Category: New York Times

As part of its full-court press on immigration, the Trump administration has increasingly sought to punish Democratic-led states that have tried to curtail their cooperation with federal immigration agencies.

Trump officials argue that the policies of “sanctuary jurisdictions” have enabled the release of sex offenders, killers, and other criminals — the “worst of the worst” — and President Donald Trump has gone so far as to call the actions of blue-state leaders a “lawless insurrection.” The administration has threatened federal funding cuts, lawsuits, and travel restrictions if state and local authorities don’t fall in line.

But the very states the Trump administration is pillorying — from California and Minnesota to New York and Massachusetts — already cooperate closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on tens of thousands of criminal cases a year, regularly turning over people charged with or convicted of serious and violent offenses for detention and deportation.

A New York Times review of policies, statutes, and practices in the 18 states targeted by Trump shows extensive cooperation and coordination with federal immigration agencies when it comes to people convicted of serious crimes. Data shows all but one of these states have sharply increased the number of people they have moved each month from local and state authorities’ custody into federal immigration custody during Trump’s second term, as compared with the last year of former President Joe Biden’s term.

In 12 of them, the number of custodial arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than doubled, according to a Times analysis of ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

The Trump administration has suggested that “sanctuary” states refuse to cooperate with ICE agents and deny them entry into jails. But by and large, these blue states have been assisting in federal efforts targeting violent offenders, while pushing back on the federal dragnets across the country that have ensnared immigrants without criminal records.

At the height of a federal crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accused ICE of targeting people of color with no criminal background while failing to pick up hardened criminals in state custody ready to be transferred to the agency.

The tensions have only been rising as federal immigration officials have received an infusion of dollars to carry out more operations and, in recent weeks, more than doubled their daily arrests, often with the help of local authorities in red states.

State officials from blue and red states agree that cooperation with federal authorities is critical to criminal investigations, and none would dispute that the release of dangerous people into communities is bad for public safety or politically unpalatable.

But governors and top law enforcement officials in Democratic-led states say they are trying to disentangle their role in criminal investigations from federal immigration enforcement. That delicate balance, they say, preserves their time and resources and engenders trust from immigrant communities.

So-called sanctuary laws enacted in Democratic-led states do limit cooperation with immigration authorities in many ways. Most largely bar state and local officers from assisting federal agents on civil immigration violations and put parameters around ICE’s access to jails and prisons as well as designated protected zones, such as schools, churches, and courthouses. A slate of state court rulings and policies have also prohibited local and state agencies from holding people for immigration officers beyond their release dates. And many prohibit authorities in most cases from alerting ICE that an inmate is about to be released, though release dates for all offenders are publicly available online.

Of all the states targeted, California, perhaps, has become the administration’s most prominent adversary. The state, which emerged as a battleground over “sanctuary” policies well before Trump first took office in 2017, barred state and local law enforcement agencies — including school police and security departments — from using public funds or personnel for civil immigration enforcement during his first term.

But the Trump administration’s criticism has focused heavily on the idea that serious criminals are being allowed to walk free — something California has specifically sought to avoid.

State lawmakers and law enforcement officials negotiated a list of exceptions to allow greater coordination when those wanted by ICE have criminal records or face serious criminal charges. Since 2019, the state’s corrections department has coordinated with the agency to transfer nearly 13,000 people convicted of murder, sexual assault, child molestation, or other grave felonies into federal custody.

“Not all sanctuary policies are created equal,” said John Sandweg, a senior Department of Homeland Security official under the Obama administration.

Many states or local jurisdictions with progressive politics “may not hand over someone convicted of driving without a license or some petty misdemeanor,” he added, “but would work collaboratively with ICE to ensure that individuals with violent criminal histories were not released in the streets.”

Democratic officials have argued that local limitations on ICE cooperation ensure that victims of crimes can approach police without worrying about being swept up in unrelated immigration actions.

“People need to feel comfortable talking to police,” said Ronnell Higgins, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, the state’s top law enforcement agency. “Wherever you go, the police need the public’s help in preventing crimes and in solving crimes as well.”

At the crux of this sanctuary debate has been a push for partnerships with ICE under a program known as 287(g). The initiative, a central pillar of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, trains sheriff’s deputies, police, and highway patrol officers to act as immigration agents in the course of their daily duties, and the program has become a force multiplier for enforcement.

Fifteen of the 18 states reviewed by the Times have passed laws that restrict their local and state law enforcement agencies from entering into contracts to help enforce civil immigration laws. The other three limit participation in the program under governor’s executive orders and state court rulings. But no states prohibit their officers from assisting federal agencies on criminal violations.

All allow the transfer of inmates into federal custody if authorities present a criminal warrant signed by a judge.

Trump’s fight with Democratic leaders over “sanctuary” policies dates to his first term. Since his return to the White House, his administration has only ramped up the stakes further. Last month, Republicans passed a sweeping immigration package signed by Trump. It includes $31 billion for ICE activities, such as supporting local and state authorities that have signed 287(g) partnerships with the agency, and earmarks another $350 million to expand enforcement operations in jurisdictions that refuse such partnerships.

During budget negotiations in late May, Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Homeland Security secretary, floated the idea of pulling customs officers from airports in major liberal hubs, which business groups warned would lead to chaos for travelers and harm the economy. In recent weeks, Tom Homan, his border czar, has repeatedly vowed to flood New York with agents.

Although neither of the plans has transpired, the administration’s strikes have turned Democratic-led cities and states into political foils in the rhetorical fight over immigration policy. That fight has played out in the public sphere and in the courts, where the Trump administration has had less success. Last month, federal judges dismissed, for now, federal government lawsuits challenging a Los Angeles ordinance and executive orders in several New Jersey cities that prohibit the use of city resources for federal immigration enforcement. (The decisions followed similar rulings last year in favor of Rochester, New York, and the state of Illinois.)

In June, the Department of Justice and New York State sued and countersued each other over expansive immigrant protections the state passed a month earlier. The new rules, among other provisions, banned partnership agreements with ICE, barred all local, state, and federal officers from wearing masks and ended ICE contracts to house inmates with federal civil immigration violations.

Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee days later, Mullin said “sanctuary governors and sanctuary mayors” were advising their local and state authorities to not cooperate with ICE. He argued that this hampered federal authorities’ immigration efforts, as well as investigations into human trafficking and retail theft.

“And so it really handcuffs us,” he said.

Asked whether exceptions or carve-outs for violent and serious offenders in state laws helped offset their restrictions on civil immigration enforcement, officials at DHS, the parent agency of ICE, suggested they had broader latitude under federal law to carry out immigration arrests than state statutes allow.

In a statement, Lauren Bis, a Homeland Security spokesperson, suggested that the agency’s partnerships with law enforcement justified the surges in arrests.

“When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities,” she said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the FBI would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.

If enacted, such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers. In the past two weeks, two fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas and Maine have thrust the government’s tactics back into the spotlight.

FBI managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their FBI counterparts.

The guidance shared with them said that the bureau would stop investigating claims of assaults against Department of Homeland Security agents, the people said. Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.

A joint statement by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, however, denied that any such change was underway.

“The relationship between DHS and DOJ in investigating assault on federal officer cases has not changed, and FBI will continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy,” the statement said. “This administration has been clear, anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Under the change, responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself, according to guidance circulated among FBI and ICE agents.

Cases involving an assault on a federal officer have been a source of tension inside federal law enforcement agencies for more than a year. White House and Justice Department officials have pushed prosecutors to bring charges in as many of them as possible, particularly as Americans protest the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Under the federal statute, felony charges can be brought against anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes” with a federal law enforcement officer.

Trump administration officials have claimed that language means anyone who makes physical contact with an agent should be charged with felony assault, which is punishable by up to eight years in prison.

“It’s abhorrent to ever, ever touch a law enforcement officer, which is why anytime anybody does that and it’s a federal officer, we’ll prosecute them,” the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said in an interview in May on CNN.

An investigation by the New York Times found that the Trump administration had filed charges against more than 550 people for assaulting federal officers. Of the more than 400 cases that had been resolved, nearly half had unraveled, with charges being thrown out or withdrawn, or the defendants being acquitted.

Under the Trump administration, when ICE agents have shot and killed people, the FBI has been assigned to scrutinize a narrow question: whether the agents were assaulted before the gunfire.

While the bureau in past administrations has investigated potential civil rights abuses and law enforcement misconduct, it has been limited from doing so in high-profile ICE shootings over the past year, according to law enforcement officials.

However, FBI investigations involving an assault on a federal officer could yield evidence that is valuable to other cases, including future civil rights investigations or prosecutions of an ICE agent. If that responsibility shifts to Homeland Security Investigations, it would leave a gap in holding immigration agents to account, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Homeland Security Investigations does not have jurisdiction to investigate civil rights violations, so putting the change into practice would make it far less likely that shootings of unarmed people by ICE agents would be investigated to determine if the agents broke federal law.

The enforcement crackdown in President Donald Trump’s second term has resulted in nearly two dozen people being fired on by federal immigration agents since January 2025. Six people, including three U.S. citizens, have been killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing into vehicles.

On July 7 in Houston, an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the country for more than three decades, during a traffic stop while he was driving to work with three passengers. He was not the target of the ICE operation, federal officials later acknowledged.

In Maine on July 13, an ICE agent shot and killed a Colombian man, who was also in his vehicle. He was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to a spokesperson for Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

THUNDER BAY, Ontario — Out-of-control wildfires in Ontario continued to force evacuations and affect major cities in Canada and the United States on Saturday as the province’s leader made his first visit near the devastated area.

Speaking from a parking lot in Thunder Bay on Saturday, Premier Doug Ford said that 191 wildfires — seven more than Friday — were burning northwest of the city and that 73 were raging out of control.

Ten communities have been evacuated, and 300 people have been rescued from campsites in 40 operations, Ford added. Roughly 1.7 million acres have burned in Ontario, data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center shows.

In a short address, Ford said it was critical that people in the area did not return to their campsites or homes, especially because water bombers did not drop fire suppression loads when they saw people in the bush from overhead. He said there were 155 fire crews at work and 80 water bombers and helicopters flying, with 40 additional aircraft ready to deploy.

Ford has faced harsh criticism by his political opponents for budgeting 150 million Canadian dollars ($107 million) for the current wildfire season after spending CA$271 million, last year.

“It’s not time to politicize these emergencies,” Ford said. “It’s absolutely disgusting in my opinion that they want to politicize and play games when people’s lives are on the line,” he added, vowing there would be “no limit to spending.”

Under Canada’s division of powers, most forest lands are owned and managed by provinces, which collect royalties for commercial tree cutting and, with some exceptions like national parks, are also responsible for firefighting.

On a late flight to Thunder Bay from Toronto on Friday night, the pilot was forced to make three approaches on landing because of unsafe conditions from the thick smoke, earning loud applause from the passengers when the twin turboprop touched down at Thunder Bay Airport. At least one plane could not land in the smoke and was forced to return to Toronto.

On the ground, smoke hung heavy over the road and diffused the light of street lamps, casting an eerie glow that was replaced at dawn Saturday by the piercing orange light from the sun breaking through the hazy sky.

Mount McKay, a landmark in Thunder Bay visible from most places in the city, was mostly lost in the smoke, only a faint outline visible.

While Thunder Bay remains safe from flames — the closest fires are burning roughly 90 miles to the northwest — heavy smoke has seriously affected air quality.

There was rain in the region Friday, and on Saturday temperatures remained fairly cool at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Local air quality alerts warned of a high health risk caused by toxic particles in the smoke that drifted on light wind and smelled like a campfire.

Provincial officials said they had delivered 3,000 N95 masks to an evacuation support center to be distributed to residents.

Thunder Bay is quickly becoming overcrowded with people fleeing their homes. Some evacuees have been sent to Toronto and other locations. Indigenous communities have been among the worst affected by the fires.

All week, smoke from the Ontario wildfires has darkened skies from Toronto to Detroit, New York, and beyond. Air quality for millions of people across the United States and Canada has plummeted to unhealthy, even hazardous levels.

New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., had the worst air quality in the world Saturday morning, and the plume of smoke floating far above Earth’s surface since Wednesday had not drifted clear.

On Friday, President Donald Trump threatened to charge Canada tariffs to pay for harms caused by the wildfire smoke, joining a handful of Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Canadian government over what they called poor forest management.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not immediately address the accusations Friday, but he suggested this past week that the United States should do more to combat climate change.

Ford on Saturday called the U.S. lawmakers’ comments “unacceptable” and said they should focus more on helping a neighboring country — Canada has often contributed firefighting resources to the United States — than assigning blame.

“I find it a shame the administration in the U.S. and congresspeople writing these letters and blaming us and so on and so forth,” he said. “They have a very short, short memory.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

For years, Shaoping Wu was part of an increasingly endangered group of human rights lawyers in China.

His work culminated in 2019, when he attended a meeting with other prominent lawyers and activists. Within days, the Chinese government began to detain the participants. Wu quickly fled to the United States, where in 2020 he applied for asylum.

On Wednesday, Wu was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Pennsylvania, where he had been living with his family and working as a contract delivery driver for Amazon.

Supporters and relatives now fear that Wu could be deported to China, where he would likely face persecution from the Chinese Communist Party. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the government has gone to great lengths to snuff out political expression, including by arresting human rights lawyers and activists. Two of the participants in the 2019 meeting are still serving lengthy prison sentences.

Wu’s wife, Caoliu Li, said that her husband had been subject to questioning and harassment by China’s security apparatus over the years but had remained dedicated to the cause of championing rights for ordinary Chinese.

“All along, he has been very focused on the things that are unfair in China and how to change them,” Li said in an interview Thursday from Lancaster, Pa., where the couple lives with their 17-year-old daughter.

John Visher, Wu’s lawyer, said that Wu had been delivering packages near Mount Holly Springs, Pa., when a police officer pulled him over as part of a traffic stop.

Visher said that Wu had entered the United States on a tourist visa in 2019 and that he had told the police officer about his pending asylum application and employment authorization document. Because Wu lacks legal status, police notified immigration officials, who detained him and brought him to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where he is now being held.

Wu is scheduled to appear in immigration court on July 27, Visher said.

The Department of Homeland Security said in an unsigned statement that Wu had overstayed his expired visa by six years and that he would receive due process. It noted that the department was offering $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport.

Wu’s case shows how even opponents of the United States’ biggest geopolitical rival are not guaranteed favorable treatment if their legal status is in question. And it is the latest test of how far the Trump administration is willing to go in its campaign to carry out mass deportations and curb the presence of asylum seekers.

This year, another Chinese dissident, Heng Guan, won his asylum case after he was detained by U.S. immigration officials who had tried to send him to Uganda. The department did not appeal the decision, and Guan was released.

Other cases involving Chinese nationals remain unresolved. Several Uyghurs, members of a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that has been systematically oppressed by the Chinese government, remain in ICE detention. They face deportation to third countries, according to Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based nonprofit.

The immigration actions have happened even as Trump has personally pushed for the release of two prisoners held by the Chinese government.

In May, during a summit with Xi in Beijing, Trump raised the case of Jin Mingri, a pastor who was detained in October as part of a major crackdown on Christians in China. This month, Jin was released and allowed to leave for the United States. The other prisoner, Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon, remains in Chinese custody.

In 2015, Wu was working as a commercial attorney in Shanghai when China, under the tightening grip of Xi, initiated its largest crackdown on human rights lawyers in decades. Many lawyers and activists who were arrested faced lengthy sentences. Some who remained went underground or stepped away from the work.

It was against that background that Wu joined the movement of rights defenders.

He began to take on more politically sensitive cases. His clients included Zhang Kun, an anti-corruption activist; Zhu Chengzhi, a human rights defender; and practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China.

“He defended some defendants that most lawyers would avoid,” said Fengsuo Zhou, executive director of Human Rights in China, a group based in New York.

At the 2019 meeting, which Wu attended with prominent human rights defenders like Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, participants discussed China’s besieged human rights movement and democratic change.

Even after he came to the United States, Wu continued his work for human rights and civil society in China. This month, Zhou noted, Wu had spoken at an online gathering commemorating the government’s sweeping 2015 crackdown on lawyers.

“To the outside world, human rights lawyers might seem like a group of idealistic and tragic heroes,” Wu told the audience. “However, for us, this is not a romantic or performative act, but rather our unavoidable mission and responsibility.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Not every television network carried President Donald Trump’s primetime speech from the White House, and it did not escape the president’s notice.

In a meta moment on Thursday night, Trump used his address to call out ABC and NBC for not airing his live remarks, claiming the networks declined to do so “because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it.” He also repeated his frequent demand that the networks’ government-issued broadcast licenses be revoked.

“They and others in the media are part of a plot,” the president said, offering no evidence for his claims.

In fact, ABC and NBC did carry Trump’s speech live on their streaming platforms. After the president concluded, both networks broke into regularly scheduled entertainment programming to air special reports that analyzed his outlandish claims about the safety of American voting systems.

Federal regulators are currently reviewing the station licenses owned by ABC, a move that the network has denounced as an “unconstitutional retaliation” for its programming.

Presidents must request airtime from television channels when they wish to speak in primetime, and in the past, network executives have been loath to accommodate speeches that they view as distinctly political in nature, especially during election years. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both had some requests denied.

On Thursday, TV networks took varying approaches to covering Trump’s remarks. Fox News and the Fox broadcast network ran the speech in its entirety; MS NOW and CBS aired some portions live, but then cut away for analysis and fact-checking from their correspondents. CNN aired clips and reporter commentary instead of the full remarks.

Fox News, which paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit stemming from false claims about election interference that appeared on its airwaves in 2020, took a careful approach on Thursday.

After Trump concluded his remarks, Bret Baier, the channel’s chief political anchor, summarized the president’s claims about the security of electronic voting machines. But he added, in a formal tone, that Fox News “has not seen that evidence directly yet, and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements at this time.” (Aishah Hasnie, a White House correspondent for Fox News, later repeated that caveat almost verbatim.)

Even Sean Hannity, a Trump ally, was careful not to endorse the allegations, despite saying the president’s claims were “pretty remarkable.”

“I’m sure anybody that cares about truth will want to do a deep dive into all of this,” Hannity told viewers.

Network executives had been reluctant in the run-up to Trump’s speech to say whether they would air it live. The president had been expected to delve into partisan or incendiary comments about voter fraud, creating a conundrum for producers who would need to decide whether to fact-check the president’s remarks in real time, or wait until he was finished to provide context.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

China on Friday rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that it had meddled in U.S. elections as baseless. But its response was relatively restrained, a sign that Beijing did not want to let the accusation derail a thaw in relations that both sides have spent months trying to preserve.

Trump had said in a speech that China had carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history” starting with the 2020 cycle, one of several claims he made that was either overstated or untethered from reality.

In Beijing, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, said China had “no interest in interfering in the U.S. elections and has never done so,” adding that the claims “are aimed at vilifying China.” It leveled a vague accusation back at Washington for “wantonly” interfering in other countries.

The response was firm but made no demands for retractions or threats of punishment. On China’s social media, commentators who are usually stridently nationalist were mostly quiet.

China experts said this showed that Beijing saw Trump’s speech as an attempt at playing to American voters before midterm elections, rather than a broadside directed at China.

It also underscored a desire on Beijing’s part to maintain a truce that was struck in May during a summit between Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.

Trump’s rhetoric on China during his address was “definitely harsh,” said Sun Yun, a scholar of China at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington. But Trump had built up so much goodwill in China in recent months, she added, “there is some resilience in the relationship.”

Playing the China card

From Beijing’s perspective, Trump was taking aim at China for domestic political reasons, experts said. Officials in China understand that the Republicans are under pressure as midterm elections approach.

Chinese state media commentaries have argued that Trump has lost some of the support of his political base following his military intervention in Venezuela and the war in Iran. They have noted that he has failed to keep factory jobs at home, while consumers “bear higher fuel costs and inflation.”

Viewed through this lens, Trump’s speech was an attempt at mobilizing voters by fanning the idea of foreign intervention, said Wu Xinbo, an American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai.

“Trump played this card mainly for domestic politics; it was not aimed at China-U.S. relations,” Wu said, adding that this was something Chinese officials would likely not respond to if it was a one-off.

Documents released by the White House that Trump said bolstered his claims suggest there is evidence of a pro-China influence effort and that Beijing was skeptical of Trump. But that was a minority perspective inside the intelligence agencies, and the intelligence officers who held that view said they had only low or medium confidence in their assessments.

China wants to preserve the stability

The U.S.-China relationship steadied in October after Beijing agreed to suspend its limits on exports of rare earth metals, and Washington halved tariffs on China related to fentanyl. “We’re not going to hurt China,” Trump said at the time.

After Trump met with Xi in Beijing, China said both sides had agreed that U.S. tariffs would not rise further. They agreed on a relationship based on “constructive strategic stability,” a vague term meant to signal that both sides would limit hostilities.

During his trip, Trump invited Xi to the White House on Sept. 24, a meeting that officials are now working toward. Beijing expects the upcoming visit to help improve trade ties.

Any disruption to the fragile detente will hinge on whether Trump decides to take additional action on his claims of election meddling.

If Trump were to take fresh actions against China, like putting new tariffs on Chinese goods, Wu said, “China would certainly retaliate.”

Chinese economy needs the U.S.

China may also be tempering its response because it wants to make nice with the United States on trade disputes as its own economy stumbles and as its companies face pushback from foreign governments.

This week, China reported that its economy grew at the slowest pace in three years. It is also facing increased scrutiny in other parts of the world as its exports surge, raising alarm among politicians in Europe and Southeast Asia. Chinese shipments overseas climbed 27% over the month of June, and its trade surplus with the world climbed to more than $125 billion, its second largest on record.

At home, Chinese families are feeling poorer, consuming less, and seeing fewer job prospects. That means that China needs markets overseas to keep its factories churning, grow its economy, and create new jobs, said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

“Having more access to the U.S. market could also take some of the pressure off China’s economic relationships with a bunch of other countries from Europe to Africa and Asia,” he said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.