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.

Several New York county jails quietly joined the Trump administration’s rapidly growing immigration detention network this spring.

Seven jails booked a total of nearly 2,800 people arrested for immigration reasons and detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first seven months of 2025, up from only 500 booked in New York jails all of last year, according to ICE data — a nearly sixfold increase.

In recent years, two jails, in Orange and Clinton counties, consistently held federal immigration detainees. But since February, Allegany, Broome, Montgomery, Nassau, and Niagara counties have joined them.