When Pamela Brown found out that her lawyer had been indicted for stealing money from her other clients, she became worried that she, too, had been robbed.

Brown had been required to deposit more than $53,000 in an escrow bank account controlled by the attorney, Daphna Zekaria. Brown asked Zekaria to prove the money was still in the account and return it. The lawyer never responded.

In May, following a criminal investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, Zekaria pleaded guilty to robbing nearly $400,000 from three other clients, stealing escrow funds in two instances and performing no legal work despite charging a significant fee in another. Zekaria has been disbarred and will face six years in prison if she doesn’t pay restitution by next May.

A surprise move by the Trump administration could result in hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers losing their food assistance benefits as soon as November — disrupting one of the country’s oldest safety net programs months earlier than expected.

In July, President Donald Trump signed his “Big, Beautiful Bill” into law, enacting over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps). Drastic changes to SNAP were expected to roll out starting next year, including expanded work requirements projected to cause hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to lose eligibility.