Category: News

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to permanently abandon its efforts to suspend funding for a $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River, describing those attempts as “flagrantly” illegal.

Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Southern District of New York said that the administration violated federal guidelines when it stopped reimbursing the tunnel’s builders for their expenses in September. The suspension forced a shutdown of the construction project and led to a brief layoff of about 1,000 workers in New York City and New Jersey in February.

Federal officials said that the payments were stopped while the project’s hiring practices were reviewed. But Vargas noted that President Donald Trump had indicated in interviews that there were political reasons for stopping the tunnel project, which was a favorite of Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader from New York.

“We’re cutting a $20 billion project that Schumer fought for 15 years to get, and I’m cutting the project,” the judge quoted Trump as saying in October. “The project is gonna be dead. It’s just pretty much dead right now.”

The project, known as Gateway, would supplement two 116-year-old single-track tunnels under the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey. Schumer had called it the most critical infrastructure project in the United States.

The project ran out of money about five months after the federal government stopped making payments. The states of New York and New Jersey jointly sued the Trump administration in federal court in Manhattan, seeking an emergency order to end the suspension.

On Feb. 6, the day that work on the tunnel stopped, Vargas granted a temporary restraining order. The Trump administration opposed that order and continued to press its case but never disputed that the suspension “flagrantly violates federal law,” the judge said.

In declaring the suspension of funding illegal, Vargas also said that the federal government could not attempt to suspend payment of the federal grants again.

Catherine Rinaldi, executive vice president of the Gateway Development Commission, which oversees the project, said that before federal funding was frozen, the tunnel project “was on schedule and on budget, and we have made significant progress since federal funding for the project resumed in February.”

In response to the judge’s decision, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, both Democrats, released a joint statement with Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and Jennifer Davenport, the attorney general of New Jersey.

“We are grateful that a federal court has once again agreed that the Trump administration’s decision to freeze billions of dollars in grants for the Gateway Tunnel Project is flagrantly unlawful,” their statement said. “This victory sends a clear message: The Trump administration’s attempt to halt Gateway funding will not stand.”

The federal Department of Transportation said that it remained “committed to ensuring hard-working taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly and do not fund unconstitutional, discriminatory contracting practices.”

The decision Monday did not complete litigation over the suspension. The development commission is still suing the Transportation Department for monetary damages resulting from the forced shutdown of the project.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

It has been six days since devastating twin earthquakes flattened entire residential neighborhoods in Venezuela, and dozens of newly found bodies are still being hauled out of the rubble.

On Monday, rescuers piled up coffins inside an improvised morgue at the sun-scorched port in the town of La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit areas. Small trucks arrived with more bodies, leaving them arranged in a long row by a concrete dock.

“Every day the number of victims keeps going up,” said Jennifer Moreno Canizales, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Caracas. “And we expect it to keep rising.”

The official death toll after Venezuela’s earthquakes rose Monday to 1,719 people, an increase of nearly 300 since Sunday. It is based on the number of bodies recovered during the search operations, Moreno Canizales said.

But sobering as it is, that figure could be a substantial undercount. Many more Venezuelans remain missing, with chances of finding them alive shrinking every day.

The uncertainty of the number is not just a matter for the journalistic or historic record. For many Venezuelans, it signifies their anguished limbo as they search for friends with bleeding hands, trapped between uncertainty and a desperate refusal to accept the worst.

There is no official or reliable toll for the missing. And with so much debris from tall residential buildings pressed tightly together, and a shortage of heavy machinery to remove the rubble, estimates of how many people might still be trapped inside vary widely.

Two forensic doctors at the main morgue in the capital, Caracas, estimated a death toll of about 4,000, basing that on the number of bodies that had been arriving at a morgue in La Guaira every day.

In anticipation of the toll increasing, the United Nations has been procuring 10,000 body bags in coordination with Venezuela’s government, said Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the organization’s resident coordinator for Venezuela. “That is the applying assumption; it’s very sad,” he said.

According to an unofficial website where Venezuelans can report the missing, more than 46,000 people were still unaccounted for. The New York Times could not independently verify the figure, which can include people who survived but became separated from relatives.

To veteran rescue workers, the high number of reported missing may be ominous.

“Contact is difficult, but not that difficult that you wouldn’t have gotten in contact,” said Linda Hornisberger, the president of REDOG, a nonprofit Swiss search-and-rescue association that has deployed eight dogs and 88 emergency responders to Venezuela since Friday. “We must assume most to be dead.”

Hornisberger said that despite working eight- to 12-hour shifts for days, “we have not been able to rescue anybody.”

Disaster response experts say that it often takes several weeks for a full picture to emerge after disasters of this magnitude.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the official government death toll was 64 people. Nearly a year later, they updated it to 2,975, nearly 50 times as high. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when entire coastal villages were completely erased, it took the authorities more than a year to settle on the final estimate of 230,000 victims.

Several signs out of Venezuela indicate that there might also be a delay before a final death toll is reached.

The area of the quakes

The day the earthquake struck was a holiday in Venezuela, when it was more likely that families would have been home, or had traveled to the seaside area of La Guaira. Many buildings there were built during an economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when developers erected tall towers, many 10 stories or more. A mountain range limited building space, which led developers to choose to build vertically, said Josué Araque, a Venezuelan geographer.

Now, many of those buildings have been pancaked into a dense tangle of debris.

“They are mountains of rubble from buildings of many, many levels, made of concrete, which basically turns them into tombs,” Araque said. It is difficult to search the lowest floors of the buildings, he said, “because there are 10 floors that fell on top of them.”

Araque said he believed that there were probably many more missing people whom “they probably will not be able to recover.”

There is 1.2 million tons of debris in the hardest-hit areas of La Guaira, the U.N. Development Program said Monday.

Moreno Canizales, from the U.N., said 700 buildings had collapsed. Despite the rescue teams’ best efforts, she said, “it is hard to reach them all in time” to rescue those who might still be trapped alive.

Del Tindaro, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Venezuela, also said in an interview that the high number of collapsed buildings indicated that the official toll was an undercount.

Ilan Kelman, a professor of disasters and health at University College London, said a full accounting of the number of deaths might never be known. But a preliminary projection that the final toll could exceed 10,000 — shared by the U.S. Geological Survey based on factors including the magnitude of the earthquake, the population density, and local infrastructure — remains grimly feasible, he said.

A difficult search

The work of recovering bodies is painstakingly slow, and it’s not a priority for most response teams that are trying to save those who may be still alive. On Sunday, 49 rescue teams coordinated by the U.N. rescued seven survivors, Moreno Canizales said. Sometimes, she said, the teams are responding to families telling them that they can hear a relative crying from the rubble.

When the disaster response shifts, more bodies are likely to be found, experts said.

“The focus of the search-and-rescue teams is to look for those who might be alive” based on reports of sound and motion, said Phil Gelman, a Latin America coordinator with GOAL, an international humanitarian response agency. “When the search-and-rescue phase is ended, and heavy machinery is moved in to move rubble, the casualty count will rise.”

Even in well-organized response efforts, many survivors end up being rescued by untrained friends, family, and neighbors, said Emily So, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Cambridge.

One Caracas resident, Rosmaria Herrera, 30, said she had lost at least three relatives. Family members and other civilians pulled the bodies of her father, her cousin, and her grandmother out of the rubble. But they couldn’t find her uncle.

“It’s strange, because there is practically nothing left of the building,” she said.

Witnesses and aid workers described a shortage of heavy machinery as one of the biggest obstacles to rescue efforts, saying volunteers often lacked the equipment needed to move concrete slabs and reach survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

In videos widely shared on social media, residents pleaded for excavators and other heavy equipment. In one, a man says neighbors pooled their own money to hire machinery after waiting days for government assistance to arrive.

“If we keep waiting for our wonderful authorities, another week will go by with our relatives still buried there,” he says. “We had to start doing this ourselves.”

Some victims will likely die from their injuries, in part because of Venezuela’s already overstretched health system, Kelman said.

So said the final toll would likely be determined by the number of people reported missing, the extent of visible damage to buildings, and impeded access to the worst hit areas, which has stymied some responses.

“Tragically, until they recover the bodies from underneath the rubble,” So said. “The count will be low.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.