New York City Councilmember Susan Zhuang walks a peculiar political line. She’s a conservative Democrat — a member of the council’s Republican-dominated Common Sense Caucus. Sixty percent of voters in her south Brooklyn district backed Donald Trump last year. In this month’s mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo — whom she endorsed in the primary — carried the district by a 20-point margin over winner Zohran Mamdani.

Zhuang, 39, is also proudly defined by her experiences as an immigrant. She’s the only sitting councilmember who moved to the United States as an adult, and she represents Brooklyn’s first Asian-majority council district. Her constituents have been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdowns, which Zhuang has denounced. She suggested to New York Focus that Mayor-elect Mamdani should set up an agency to oversee federal immigration enforcement actions.

These positions put her at odds with some of her political allies. Zhuang, who opposes plans to build a homeless shelter in her district and has criticized the reallocation of city resources for migrant shelters, has recently found herself more aligned with some of her most progressive colleagues, particularly on immigration issues. She appeared alongside Progressive Caucus members in a recent video aimed at informing Asian New Yorkers of their rights. And she broke with conservative councilmembers by voting to override Mayor Eric Adams’s veto of a bill that sought in part to protect immigrant workers by decriminalizing street vending.

Baba Ndanani has lived in one of New York City’s most flood-prone neighborhoods for more than 20 years. His two-story home in the coastal, majority-Black community of Edgemere, Queens sits directly beside Jamaica Bay. During high tides, the bay often creeps into his backyard and climbs the steps to his back porch.

In 2012, during Superstorm Sandy, five feet of water surged into Ndanani’s home. He swam across the street to higher ground, riding out the storm in a disabled car surrounded by water.

“I was praying,” Ndanani told Floodlight. “I just wanted to get out, and that was it.”

After the storm, he returned to his wrecked home and spent two weeks sleeping on top of the overturned refrigerator. “I had nowhere else to go,” he said.

This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.

A teenage girl came forward in May 2023 with a horrifying complaint: Her adoptive father had been raping her since 2021, she told police officers in an interview at her school. After some of the assaults, according to a police report, he would give her soda, candy or blueberry iced tea. The abuse started when she was 13.

The teen was removed from the home, and the case was assigned to Megan Morehouse, an investigator in the Yates County Sheriff’s Office who had met the girl at the school. For the department, in one of New York State’s smallest counties, the case was among the most serious of the year.

Investigator Morehouse did not believe the teen — she said as much in a conversation with a colleague that she accidentally recorded. She did not take basic investigative steps recommended by Todd Casella, the Yates County District Attorney, who consulted on the investigation. She did not obtain search warrants to access the father’s phone or to search the home, where a half dozen or so children lived. The teen said the abuse had occurred in a bedroom and the garage, among other places.