates have called on Mamdani to join the program. The city’s understaffed social services agency has struggled to keep up with applications despite mandatory overtime, as New York Focus reported. A 12 percent vacancy rate in the city’s housing agency has contributed to slower project reviews and increased building costs. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene blamed its drop in restaurant inspections two years ago on a shortage of inspectors. Even DCAS itself has a 16 percent vacancy rate.

Fifty-two of the 57 counties outside of the city have opted into NY HELPS, as have cities including Albany, Kingston, Troy, and Rochester. The state’s three-person Civil Service Commission approved the two-year extension at a May 13 meeting.

DCAS did not give a rationale for its decision not to join the program. But opting into NY HELPS could risk blowback from city unions like DC37 and the United Federation of Teachers, which are generally allied with the pro-labor mayor and were among the unions that sued to block Adams’s attempt.

“We have thousands of workers already on the civil service list who have taken the exams, who have gone through the process of paying the fee, who have taken all the necessary requirements to qualify,” DC37 executive director Henry Garrido said of NY HELPS at an April City Council hearing. “It’s not fair to those people who have done so.”

City unions largely support the current civil service system, which they say protects merit-based promotions, guards against patronage, and ensures that new hires meet the same standard qualifications: achieving a good score on civil-service exams. Reform advocates, on the other hand, have pointed out that many other cities limit exams to certain agencies, like police and fire.

Mamdani administration officials have predicted that staffing will improve thanks to his February decision to end an Adams-era policy that only lets a position be filled once two employees have left. DCAS Commissioner Yume Kitasei has argued that the vacancy crisis is partly a communication issue.

“The number one issue is the complexity of the system itself and how much New Yorkers actually understand it,” Kitasei said at an April City Council hearing. “That’s a job that we have to tackle — really explaining to the public, not only that this is what civil service is, but also, this is how you get city jobs.”

The state-level Public Employees Federation, which represents about 55,000 state workers, has had mixed feelings about NY HELPS — acknowledging its success in filling vacancies and growing its own membership, while worrying that it could allow unqualified new hires to leapfrog longtime employees.

A PEF spokesperson declined to comment.

One elected PEF representative, who was granted anonymity to describe internal dynamics, said union members have watched with anger as new hires are given promotions thought to “belong” to agency veterans.

“That makes people angry and I’m sympathetic to that,” the person said. “But we also need to hire people. Jobs need to be filled. And if we don’t fill those jobs, the people who are present have to carry the remaining workload, and that can be a real challenge.”

New York City is bracing for the first heat wave of the year this week. Temperatures are expected to soar into the triple digits, prompting the National Weather Service to issue an Extreme Heat Watch — and raising questions about why New York state has let a key cooling program shrink for several years in a row.

The federally funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps low income households pay for cooling, heating, and weatherization. For years, climate advocates have called on the state to direct more of the program’s funding toward cooling assistance to keep up with warming temperatures caused by climate change. But while the state projects that it will increase its heating assistance allotment from over $200 million to nearly $300 million this fiscal year, the sum allocated to cooling assistance is expected to remain at around $15 million.

“The formula really just is not adapting to climate change. It’s  just been set in stone in a way that is really out of touch with reality,” said Caleb Smith, a policy manager at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, adding that the overall pot is also too small.

The cooling program provides eligible New Yorkers with up to $800 for a window air conditioner or $1,000 for a wall sleeve unit. It generally begins taking applications in April and accepts applications until funding is exhausted. But the application window has grown shorter each year: This year, applications closed on June 5. Last year, the funding ran out on June 23. In 2024, it ran out on July 19.

Heat is the leading cause of weather-related fatalities and injuries across the country. At least 21 New York City residents died directly from heat stress last year, with most of the deaths attributed to a June heatwave, and an estimated 500 city residents die each year from conditions exacerbated by heat. Children, elderly people, and people with medical conditions are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, and heat-related deaths disproportionately impact Black and Latino residents.

Over the past three years, the number of households that have received cooling assistance has steadily declined. In 2024, 23,104 households received assistance. Last year, 20,984 households were helped. This year, just 18,500 households are expected to be served, according to the New York’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), which administers the state’s eligibility program. It declined to answer questions from New York Focus about that data.

The state’s HEAP program has remained overwhelmingly focused on heating, data gathered by New York Focus shows — and 2026 estimates reveal an even larger investment in heating assistance this fiscal year.

An OTDA spokesperson did not explain the rationale behind the allocations for heating and cooling assistance or whether the agency has considered redistribution, and members of the program’s advisory council deferred to the agency when asked for comment.

Some northeastern states don’t allocate funding under the program to cooling assistance at all. But of the ones that do, New York sets aside the least. Between 2022 and 2024, Rhode Island directed almost a fifth of its LIHEAP funding for cooling assistance. In New York, the figure was roughly 3 percent.

Advocates say that in addition to giving out more air conditioners, New York should help cover the costs of running them. “Even if they get a discounted air conditioner, sometimes people prefer a fan,” said Allison Nickerson, executive director of LiveOn NY, a nonprofit which advocates for older New Yorkers. “And even then they don’t use them because they can’t, they’re so worried about the electric costs.”

Meanwhile, LIHEAP is under attack from President Donald Trump, who recently proposed eliminating it for the sixth time, calling it “unnecessary” since states have policies to prevent utility shutoffs.

“The program rewards States such as New York and California, two of the top recipients for LIHEAP funding, which have implemented antienergy and anti-consumer policies that drive up home energy prices,”  the president’s April budget said.

The administration has already fired all of the staff who run the program at the federal level. 

“While President Trump again cruelly looks to cut the HEAP program entirely, New York continues to offer this important assistance to thousands of New York households that need it most,” a spokesman for OTDA said in a statement to New York Focus.

New York City Councilmember Crystal Hudson, chair of the body’s general welfare committee, called on Congress to increase LIHEAP funding and urged state leaders to restructure HEAP to account for rising energy costs associated with air conditioning.

The program, she said, has been a lifeline for thousands of low-income New Yorkers, but “is not designed for a world with stronger storms and extreme temperatures.” 

The New York City Council recently passed a law which requires landlords to provide renters with air conditioners able to keep bedroom temperatures below 78 degrees, if a tenant requests one. But it won’t go into effect until June 2030.

Last year, the state Department of Health launched a separate cooling assistance initiative offering free air conditioners to New Yorkers enrolled in the state’s Essential Plan and with chronic health conditions. The program has approved nearly 7,000 applications to date, a spokesperson said, and eligible New Yorkers can apply through July 6.

An analysis conducted by the government reform group Reinvent Albany and shared exclusively with New York Focus found the exemption was applied to a wide range of taxpayer-funded programs, including $500,000 for a golf tournament; $40 million for projects to promote swimming; and $212 million to expand rural health care options through a program that includes expanding telehealth and addressing staffing challenges.

Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office normally exerts independent oversight over executive branch contracts. This approval process promotes fair competition in the bidding process, helps avoid wasteful spending, and saves taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to DiNapoli’s office. But the executive branch has at times bristled at this added layer of bureaucracy that can delay projects, and the Hochul administration has chipped away at DiNapoli’s authority in recent years.

In a budget passed several years ago, for example, lawmakers explicitly exempted a contract to oversee a multibillion-dollar home care program from review by DiNapoli’s office. The transition has since allegedly led to turmoil in the home care program. Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern about the contract’s bidding process and at times have struggled to get answers about its details.

Before this year’s state budget was passed in May, DiNapoli’s office typically had the power to approve or reject executive branch contracts of over $50,000. In this year’s budget, Hochul’s office sought to raise that threshold to $300,000 for certain contracts. After negotiations with the legislature, the figure for some contracts was raised to $150,000.

The $1.5 billion identified by Reinvent Albany has largely escaped public notice. In these instances, the contracts ultimately funded through the budget appropriations will be exempted from comptroller approval, even if they exceed $150,000, according to Reinvent Albany. This exemption was often coupled with another allowing Hochul’s administration to skip the normally required competitive bidding process.

“This year’s final state budget included provisions that significantly reduce competition, independent oversight and transparency,” said DiNapoli spokesperson Jennifer Freeman.

A state Division of Budget spokesperson, Tim Ruffinen, called use of the exemption a “permissible legal process that has predated the current administration and can be used for a variety of reasons, including addressing emergency and time-sensitive situations.”

He declined to answer questions about why specific funding pots identified by Reinvent Albany required exemption. But he said DiNapoli’s office still has some power over these contracts.

Under the state constitution, the comptroller retains the authority to review and reject payments to a vendor for work performed under a state contract. DiNapoli’s office also has the right to conduct audits of all agency programs and spending. 

According to DiNapoli’s office, however, this does not make up for the powers stripped away. When it reviews a contract, the comptroller’s office examines factors including whether the selection process was conducted fairly; the reasonableness of cost; and whether the selected vendor’s history raises red flags.

The comptroller’s office can only approve or reject payments to a vendor based on the terms of their existing contract, “no matter how imprudent” the terms may be, Freeman said. And DiNapoli has no power to approve the original contracts funded by this year’s $1.5 billion, according to the Reinvent Albany analysis.

New York Focus found that, at times, funds exempted from comptroller review have then gone unspent for lengthy periods, raising questions about whether a speedier process skipping normal oversight was truly necessary. Ruffinen did not address specific questions about those appropriations.

In true emergencies, DiNapoli’s office argues, state law already provides the executive branch means of working around the normal review process, such as through the issuance of executive orders. 

And according to DiNapoli’s office, its average approval process for state contracts last year took only about eight days. Nearly 90 percent were reviewed within 15 days, the office said.

Freeman, the DiNapoli spokesperson, told New York Focus that “history has shown the negative consequences when the State Comptroller’s office is cut out of the process and competition is eliminated.”

Early in his tenure, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed through changes that exempted state university contracts from normal comptroller approval, allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on Cuomo’s signature “Buffalo Billion” economic development initiative without this oversight. These contracts ultimately became the centerpiece of a sprawling federal corruption case against the Cuomo administration concerning alleged bid-rigging. 

When Hochul came into office, “she actually reversed, initially, a lot of what Governor Cuomo had pioneered,” Alex Camarda, a senior policy advisor at Reinvent Albany, told New York Focus. “But then, in recent years, she’s started to do the same thing.”

The Reinvent Albany review found that in this year’s budget, at least $733 million in new budget appropriations had been exempted. In addition, lawmakers reapproved the spending of $745 million that had been exempted in prior budgets, but had so far gone unspent. The vast majority of the previously exempted funding stems from budgets passed since Hochul took office in 2021.

“Are they setting it up so that one vendor gets chosen and not another — or is it truly on the merits, and they’re just trying to speed up the work because it’s important to the state?” Camarda said.

The use of the exemptions in the current budget may go even further than $1.5 billion: According to Reinvent Albany, they could end up being applied far more widely. 

For instance, the budget also allows up to $100 million to be spent on a program aimed at greenhouse gas reduction — without comptroller approval or competitive bidding — if agencies receive permission from the state budget director to bypass these processes. According to Camarda, it’s unclear from budget documents what proportion of this pot of money, the Sustainable Future Program, will ultimately be exempted.

Earlier this year, Hochul justified a rollback of state climate goals due to concerns about affordability. But Camarda said that through the exemptions, the governor was at the same time potentially “jacking up the cost for all these vendor contracts that are related to climate change.” The projects funded by the money include heat pumps for public schools and electric vehicle chargers. At least some of the contracts are being awarded through competitive bidding, records show.

Though Hochul’s administration says the exemption from review is needed to expedite certain contracts, the administration at times has failed to spend appropriations that have received it.  Lawmakers then approved even more money exempted from review, which has also gone unspent.

For instance, $60 million in funding for an initiative called the “Local Assistance Resource Program” was approved in the 2023 budget. Three years later, only $25 million has been spent from those funds.

The funding is earmarked for “services and expenses of local assistance projects, programs, and other purposes.” Besides being exempted from comptroller review, the contracts awarded through the funds were exempted from normal competitive bidding requirements.

Although much of the original money had gone unspent, the 2024 budget added $60 million more for the initiative — all of which also remains unspent – and the 2025 budget added another $30 million — also unspent. These allocations, too, were exempted from comptroller approval and competitive bidding.

The deal, which must be approved by a federal judge, is one of the largest wage-related payouts in New York history, according to lawyers Hugh Baran of Katz Banks Kumin LLP  and Michael Diller of the Legal Aid Society, who were part of the legal team that represented the plaintiffs. It could benefit as many as 200,000 home health aides with average payouts of nearly $700 each — equivalent to a week’s pay.

“We’re really proud of the results, and what it will mean for these home care workers who work so hard to take care of their loved ones,” Baran said.

Those aides are employed as part of the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, or CDPAP, a New York state program that allows disabled people to receive state-funded home care, often from their own family members. Since last year, the program has been run by the private company Public Partnerships LLC, which was selected by Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration. The aides sued PPL for wage theft, and the company will now be responsible for the $162 million payment.

Since PPL took over the program in April 2025, workers have repeatedly accused it of failing to pay them on time, or in some cases, pay them at all. PPL did not admit any illegal behavior in the settlement. 

“We categorically deny the allegations in this lawsuit, and the settlement reflects no admission of liability or wrongdoing. We look forward to putting this matter behind us,” said PPL spokesperson Meg Fitzgerald.

The two sides bargained for months to reach the deal.

The approval process for settlements in class action lawsuits like this one can take months, so workers may not receive payments until early 2027, according to Baran and Diller.

Even so, the settlement was welcome news to Debbie McGowan, who lives on Long Island and cares for her adult son, who has Down syndrome. Since last year, McGowan has spent hours wrestling with PPL’s system, trying to get her shifts properly counted so she could be paid in full.

Those struggles “took time away from caring for my child,” McGowan said. The settlement is “a really good decision, and it’s fair,” she added.

As part of the settlement, aides will receive at least $25 million in compensation for money that PPL deducted from their wages to pay for a mandatory health insurance plan. That plan was harshly criticized by many aides and policy wonks, who noted that it did not cover basic medical care like doctor and hospital visits. Most of the aides already had insurance from other sources. 

Last year, New York Focus reported extensively on that plan, which PPL funded by collecting 40 cents per hour from workers’ paychecks. New York Focus estimated that PPL could make as much as $60 million in annual profits from the plan. Home health aides in New York make about $20 per hour.

The plan was run by health insurer Leading Edge Administrators, a company that was founded by a convicted fraudster and has a long record of saddling patients with medical debts, approving treatments and then refusing to pay, and canceling patients’ insurance without notice. 

In the wake of New York Focus’s reporting, PPL announced that it would discontinue the plan and end its relationship with Leading Edge. 

Still, aides in the New York City area were required to enroll in the plan until April 30, when it was discontinued and PPL ended its business relationship with Leading Edge, which also goes by the name Omni Advantage. If the settlement is approved, aides will be reimbursed for at least some of the money that they were forced to spend on that plan.

Climate advocates and some city legislators are urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration to limit the use of credits to comply with Local Law 97, the landmark statute that requires owners of large buildings to ratchet down their emissions. Mamdani said he would do so on the campaign trail last year, but hasn’t indicated his position since he took office.

In June, the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 339-mile transmission line, began delivering Canadian hydropower to New York City. Its abundant clean energy will be translated into the credits, known as RECs, that companies or organizations can buy from the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency, with the proceeds helping pay for the transmission line.

That’s where the advocates’ concerns come in. The RECS are expected to cost significantly less than the penalty for not complying with the city law, and some fear they will be used too liberally.

“We’ve got to start by asking what’s the risk here,” said Chris Halfnight, CEO of the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on decarbonizing buildings in New York City. “Without a reasonable limit, RECs could become a substitute for building upgrades rather than a complement to them.”

RECs can only be used to offset emissions from electricity use, not from on-site oil or gas usage. Still, they could reduce the incentive to make buildings more energy efficient through retrofits and upgrades. The Urban Green Council calculated that as much as half of the emissions over the law’s 2030 limits could be offset by RECs — including 85 percent of excess emissions from office properties.

Asked at a mayoral forum last year, Mamdani said he would eliminate the use of RECs to offset emissions. He lambasted Mayor Eric Adams for slow-walking Local Law 97’s implementation and deferring to the real estate lobby in allowing the sale of RECs as a clean energy compliance option.

“It is cheaper for some New Yorkers to be out of compliance than in compliance,” Mamdani said, in response to a question about RECs. “That is a ridiculous state of affairs.”

As mayor, however, Mamdani has yet to publicly support any limit on the use of RECs to comply with the law. A bill now pending before the City Council would limit the volume of emissions that can be offset by RECs to 10 percent of a building’s emissions from electricity, but the mayor has not yet endorsed it.

“As we review Intro 159,” said a City Hall spokesperson, referring to the bill, “we will continue to support those who are taking concrete steps to come into compliance with the law.”

Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa, the main sponsor of the bill, said she and her co-sponsors hope the mayor will sign on. “It does seem consistent with positions he advocated as both an assemblymember and a mayoral candidate,” she said.

De La Rosa said she introduced the bill to ensure the benefits of Local Law 97 flow to the city’s residents, especially those in marginalized communities.

“Climate change is already affecting us,” De La Rosa said. “In recent years, we’ve seen major brush fires in my district. Communities of color and environmental justice communities are bearing the impacts.”

Several climate organizations signed a memo in support of De La Rosa’s bill, and note that Mamdani could also enact an offset limit through rulemaking at the Department of Buildings.

The department formalized the use of RECs as a compliance option in 2022, under then-Mayor Adams. “Eric Adams ripped a giant loophole into Local Law 97,” said Pete Sikora, who directs climate advocacy at New York Communities for Change. Closing that loophole “would ensure energy efficiency investments that lead to thousands of jobs, millions of tons of air pollution reductions, and lower utility bills,” he said.

But not everyone sees the RECs as a handout to property owners. Because they provide revenue to energy developers, they can also spur energy investment, said Ben Furnas, a former top climate official in the Bill de Blasio administration.

“I think CHPE is a huge victory for Local Law 97 in a lot of ways,” he said, since its RECs can “help catalyze a political coalition for a much lower emission grid.”

Another alum of the de Blasio climate team, Daniel Zarrilli, said it would have been hard to fund the transmission line without it.

“CHPE actually getting built was far from guaranteed,” Zarrilli said. “If part of the tradeoff was allowing some offsetting of electricity emissions, I think that was a worthwhile compromise.”

The sale of RECS will help defray some of the cost of building and operating the transmission line, which otherwise will be absorbed by ratepayers across the state. In a statement, the Department of Buildings said purchasing RECs “cuts down on pollution and supports a cleaner grid for our city.” 

New York City itself has already committed to buying a substantial portion of RECs. Utility customers will see their monthly bills rise by a few dollars per month to help pay for CHPE; the exact amount may vary slightly, depending how many RECs building owners buy.

Most large buildings are already in compliance with the law’s earliest requirements. By the time stricter requirements take effect in 2030, RECs may well be more expensive. Their prices fluctuate each month — rising when power prices are low and decreasing when power prices are high. Starting in 2030, the law starts to treat New York City’s electricity as much cleaner, anticipating the grid’s continued shift towards carbon-free energy sources. At that point, building owners will have to buy twice the number of RECs to cover the same amount of emissions.

Halfnight said the shifting calculus of REC prices could eventually help encourage building owners to actually lower their properties’ emissions rather than relying on the offsets. In the meantime, he said, a cap on the RECs would provide a “straightforward fix.” 

“These countervailing factors say ‘Okay, it’s some risk, but it’s not a five-alarm fire,’” he said.

For months, they’ve been talking to workers in 12 languages, including Creole, Yoruba, and Burmese. There are about 200,000 aides to reach, and the union needs signatures from at least 60,000 to even call for an election. Then it still has to win.

If it does, 1199 hopes to boost aides’ wages and benefits, as it has successfully done in other states. Since the aides are paid by New York state, 1199 will seek more taxpayer funding for home care, on top of the current $11 billion budget — a tough sell when Governor Kathy Hochul has spent years pursuing cuts.

Any boost would be welcome news to the aides, who make less than $21 per hour doing hard physical work: feeding, clothing, bathing, and toileting infirm and disabled New Yorkers. Family members can serve as aides, so the job is often personal.

But many workers are reluctant to trust the union. New York Focus independently spoke to more than a dozen aides for this story, and eight were either against it or leaning in that direction. 

Saba Nakhai, 32, who cares for her mother in Westchester full time, told New York Focus that she doesn’t see a place for the union in her work. “Maybe if I was working at a corporation, I would want a union,” she said. “But here, who’s the enemy, my mom?”

To win, 1199 must convince workers like Nakhai that they need an advocate — not against their patients, but against the sprawling bureaucracy that sets their wages and benefits.

If it’s successful, 1199 — already one of New York’s political kingmakers — will become even more powerful. Its membership and dues revenue will balloon, enabling more organizing and lobbying.

The union plans to ask for an election this fall. At the call center, its organizers dial away, working with quiet focus. “Believe in yourself,” a sign on the wall reads. “You got this.”

The engine of the campaign is workers like Jeannine Hutchinson, 54, who has been a member of 1199 for two decades. She spent more than half of that time working at a hospital in Far Rockaway, Queens, the neighborhood where she grew up and raised her own family. 

She liked her most recent job as a patient navigator, guiding people through labyrinths of paperwork and treatment options. She could walk to work in 10 minutes, and spend lunch breaks on Rockaway Beach.

But late last year, when her union rep asked Hutchinson to spend a year working at 1199 headquarters in Manhattan, more than an hour’s commute away, she didn’t even ask what the role was.

“I said, ‘Bet, when do I start?” she told New York Focus. “This is the faith that I have in my union.”

It’s easy to understand that faith. Hutchinson’s husband was in 1199 as a nursing home worker before he retired, and two of her three children, who are social workers, are also members. The union has given her family “an opportunity to have a fair chance,” she says.

Five days a week, Hutchinson leaves her house around 7:00 am, and gets back a little after 6:00 pm. She brings her work phone home, and takes calls at family dinners, at church, and from bed.

Workers are often dubious, and ask Hutchinson if joining the union will really get them better wages.

“We can’t guarantee anything,” she tells them. “But there are some dreams and aspirations that you have that you may not ever reach without having a union.”

She strives to get 25 cards signed a week, the goal that 1199 has set for each organizer. Getting her first card took four calls to the same person. 

“Every time I called it was a bad time, but I did not give up,” she said, “and the fourth time was the slam dunk.”

She signed up for one year as an organizer, but she’d like to stay until the union wins, however long that takes.

“I’m the kind of person who likes to see things through,” she said.

The program that 1199 wants to unionize is officially called the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, or CDPAP. Since its launch in 1995, it has expanded to serve hundreds of thousands of disabled and infirm New Yorkers.

The program grew explosively in the past decade. New York’s booming population of senior citizens flocked to care they could get in their own homes for free, and that kept them out of nursing homes. That the care could come from family members was an added bonus.

The union’s big opportunity came in late 2024, when New York hired a company called Public Partnerships LLC to run the program. Previously, the state paid over 600 companies to do the job, a few of which had been unionized by 1199. PPL’s takeover meant that 1199 would be able to unionize the entire program in one fell swoop.

But the transition to PPL has been rocky, and home health aides have often gotten the short end of the stick. Last week, PPL announced that it had agreed to pay $162 million to settle a wage theft lawsuit alleging that it had chronically underpaid home health workers. It did not admit wrongdoing in the case. And earlier this month, the US Department of Justice sued PPL and New York state, accusing them of rigging the bidding process that led to PPL’s selection. Both New York state and PPL have denied the allegations, and the lawsuit is pending.

The wage theft and bid rigging claims have been circulating for more than a year, but they haven’t dissuaded 1199 from working with PPL. In 2024, before PPL took over, 1199 announced its plan to organize the entire CDPAP workforce, and asked PPL and other companies that bid on the contract not to oppose its union drive. In September 2025, PPL agreed to remain neutral. It also gave 1199 contact information for the home health aides. Through the transition, the union publicly supported PPL despite fierce opposition from many lawmakers and activists.

That bargain made 1199’s campaign possible: Since there’s no central location where aides congregate, 1199 needs to be able to reach them remotely. But workers told New York Focus that the deal also turned many aides against the union, because they see it as too cozy with their unpopular employer. 

Since PPL took over the program, Sophie-Anais Renois, 26, who spends most of each weekend caring for her legally blind grandmother on Long Island, has been repeatedly underpaid for her work, she told New York Focus. As she cooks, does laundry, and injects insulin to manage her grandmother’s diabetes, PPL’s timekeeping system shaves hours off her shifts. Many workers have complained of similar bureaucratic hassles.

She spent months trying to get PPL to address the problem as her credit card bills mounted. When she finally reached someone at the company, the person who answered said there was nothing they could do. 

PPL declined to comment on Renois’s case, but company vice president Patty Byrnes said, “All personal assistants who submitted fully compliant timesheets in accordance with program rules have been paid on-time and in full.”

Some months ago, Renois learned about the agreement between 1199 and PPL. “It really made me go, ‘Hmm, is this union looking out for my best interest?’” she said. So far, she’s refused to sign a union card.

When asked about PPL’s alleged wage theft, 1199 press secretary Rose Ryan said that the union “strongly supports ending wage theft across the home care industry,” and that it is “vital that these workers be made whole for missing pay.”

The union has a simple defense of its partnership with the bosses: It works.

Every year, it joins forces with New York’s main hospital lobby to pressure lawmakers for more Medicaid funding. If lawmakers refuse, they face barrages of attack ads. Generally, 1199 wins.

This is why, despite the bitter complaints that workers like Renois have against PPL, 1199 doesn’t treat the company as an enemy.

“We know that our interests are aligned,”said Keith Joseph, 1199’s vice president for home care workers, “because the funding comes from the decision the elected official makes in Albany.” 

Union leaders are aware that some aides have issues with PPL. The answer to those problems is the union, according to 1199 vice president of new organizing Lystra Sawney, who is leading the campaign.

“We can work together collectively to make those changes,” Sawney said. “Because they can’t make the changes on their own.”

The union has also vowed that it won’t go on strike against PPL. 

“Strikes will not be a tool,” said Helen Schaub, 1199’s political director. “There are lots of other ways workers can make their voices heard.”

This isn’t an unusual stance for 1199. When Rose Ryan, the union’s press secretary, recently tried to figure out the last time the union went on strike in downstate New York, no one on staff could remember.

In Massachusetts, 1199 organizers have won significant gains for home care workers. But recently, those wins have come with cuts to other parts of the state’s home care budget.

In 2023, 58,000 state-funded home care workers in Massachusetts represented by 1199 won a contract that included raises, holidays, and paid training. Following the deal, higher wages and growing enrollment pushed spending on the program above $1.7 billion, leading Governor Maura Healey to seek budget cuts. The union initially succeeded at pushing back, but it didn’t last: This year, the state slashed $32 million from home care. Healey is currently asking lawmakers to cut another $68 million.

The cuts didn’t touch the wages that 1199 won for its members. Instead, almost all the savings came from slashing the hours that workers could spend preparing food for their patients, who often cannot cook for themselves. The next round of cuts could further curtail care.

Marcus Johnson, a disability rights activist who is paralyzed from the neck down, fears the impact cuts would have.

His aides are on duty full time: They get him out of bed, feed him meals, and brush his teeth. Tampering with this schedule could make it impossible for him to live at home. 

“I don’t want to make it consumers against workers,” he said. “We want the union to support the workers. But are they supporting our community?”

Progressive economists have argued that higher wages benefit patients, too, by attracting more workers and reducing turnover. Higher wages would increase spending and likely create more political pressure for cuts. But 1199 would use its power in Albany to push back. 

“Workers are going to fight to make sure the program is funded,” Schaub said. “Especially when many workers are directly related to the consumers.”

Two aides who spoke with New York Focus for this story support the union. Maggie Ornstein, 48, who cares for her mother in Queens, hopes that it can win better health insurance.

“Will it come to fruition? I don’t know,” she said. “But without being in the union, it definitely won’t happen.”

But outright opposition was more common, or at least wariness, like from Carolyn Wember, 68, who cares for her daughter in Brooklyn and doesn’t plan to sign a card.

“My level of trust in the system at this point is just zero,” Wember said. 

At 1199 headquarters, organizer Bertha Motta, a home care worker herself, presses on. As she dials for hours a day, she’s fueled by devotion to the union, which she’s belonged to for almost all of the 40 years since she emigrated from Peru. 

The work is repetitive, but Motta, 66, is persistent. She was recently woken up at 1:00 am by a call back from an aide who was visiting family in India and forgot about the time difference. They spoke for 45 minutes, and she convinced him to sign up.

When one woman accused her of being a scammer, Motta invited the skeptic to come to 1199 headquarters and meet her in person. The woman traveled from Queens to visit the call center, and then signed a union card in the building’s lobby.

On another recent call, an aide asked Motta how the union would help him. She said it already had — the 55-cent-per-hour raise that all home health aides received at the beginning of 2026 was thanks to a law that 1199 lobbied for in 2023. 

To Motta’s surprise, he started laughing, incredulous that she’d brag about 55 cents.

“I told him, ‘But you don’t have idea how we fight for you to get those 55 cents,” Motta said in Peruvian-inflected English. During the campaign for the raise, she told him, she had traveled from her home in Queens to rallies and lobbying days in Albany many times, leaving at 3:30 am and not getting back until the evening.

“You get easily, but you don’t have idea how hard it was for us,” she said.

He signed a card.