Category: New York Times

The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Donald Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.

In the view of critics and even some ATF veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.

Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joe Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating ATF’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.

Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.

“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”

Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.

Since his first run for office, Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

By May 2025, the ATF had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks, or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.

It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the FBI were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.

In realigning the Justice Department’s priorities to bolster Trump’s agenda, the agency said in December that it would balance defending the right to own a gun with ensuring the public’s safety.

But when the ATF announced in April nearly three dozen changes, the administration’s own analyses acknowledged the pitfalls to public safety.

The ATF’s director, Rob Cekada, defended the agency’s approach. In a statement, he said that it reflected an effort to be as explicit as possible about “the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios.”

“This was an honest attempt to fully and transparently inform the public and is exactly the kind of analysis the comment period exists to test,” he said.

In unveiling more changes on Friday, including eliminating fingerprinting requirements for certain firearms applications, Cekada again asserted that the agency was committed to public safety, pointing to a news release that heralded how its shift in priorities had led to the seizure of nearly 50,000 firearms and the handling of nearly 950,000 gun trace requests. Still, the data is far from a complete picture because it does not reflect all the policies the Trump administration has rolled back and because many of its proposals have yet to go into effect.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in announcing the proposals in April, said that the moves struck a careful balance between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners, as well as public safety. “For too long, regulations were written without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms, or what truly improves public safety,” he said.

One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, “up to and including potential mass casualty events,” according to a cost analysis by the agency. For instance, people involuntarily committed to a mental health institution would still be barred from owning a gun, whereas those who voluntarily enter those facilities would not. The rule also seeks to extend the Veterans Affairs Department’s policy to ensure that all Americans unable to manage their financial affairs, not just veterans, are not automatically prohibited from buying a gun.

In the analysis of another proposal, seeking to undo a Biden-era rule intensifying scrutiny of the use of stabilizing braces, the agency acknowledged that the gun accessory to create “dangerous, easily concealed weapons would pose an increased public safety problem.”

The agency is also proposing a higher bar to revoke a federal gun dealer’s license, instead requiring evidence that the dealer knew that it was violating the law. The agency said in its analysis that it expected the number of federal firearms licenses it revoked to drop “considerably” both under the new rule and “shifting enforcement priorities.”

Another rule would end the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales as a way to crack down on straw purchasers, or people who illegally buy guns on behalf of another.

Critics warned of the potential consequences. The rapid changes under the Trump administration flew in the face of its vow to be tough on crime, they said, crediting the Biden-era measures for helping to bring down the murder rate after coronavirus pandemic highs, though experts have suggested that a number of factors could have contributed to the drop.

“These guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years,” said Marianna Mitchem, a former ATF official who now advises Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

She added, “I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.”

Even as the proposals have yet to take effect, some supporters of gun rights are pushing for the regulations to be loosened even further.

Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said it was not enough to simply revert to regulatory standards on the books before the Biden administration.

His group, for instance, opposes the Justice Department’s approach to a 2022 rule directing federal licensed gun dealers to hold on to records indefinitely, reducing the amount of time that gun dealers have to keep records of sales. It has argued that the administration should eliminate the requirement altogether.

“The ATF proposals are a mixed bag,” he said, adding, “Gun owners would expect better from our Republican Justice Department.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Mia Taylor looked down at her Los Angeles County election ballot a few weeks ago and felt a familiar mix of duty and dread. How could she possibly know the best choices in the dozens of local contests she was asked to vote in? Partly on a lark, she turned to a newly ubiquitous tool: Claude.

Taylor snapped a picture of her ballot and asked: “So, who do I vote for here?”

Claude, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Anthropic to analyze data and hold natural conversations, initially declined to answer. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, other widely used tools, Claude is trained to avoid answering political questions that could expose biases.

So Taylor, a self-described liberal Democrat, sharpened her question, asking it to find links to well-regarded progressive groups and help her come up with strategic voting options.

“Here are some sources you can look at,” it replied, linking to voter guides and describing each race in detail. Taylor was especially torn about her vote for mayor, wondering how she could help stop Spencer Pratt, the Republican who momentarily looked likely to win one of the top two spots in the open primary. Claude’s advice: Vote for the incumbent, Karen Bass, not Nithya Raman, a member of the City Council. (Pratt later lost the race, while Bass and Raman advanced to the general election.)

It was probably only a matter of time before voters began to use artificial intelligence to help guide their choices. The 2026 midterms may be the first U.S. elections in which voters are using AI in meaningful numbers.

Voters are turning to new AI tools to serve as nonpartisan researchers, viewing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides, or social media. They provide an appealing and seemingly efficient way to learn about campaigns and ballot measures, allowing users to bypass the sometimes dizzying array of political literature, advertising, and commentary coming their way. But some experts warn that the tools are far from foolproof: The results they produce can be marred by factual errors or shaped by flawed assumptions.

Chris Johnson, a 58-year-old resident of Atlanta, appreciates the allure of relying on AI to choose candidates and the worry about its accuracy.

Johnson, a registered Republican who considers himself a libertarian, has voted in every Georgia election for the past 40 years. When he prepared to vote in the state primary in May, he asked ChatGPT to tell him which of the candidates was the most libertarian. Initially, the system resisted answering directly, so Johnson asked it to rely on the candidates’ voting history. The chatbot suggested Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who was running for governor in the Republican primary but ultimately lost the race.

Johnson felt chagrined by how easy it was. He recalled that for years he read the print edition of the local newspaper to come up with his own sense of which candidates most closely matched his values.

“I felt a bit lazy for not doing more,” he said. “It felt easier, but I am not sure that everything was correct.”

The appeal of artificial intelligence tools, also referred to as large language models, lies in their simplicity: Users often find the information they produce more straightforward and understandable than data from a more traditional internet search. And many welcome the interaction. Researchers and AI companies are already envisioning a time when political campaigns create their own chatbots, enabling voters to question them directly.

“There is a reason these models are persuasive: They come up with facts or factual claims and are just good clear explainers,” said David G. Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University who has done extensive research on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in political persuasion.

Earlier this year, before voting in a local school board election, Rand turned to artificial intelligence for help. He uploaded an hourlong video of a campaign forum and then asked which of the candidates most closely matched his values. He used this research to make his choices. And when he ran his picks by friends who were more involved in local politics, they endorsed his reasoning.

Still, Rand noted, the output is only as good as the input: AI tends to reaffirm and mirror users’ biases, framing candidates’ views through the voters’ lens, rather than objective facts.

Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, has said users asking about political topics “should get comprehensive, accurate and balanced responses — responses that help them reach their own conclusions rather than steer them toward a particular viewpoint.” In a lengthy statement this year, the company said Claude is trained to “treat different political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and analytical rigor.”

Jeremiah Hain, a 42-year-old psychotherapist in Los Angeles who has used ChatGPT routinely for other small tasks, recently employed it to help him choose candidates in races for mayor and various other offices.

“I don’t have the time, nor did I want to do the same kind of research I have done in the past,” he said. “This was very intuitive, and I actually respect its intelligence, I guess.”

He was so enamored of the process that he posted a video on TikTok encouraging other voters to do the same. (And because he knows his videos get more engagement when he is shirtless, Hain filmed himself bare-chested. “I wanted to do this as a thirst trap on purpose,” he said.)

But that sense of efficiency may mask the risks of turning over the democratic process to technology, some experts warn. Because most chatbots produce answers that sound confident and authoritative, users may not make the time to check the underlying claims.

Ideally, AI tools for election help would rely on a curated and verified database of political information and policy platforms to help voters, rather than pulling data from across the internet, as the existing tools do, said Yamil Velez, a political science professor at Columbia University who has researched the effectiveness of AI in convincing voters. But he was reluctant to completely dismiss the usefulness of AI in election decisions. “It is important to think about what is the alternative,” he said. After all, he added, most voters are unlikely to spend hours in the county clerk’s office researching their election options.

A year ago, Velez added, he would have said that voters would be better off relying on an internet search, but the AI tools are becoming increasingly accurate.

Nonetheless, he cautioned, the current tools likely benefit candidates who are more vocal in the local press and on social media, making their views easier to find. Campaign strategists are keenly aware that voters are using these tools and have begun looking for ways to get more favorable results by publishing more material online in formats that chatbots prefer, such as using bullet points.

Still, in interviews, people who had used AI to research election choices said it allowed them to vote with more confidence.

Robert Siebelink, a 54-year-old Democrat who lives in Corona, Calif., turned to Claude after feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of researching the 61 candidates running for governor in his state, not to mention the candidates in less high-profile races. He uploaded his ballot and asked Claude to suggest candidates who most aligned with his values.

Eventually, he had narrowed down his choice for governor to two Democrats, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, and asked Claude how to strategize.

In less than half an hour, he had filled out his ballot and chosen Becerra.

“I just felt so refreshed,” Siebelink said. “That’s the most informed voting that I have ever done.”

“It felt like some political expert that knew all of the research and we just sat down over coffee and chatted, and they took notes,” he said.

Similarly, Rikki Powers, a 31-year-old Democrat who lives in Baltimore, took a photograph of his ballot before the recent Maryland primary and asked Claude to provide bullet points for each candidate. He said he was looking for a broader perspective than what he could get from candidate campaign websites. After checking some of the links for accuracy and to “make sure that I truly like the candidates I am voting for,” he used the summary to fill out his ballot on the spot.

“The last time I voted, I spent probably 20 hours researching,” he said. “This time was an hour.”

Still, Powers said, there are limits: While he had no hesitation uploading a blank ballot, he would never tell AI how he voted.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Shirley Jennett, a retired nurse, loves her spacious ranch-style house in Denver, with its big backyard and gazebo.

“I want to stay here,” she vowed. “And die here.”

She might pull that off. In relatively good health, Jennett still drives to lunch with friends, does her own housekeeping and grocery shopping, and plows through a book a day, usually a mystery. But her children worry about her living alone at 89, especially since she has had a couple of falls.

Enter her new housemate, Susan Beese. Despite working four days a week in retail, Beese could no longer afford her nearby one-bedroom apartment as the rent topped $1,500 a month. She moved out, first staying with friends and then in what she delicately called “a senior women’s facility.”

Now Beese, who is 79, pays Jennett $800 monthly for a bright two-bedroom space, with a bath and a kitchen, on the lower level of her house. As part of the agreement the housemates worked out, she helps plant and water Jennett’s garden, takes out the trash, and cooks occasional meals.

“It’s been a lifesaver,” Beese said. Jennett even welcomed her dog.

Meet the real-life Golden Girls. In the much-loved 1980s sitcom, still in perpetual reruns, the four wisecracking women who share a house in Miami met through an ad on a supermarket bulletin board.

In Denver, the housing matchmaker was Sunshine Home Share Colorado, a local nonprofit that Alison Joucovsky, a senior services administrator, founded in 2016 when the problem became urgent. “My phone was ringing off the hook,” she said, recalling anxious pleas from older residents spending most of their Social Security checks on rising rent or facing yearslong waiting lists for subsidized senior housing.

Home sharing “is a really efficient way to create affordable housing and to support older people who want to age in place,” Joucovsky said. Carefully vetting both “home providers,” who may be rattling around in family houses now too big and too empty, and “home sharers” seeking reasonable rents, Sunshine facilitated 31 shares last year, a record for the nonprofit.

“The cost of developing and building new housing is astronomical, and so is the length of time it takes,” said Laura Fanucchi, president of the National Shared Housing Resource Center and an administrator with HIP Housing, a home-share organization in San Mateo County, Calif. “Why not make use of existing housing stock?”

About 55 organizations around the country offer these services — and demand is growing, driven by housing shortages, rising rents, and sales prices that affect both the old and the young. Legislators in several states are working to promote home sharing as an option. (Personal care is not part of these arrangements.)

The need is acute. About one-third of households headed by someone 65 or older were “cost-burdened” in 2024, according to an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That means they spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

Although nearly 80% of those people were homeowners, the center found, an increasing proportion are still paying off mortgages or home equity loans, and most contend with higher taxes, utility and maintenance costs, and insurance premiums.

“A lot of the people calling me to complain about property taxes and inflation are senior citizens on fixed incomes whose children have left, and maybe their spouse has died,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Abby Major, a Republican, who has co-sponsored a bill that would facilitate home sharing. “They’re a single older adult living in a four-bedroom house.”

Yet most don’t want to relocate. Even if they do, many older adults will find that downsizing has also become prohibitively expensive, as home prices rise and very low interest rates become a memory.

Younger people are similarly cost burdened, including 37% of those aged 25 to 34, and 31% of those 35 to 44, the Joint Center has reported. Home sharing can benefit both older homeowners who need income and people of any age in search of lower-cost housing.

To help increase their reach, some home-share programs now supplement or replace the traditionally labor-intensive matching process with online platforms. (For-profit companies like Nesterly or Roommates.com also facilitate shared housing.)

“It’s like online dating, except that people who have rooms can meet people who need rooms,” said Candice Smith, executive director of HomeShare Oregon. “And it’s a lot more secure.” HomeShare’s online platform has drawn close to 7,000 providers and seekers over five years.

Further support has come from the city of Portland, which this year announced a pilot program to pay $1,000 to homeowners who make a spare room available (or $1,500 for two rooms) through qualified home-share programs.

In addition, legislators in several states have introduced or passed bills that prohibit municipalities from unduly restricting homeowners who want to rent spare rooms to nonfamily members. Sponsors in Pennsylvania and Connecticut actually call them Golden Girls bills, and they’ve drawn bipartisan support.

“So many young people have basically given up on buying a home,” said Colorado state Rep. Manny Rutinel, a Democrat. He helped pass a 2024 law prohibiting cities and counties from limiting the number of unrelated people who could live together in a single dwelling.

In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Tarik Khan steered a similar bill through the House in June; it awaits a Senate vote. “It doesn’t make sense that your cousin can move in but someone unrelated to you can’t,” said Khan, a Democrat.

The Pennsylvania bill caps the number of nonfamily occupants in a home at five; Connecticut’s limit would be three. That bill passed the Senate in April, and then died without a vote in the House. But the bill sponsors plan to reintroduce it next session.

Home sharing can’t solve the housing crisis, its fans acknowledge. But it could make a dent, potentially unlocking thousands of spare bedrooms across the country without requiring new construction that would change the character of neighborhoods.

Admittedly, matching homeowners with those who want to rent a room becomes a delicate process. Home-share staff members typically interview the individual parties, run background checks, verify incomes, coordinate initial phone calls and meetings, and mediate if problems later arise.

They also help applicants sift through the myriad lifestyle preferences that can torpedo a match. “Living together isn’t easy,” Fanucchi said. Will the home provider accept smokers, pets, visitors? Does the sharer work from home? Or need to park a car? Who sets the thermostat?

Sometimes the agreement includes a “service exchange,” in which the newcomer does a few hours of chores such as snow shoveling, shopping, or some meal preparation in return for reduced rent.

Jenlyn and Larry Boyer, for instance, have lived in their ranch house in suburban Broomfield, Colo., for 31 years and never want to leave. But Jenlyn Boyer, who is 80, has “gotten unsteady” and uses a walker. Her husband, 70, suffers chronic fibromyalgia pain and needs a wheelchair.

Because they now pay for tasks that they used to undertake themselves, and because inflation has undermined their finances, “I had an epiphany,” Jenlyn Boyer said. “We need more help and we need more money.”

Six months ago, through Sunshine Home Share, they met a 46-year-old graduate student whose monthly rent had doubled to an unmanageable $2,000.

The student moved into their furnished downstairs bedroom/family room with a bathroom, a small refrigerator and a microwave. In exchange for about 10 hours of dishwashing a month, she pays a reduced rent of $600.

The additional income has helped the Boyers cover expenses like van repairs and wheelchair batteries. But they also enjoy chatting with their new housemate.

“She turns out to be just a gem,” Boyer said. “We laugh together a lot.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the five days ending Thursday, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates.

Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport, according to documents obtained by the New York Times and interviews with federal officials. ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins, with immigration authorities, during traffic stops, and on the street. The push has apparently yielded results, with recent arrest numbers roughly doubling from the 1,000 picked up each day earlier this year.

ICE officials were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests, according to three officials with knowledge of the conversations. One of the officials said that it was unclear how long the pace could continue, but that ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.

The surge has occurred without the fanfare of highly visible operations last year, in which officials announced their intentions ahead of time to target cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, and send officers pouring into the streets. Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, pledged to mount a quieter enforcement campaign following the chaos of a monthlong operation in Minnesota, where federal officers killed two U.S. citizens.

The rise in arrests suggests that President Donald Trump is determined to meet his pledge of mass deportations, a goal that is popular among his conservative supporters but that has fueled a political backlash amid the administration’s heavy-handed tactics. The Trump administration has promised more aggressive actions, particularly after the Supreme Court in recent days expanded the president’s power to set federal immigration policy, but undercut his effort to eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants in the country illegally and visitors.

“Our message is clear: If you come to our country illegally, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you,” Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in a statement.

Word of an uptick in arrests has started to trickle out, sowing fear in immigrant communities and among advocates already on edge after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could end deportation protections for people from disaster- and war-torn countries under the Temporary Protected Status program.

In recent days, ICE officers have launched an intense push to ramp up arrests. Arrests topped out Saturday when authorities detained more than 2,400 people, according to documents obtained by the Times. The detention population inside ICE facilities has jumped nearly 4,000, to more than 63,000 in the agency’s custody as of Tuesday, according to internal documents.

In emails to ICE personnel, agency leaders applauded the latest numbers.

“I want to personally thank each of you for your extraordinary efforts this past weekend,” Marcos Charles, the head of ICE’s deportation wing, wrote this week. “Through your dedication, professionalism, and unwavering commitment to our mission, enforcement and removal operations achieved remarkable operational results.”

Top ICE officials were told to make sure that as many officers as possible were working seven days a week, and to put 80% of their officers on arrest operations, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Top supervisors were expected to be working closely on the operations as well.

Last year, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, set a goal of 3,000 arrests a day for the agency, a figure it was not able to hit. Since then, the agency has hired thousands of new officers and has had its budget increased by billions of dollars for the enforcement surge.

Across the country, immigration lawyers and advocates have reported an uptick in enforcement.

In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Ugboaja is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Pimentel called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release.

On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Pimentel was there to greet her.

Pimentel said that Ugboaja was distraught upon her release.

“It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.

In southern Florida, attorneys have been on alert. Cindy Blandon, an immigration attorney in Miami, said that one of her clients, a Nicaraguan father of two children, had an immigration court hearing set for 2027, but was arrested by ICE on Monday during a routine check-in.

And in Utah, Ysabel Lonazco, an immigration attorney, has noticed an uptick as well. She has spoken to several clients, including a man who was driving when he was picked up by the agency for overstaying his visa this weekend.

“It sets further fear in the community,” she said. “People don’t want to leave their houses. They are afraid to drive to do their grocery shopping. They are just terrified with these detentions.”

One of her clients, Arturo, a 48-year-old Mexican man, was arrested in Salt Lake City on his way to a soccer game Sunday, according to his wife, Veronica. She said the arrest had shattered their family.

“They’re getting people — be very careful,” her husband told her from ICE detention, she recalled through an interpreter. She said her 13-year-old son was traumatized by the arrest of his father, who had worked most days of the week building furniture before his arrest, she added.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that Arturo had illegally reentered the United States and would be held in ICE custody as the agency sought to deport him.

Veronica said the family had not expected to be caught up in Trump’s deportation sweep.

“We were worried, but it wasn’t like we were extremely worried. We figured — we don’t have any criminal record, we pay taxes every year,” she said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

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.