The city is seeking providers to operate an additional 190 units of Justice-Involved Supportive Housing—affordable units paired with support services for people with mental health needs who tend to cycle between jail and homeless shelters.

The proposed site for the “Just Home” project at 1900 Seminole Ave. on the Jacobi Medical Center campus.

New York City is seeking providers to operate an additional 190 units of Justice-Involved Supportive Housing—affordable apartments paired with support services for people with mental or behavioral health needs who tend to cycle between jail, hospitals and homeless shelters.

Homeless and criminal justice advocates have been calling for the city to expand the niche program, known as JISH, as a means to reduce both the number of people behind bars and in its shelter system. Stable housing and access to mental health care is key to helping people avoid returns to jail, officials say: almost 90 percent of current JISH participants—living in 120 units across the city—had no further arrests since joining the initiative, which launched in 2015.

“Nearly 30 percent of our patients report being homeless prior to entering jail or likely to be unhoused on release,” Dr. Patsy Yang, senior vice president for Correctional Health Services, which provides health care in the city’s jails, said in a statement announcing the planned JISH expansion. “Each one deserves the chance to return safely and successfully to the community.”

City Hall released a request for proposals (RFP) earlier this month seeking operators to open the additional 190 JISH apartments, thanks to a $4.8 million funding boost included in the last budget deal. Earlier city efforts to grow the program had previously failed to take off: providers largely declined to bid on a 2019 RFP, telling City Limits the funding rates were too low to adequately provide the housing and services required.

But advocates cheered the city’s latest request, saying it’s “in line with service funding provided in comparable programs across New York City,” said Gary Jenkins, interim CEO of Urban Pathways, which runs 30 of the existing JISH apartments.

“We are thrilled to see Mayor Mamdani taking such a significant step so quickly toward closing the revolving door between jail and homelessness,” said Darren Mack, director of Freedom Agenda at the Urban Justice Center, in a statement to City Limits.

“It means so much, not just for the tenants, but for what the providers are able to do,” said Rob DeLeon, interim president and CEO at The Fortune Society, which currently operates JISH housing for roughly 60 people, where residents have access to medical and behavioral health care, medication management, job training, art programs and other resources.

The latest round of funding includes the option of a congregate model—where tenants in the program are housed within the same building run by a nonprofit, rather than “scattered-site” units rented in privately-run properties—which advocates say can offer participants a deeper sense of community and easier access to programs.

“When you’re in a congregate setting, it’s as simple as having folks come downstairs,” DeLeon said. “Or if you’re meeting with them right in their units and checking in on how they’re doing and all of those things, you don’t have very far to go to meet with a number of people that you’re serving.”

The planned 190 new apartments will bring the total number of JISH units to 390, officials said. That count includes 83 affordable rentals planned for an underused building on the Jacobi Hospital Campus in the Bronx, which will primarily house people with complex medical needs after they leave city jails.

The project, dubbed “Just Home” had spurred furious opposition from some locals, prompting former Mayor Eric Adams to pull his support for it last fall after years of planning. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced last month that his administration would restart the plan.

“By housing New Yorkers who are too often left on the streets or shuttled through emergency rooms, Just Home meets our housing crisis with dignity,” Mamdani said in a statement at the time.

Just Home is now expected to break ground by the end of this year or early next year, said DeLeon of Fortune, which will build and operate the facility.

Still, even with the expected expansion, the JISH network will fall short of what the city pledged in 2019 as part of its agreement to close the notorious jail complex on Rikers Island and replace it with smaller borough-based jails. That deal initially called for 500 JISH units, a nod to the important role access to housing plays in lowering the number of people behind bars.

But advocates say they’re hopeful new Mayor Mamdani will eventually reach that goal. “His messaging is really about meeting the moment, helping all New Yorkers to live lives of dignity,” said DeLeon.

“We are locked in, in this journey, this mission, to get individuals housed,” he added. “To help them to be whole and not to continue to be judged for their worst mistakes for the rest of their lives.”

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post NYC Looks to Expand Supportive Housing for New Yorkers Coming Out of Jail appeared first on City Limits.

By DAVID KLEPPER, MATT O’BRIEN and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to meet Tuesday with the CEO of Anthropic, with the artificial intelligence company the only one of its peers to not supply its technology to a new U.S. military internal network.

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Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, declined to comment on the meeting but CEO Dario Amodei has made clear his ethical concerns about unchecked government use of AI, including the dangers of fully autonomous armed drones and of AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent.

The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It underscores the debate over AI’s role in national security and concerns about how the technology could be used in high-stakes situations involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance. It also comes as Hegseth has vowed to root out what he calls a “woke culture” in the armed forces.

“A powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow,” Amodei wrote in an essay last month.

Anthropic is the only AI company approved for classified military networks

The Pentagon announced last summer that it was awarding defense contracts to four AI companies — Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Each contract is worth up to $200 million.

Anthropic was the first AI company to get approved for classified military networks, where it works with partners like Palantir. The other three companies, for now, are only operating in unclassified environments.

By early this year, Hegseth was highlighting only two of them: xAI and Google.

The defense secretary said in a January speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas that he was shrugging off any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars.”

Hegseth said his vision for military AI systems means that they operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications,” before adding that the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke.”

In January, Hegseth said Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok would join the Pentagon network, called GenAI.mil. The announcement came days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent.

OpenAI announced in early February that it, too, would join the military’s secure AI platform, enabling service members to use a custom version of ChatGPT for unclassified tasks.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaves an oath of enlistment ceremony, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, held on the base of the Washington Monument in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Anthropic calls itself more safety-minded

Anthropic has long pitched itself as the more responsible and safety-minded of the leading AI companies, ever since its founders quit OpenAI to form the startup in 2021.

The uncertainty with the Pentagon is putting those intentions to the test, according to Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis and fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“Anthropic’s peers, including Meta, Google and xAI, have been willing to comply with the department’s policy on using models for all lawful applications,” Owens said. “So the company’s bargaining power here is limited, and it risks losing influence in the department’s push to adopt AI.”

In the AI craze that followed the release of ChatGPT, Anthropic closely aligned with President Joe Biden’s administration in volunteering to subject its AI systems to third-party scrutiny to guard against national security risks.

Amodei, the CEO, has warned of AI’s potentially catastrophic dangers while rejecting the label that he’s an AI “doomer.” He argued in the January essay that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023″ but that those risks should be managed in a “realistic, pragmatic manner.”

Anthropic has been at odds with the Trump administration

This would not be the first time Anthropic’s advocacy for stricter AI safeguards has put it at odds with the Trump administration. Anthropic needled chipmaker Nvidia publicly, criticizing Trump’s proposals to loosen export controls to enable some AI computer chips to be sold in China. The AI company, however, remains a close partner with Nvidia.

The Trump administration and Anthropic also have been on opposite sides of a lobbying push to regulate AI in U.S. states.

Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, accused Anthropic in October of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

Sacks made the remarks on X in response to an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, writing about his attempt to balance technological optimism with “appropriate fear” about the steady march toward more capable AI systems.

Anthropic hired a number of ex-Biden officials soon after Trump’s return to the White House, but it’s also tried to signal a bipartisan approach. The company recently added Chris Liddell, a former White House official from Trump’s first term, to its board of directors.

The Pentagon-Anthropic debate is reminiscent of an uproar several years ago when some tech workers objected to their companies’ participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon drone surveillance program. While some workers quit over the project and Google itself dropped out, the Pentagon’s reliance on drone surveillance has only increased.

Similarly, “the use of AI in military contexts is already a reality and it is not going away,” Owens said.

“Some contexts are lower stakes, including for back-office work, but battlefield deployments of AI entail different, higher-stakes risks,” he said, referring to the use of lethal force or weapons like nuclear arms. “Military users are aware of these risks and have been thinking about mitigation for almost a decade.”

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

By Trisha Walrath Cole

From the first time I heard that three friends had taken on the Herculean task of renovating the 1950s roadside Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, an hour east of San Diego, I’d been trying to find a reason to go. So when a road-tripping pal moved close to me, I immediately knew where our first Thelma-and-Louise-esque adventure would take us.

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Jacumba today feels like what Marfa, Texas, must have been like before Donald Judd arrived: a quiet, slightly rough-edged desert outpost on the brink of something special. The 20-room hotel and mineral-spring pools lie hidden behind sand-colored walls. You check in at a retro trailer out front, then enter through a massive 500-year-old Moroccan wooden door that is your portal to a bohemian desert version of Wonderland.

Alice could easily whisper “Drink Me” if you go left into the bar with its snake-shaped doorknob, or “Eat Me” if you go right into the sunlit restaurant, Long Shadow. Both are open to the public daily. We chose the latter, settling beneath a wall lined with oil paintings of desert scenes in muted, serene tones.

As we ventured deeper into the hotel, the calming effect of the monochromatic color palette set in.

“I’m obsessed with environmental psychology and how people move through a space,” founding partner Melissa Sturkel told me. “We made an intentional decision to stay in this lane,” said her partner and chief of design, Corbin Winters, about their commitment to the use of desert beiges and soft earth tones found in every room, wall, textile, and vantage point.

Guests see stars on a clear night at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Photo by Joey Taylor/Courtesy Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel)

A walk to the end of the first long block of ranch-style rooms surrounding the pools brought us to our room. Stone flooring flows from the walkway into each space, enhancing the sense of continuity. The Siren Suite featured a deep, cushy couch, a cloudlike bed, stuccoed nooks in the open closet, and curated touches like Moroccan pendant lighting and oversized Mongolian sheepskin ottomans.

Sliding into either of the outdoor mineral pools, you can almost feel the energy of the vortex beneath the hotel, working its steady, ancient magic. Guests also have access to the Echo Room, a 24-hour enclosed circular soaking tub. If I lived closer, I’d invest in one of the hotel’s flexible pool passes. A massage in one of the secluded Sahara tents near the Afghan Pines was tempting, but surrendering to the ethereal mineral water felt like more than enough.

“Everyone loves the water — the way it makes them feel, how well they sleep after they’ve soaked, how their skin feels. Just overall … more relaxed,” Winters said.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

As I sank into bed, the spell of the magnesium-rich water took hold. I slept deeply, waking at sunrise for a final soak. Coffee in hand, as heat rose off the water, a new word drifted into my mind: returnasy. The feeling of being in a place while already dreaming of coming back.

By MELISSA GOLDIN

President Donald Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term on Tuesday. Priorities for the Republican’s administration have centered largely on the economy, immigration, crime, energy and national security.

Trump has spent the last year touting his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. But much of this bluster is based on false and misleading claims — many of which are likely to be a part of the president’s address to the nation.

Here’s a look at some of the false and misleading statements Trump has made at recent public appearances.

Economy

Trump often says the U.S. is now “the hottest country anywhere in the world” after years as a “dead country.” The U.S. economy was hardly “dead’’ when Trump returned to office last year. But in his second term, it’s generally performed strongly — after getting off to a bumpy start.

In 2024, the last year of Biden’s presidency, U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.8%, adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023.

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GDP shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter of 2025. Growth rebounded in the second half of the year, but slowed again in the fourth quarter. Annual GDP growth in 2025 was 2.2%.

A key measure of inflation fell to nearly a five-year low in January. However, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, it remains elevated as the cost of goods such as furniture, clothes and groceries increase.

Companies have also sharply reduced hiring. Employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025, the fewest — outside a recession — since 2002. Economists blame a range of factors: Uncertainty created by tariffs and artificial intelligence likely caused many firms to hold back on adding workers. And many companies hired like gangbusters in the aftermath of the pandemic and have since decided to forgo creating any new positions.

The U.S. stock market did well last year and yet it underperformed many foreign stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 17% — a nice gain but short of a 71% surge in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the United Kingdom.

Investments

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has secured up to $18 trillion in investments, but has presented no evidence of such a high number. The figure appears to be exaggerated, highly speculative or both.

The White House website offers a far lower number, $9.6 trillion, and that figure appears to include some investment commitments made during the Biden administration.

A study published in January raised doubts about whether more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by many of America’s biggest trading partners will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did.

Immigration

A key aspect of the Trump administration’s agenda is curbing illegal immigration, though the president often uses falsehoods to support his arguments.

For example, Trump has repeatedly claimed that an influx of immigrants has led to a massive increase in crime. While FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

The president also frequently references upward of 300,000 migrant children who are allegedly missing. This misrepresents information in an August 2024 report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.

Energy

Trump consistently lauds coal as the ideal energy source, calling it “beautiful, clean coal.” The production of coal is cleaner now than it has been historically, but that doesn’t mean it’s clean.

Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the coal industry have decreased over the past 30 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And yet United Nations-backed research has found that coal production worldwide still needs to be reduced sharply to address climate change.

Along with carbon dioxide, burning coal emits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that contribute to acid rain, smog and respiratory illnesses, according to the EIA.

The president also regularly denigrates wind power, claiming that it is expensive and that windmills kill birds.

Onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity generation, with new wind farms expected to produce energy costing around $30 per megawatt hour, according to July estimates from the Energy Information Administration.

Wind turbines, like all infrastructure, can pose a risk to birds. However, the National Audubon Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of birds, thinks developers can manage these risks and climate change is a greater threat.

Elections

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterms, Trump has taken to repeating the claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.

This is a blatant falsehood that has been disproven many times over — the 2020 election was not stolen.

Biden’s win has been affirmed through recounts, audits and reviews in the battleground states where Trump disputed his 2020 loss. He and his allies lost dozens of court challenges related to the election, and his own attorney general at the time said there was no widespread fraud that would have altered the results.

Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. He also won over 7 million more popular votes than Trump.

Additionally, the president brags that his 2024 win was a “landslide.” But Trump’s margin of victory was not as large as he makes it seem.

He won the electoral vote 312 to 226, including all seven swing states, according to the Federal Election Commission. The popular vote, however, was far closer, with Trump receiving 49.8% of the vote with 77,302,580 votes cast to Democrat Kamala Harris’ 75,017,613 votes (48.32%).

Crime

Trump takes credit for a significant decrease in violent crime during 2025, claiming the murder rate in the U.S. dropped to its lowest in 125 years. But this is misleading. Crime had already been trending down in recent years.

A study released in January by the independent Council on Criminal Justice, which collected data from 35 U.S. cities on homicides, showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025.

The report noted that when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.

FBI reports for 2023 and 2024 show significant reductions in violent crimes.

Crime surged during the coronavirus pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year, the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records. But violent crime dropped to near pre-pandemic levels around 2022 when Biden was president.

The increase in violent crime during the pandemic defied easy explanation, and experts similarly said the historic drop in violence last year defies easy explanation despite elected officials at all levels — both Democrats and Republicans — rushing to claim credit.

Foreign policy

One of Trump’s most frequent talking points is he has “solved” eight wars, a statistic that is highly exaggerated. Although he has helped mediate relations among many nations, his impact isn’t as clear-cut as he makes it seem.

The conflicts Trump counts among those that he has solved are between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.

Associated Press writers Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia and Josh Boak and Christopher Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.