Fifteen elected officials, including 11 state legislators, were arrested Thursday at a Manhattan federal building where immigrants have been detained as they protested President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and called on the state and city to mount a stronger opposition to it.

The protest took place as federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to ramp up arrests and detain record numbers of immigrants, including across New York state.

It also marked three months since the state legislature ended its annual session without passing immigration protection bills that advocates have framed as key to countering Trump’s agenda. Legislative leadership failed to bring the New York for All Act, which would prohibit state and local authorities from collaborating with ICE, up for a floor vote, despite strong support for the bill from immigrant rights groups and members of the state’s congressional delegation.

You may have noticed your energy bills going up recently. It’s not just you, and it’s about to get worse.

Electric bills in New York are the highest they’ve been in over a decade, even when taking inflation into account. More than a million households are at least two months behind on payments, owing utilities close to $2 billion. And record numbers of households had their electricity or gas shut off this spring, including more than 61,000 in May — the highest number the Public Utility Law Project (PULP), a decades-old consumer advocacy group, has ever seen.

Anxiety about unaffordable bills only mounted over the summer. Laurie Wheelock, PULP’s executive director, said this August was the group’s busiest month ever, with a surge in calls to its hotline. The top concern on people’s minds: rate hikes.

Kevin Danahy was shocked when he got a $17,000 bill for a treatment his health insurance company had told him would be covered.

The 60-year-old retiree suffers from cardiac sarcoidosis, a heart condition that is generally treatable but can be dangerous or even fatal without medical attention. It forced him into early retirement from a career in book publishing, so he has relied on a combination of Medicare and the insurance that his wife received from her work.

Since 2020, when he was first diagnosed, his doctors have treated his condition with regular infusions of a drug called Remicade. It’s highly effective, but costs up to five-figure sums per treatment. New York Focus reviewed his doctor’s records, which note that his disease was “severe” before the Remicade treatments, but “highly responsive” once the infusions began. Without them, he runs the risk of his condition worsening dramatically.

New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations have been digging into conviction integrity units for more than a year. These programs, typically housed in district attorneys’ offices, are designed to re-examine potential wrongful conviction cases. But as our series shows, CIUs have limitations. DAs rarely overturn their own convictions — and when they do, they seldom acknowledge misconduct.