Seventeen New Yorkers have died outdoors in recent weeks amid freezing temperatures, which are expected to dip again this weekend. Local homeless advocates urged the city Friday to flood the streets with extra outreach workers.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined a a homeless outreach team in Manhattan on Tuesday amid freezing temperatures. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

Seventeen people have died outdoors in New York City over the last two weeks amid a stretch of unusually cold weather—and with frigid temperatures on the way again, homeless advocates are urging the city to deploy more outreach teams to bring unhoused people inside.

“With this weekend’s wind chills expected to fall well below zero, the City must immediately bolster measures to prevent further loss of life,” The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said in a joint statement Friday.

This should include, “flooding the streets with additional outreach workers,” the groups said, expanding capacity at warming centers and drop-in sites, and ensuring people can access shelter even if they don’t have a government ID. They also called for “clear communication with all public and private hospitals” about allowing unhoused people to seek refuge in emergency and waiting rooms during what’s known as a “Code Blue” emergency.

“Hospitals must coordinate with the Department of Homeless Services to ensure that no one without a warm place to go is discharged or released to the streets, regardless of health status,” the advocates said. “More lives are at stake.”

Since Jan. 19, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday, the city’s outreach teams have placed more than 1,100 people into shelters or Safe Havens—facilities with fewer restrictions to entry, often preferred by unhoused New Yorkers who’ve had bad experiences with traditional shelters and are reluctant to enter the system. The city opened one such facility early this week in response to the cold, adding 106 single-room occupancy beds in lower Manhattan.

Emergency responders removed 20 people to hospitals involuntarily, the mayor said. The city also expanded its number of warming centers and mobile warming buses (locations can be found here.) “We will continue to do everything in our power to get every New Yorker into a shelter where they will be safe and they will be warm,” Mamdani said.

The City Council will hold an oversight hearing on Tuesday to examine the administration’s response to the extreme cold. The weather also prompted the Department of Homeless Services to twice postpone its annual HOPE count, in which volunteers canvas the city to track the number of New Yorkers sleeping on its streets.

“It’s tough. It’s freezing out here,” said Rose Williams, who said she’s been street homeless for the last 10 years.

Williams doesn’t trust the shelter system and is reluctant to share her personal information with city workers. She told a City Limits reporter who was accompanying an outreach team that she might consider entering a Safe Haven.

But for now, she’s been sleeping on the E train with a friend, Michael, and the two look out for one another to stay safe. “Everybody says ‘stay warm!’ Where are we going to stay warm at?” Williams said. “It’s nice they say that but … you know.”

Here’s what else happened in housing this week—

ICYMI, from City Limits:

The cold stretch has also led city tenants to lodge a record-high number of complaints for lack of heat and hot water. During the last week of January, 30,000 tenants called in, the most heat complaints ever recorded in a seven-day period, according to City Limits’ reporting.

Residents at NYCHA’s Isaacs Houses will start voting next week on what funding model they want for their development.

More than 700 homes at Beach 41st Street Houses in Rockaway will switch to electric heating and cooling, which officials say will reduce pollution and offer more reliable service than NYCHA’s aging, fossil fuel-powered boilers. 

ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:

The rise in cold-related deaths prompted calls for Mamdani to revisit his decision to end city “sweeps” of public homeless encampments. But the new mayor told Gothamist that none of the recent fatalities have been people living in encampments, and reiterated his criticism of “sweeps” as ineffective.

The city is moving ahead with a new rule that critics say will make it harder for people to enter Safe Haven shelters, The City reports.

How Pinnacle’s bankruptcy “triggered a citywide wave of tenant organizing,” via Jacobin.

Tenants and advocates are pushing state leaders to increase funding for supportive housing programs in the upcoming budget, WRGB Albany reports.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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

The post NYC’s Deadly Cold Spell Continues, And What Else Happened This Week in Housing appeared first on City Limits.

With her own refugee community in mind, St. Paul City Council Member Nelsie Yang is organizing East Siders to shine their lights across Lake Phalen on Saturday in a symbolic gesture against Operation Metro Surge.

Residents plan to spell the words “MN > ICE” with a Hmong heart symbol across the lake shortly after sundown.

Since early January thousands of federal immigration officials have detained illegal immigrants and in some cases legal residents in the Twin Cities. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot by immigration agents in encounters last month in Minneapolis.

The gathering will begin at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Lake Phalen beach, 1400 Phalen Boulevard. Yang, in a written statement, noted the Payne-Phalen neighborhood is 45% Asian, 14% Black and 9% Latino, making it one of the most culturally diverse communities in the state.

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“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

That was President Donald Trump’s demand in a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the state in the 2020 election. Raffensperger, citing the results of numerous lawsuits and three rounds of vote counting, refused, making him one of the few Republican officials to publicly stand up to Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Now, six years later, the Trump administration is sending one of its own to Georgia — where the president was once charged with election interference — in an apparent effort to find those phantom votes and retroactively validate Trump’s debunked claims. Even more troubling, the prosecutor  — who has ties to Trump allies — received a special appointment from Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate election fraud cases nationwide, according to Bloomberg Law.

When the FBI raided Fulton County’s main election office last week, St. Louis U.S. Attorney Thomas Albus was listed as the prosecutor who’d sought the warrant, not the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who would ordinarily have jurisdiction. The appointment of Albus raises concerns not only about the potential for manufactured crimes but also about the risk of undermining the integrity of elections in 2026 and 2028.

The warrant suggests that federal prosecutors are now pursuing a theory that Trump was not the perpetrator of election fraud, but its victim. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump said recently.

Albus’ appointment bears resemblance to that of Lindsey Halligan, who was appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney there was removed for refusing to indict James Comey and Letitia James. Halligan, a former insurance attorney who had been working in the White House, promptly filed indictments against the two, but both were ultimately dismissed after a court found Halligan’s appointment was invalid.

Unlike Halligan, Albus’ appointment appears to be lawful under a federal statute that permits the attorney general to direct “any other officer of the Department of Justice” to “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal … whether or not he is a resident of the district in which the proceeding is brought.” But sidelining Atlanta U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg in favor of Albus is concerning nonetheless — especially given his ties to Trump allies.

First, Albus previously served as the top deputy to former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and appears to have been working in that role when Schmitt joined a 2020 lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to challenge the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The lawsuit, filed without evidence of fraud, was an audacious last-gasp attempt to overturn the results. Even Georgia’s Republican Attorney General Christopher Carr urged the Supreme Court to reject Texas’ request, joining other states in warning that the suit amounted to what Pennsylvania called an attempt to “overthrow the votes of the American people and choose the next president of the United States. That Faustian invitation must be firmly rejected.”

The Supreme Court dismissed the case, saying that Texas lacked standing to challenge elections in another state.

Albus’ career also moved in lockstep with that of fellow Missourian Ed Martin, the former interim U.S. attorney in Washington whose name was withdrawn when it became clear he lacked sufficient votes to win Senate confirmation. Martin, an election denier who represented some of the Jan. 6 defendants, now works as Trump’s pardon attorney and leads the DOJ’s “Weaponization” Working Group.

Martin and Albus both worked at the Bryan Cave law firm early in their careers, and Martin served as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, making it likely that the two are well acquainted.

While no one is guilty of impropriety by association, it is difficult to believe that Bondi would have appointed Albus without Martin’s input. Martin’s track record at the Justice Department has shown that he views his work through a political lens, as demonstrated by his social media post upon becoming pardon attorney: “No MAGA left behind.” It seems likely that Trump and Bondi would want another loyalist overseeing the election fraud investigation, and that Albus would be their choice.

Additional warning signs about the investigation include FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent firing of the head of the bureau’s Atlanta field office. While the reason for the termination has not been publicly disclosed, Patel has previously fired agents for participating in investigations involving Trump and individuals who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The special agent in charge of a field office would oversee any search conducted within their jurisdiction and would be positioned to push back against a search they perceived as improper. With the firing, Patel effectively cleared the way for the Fulton County search to proceed unopposed.

The Fulton County investigation also coincides with the DOJ’s lawsuit against several states, including Georgia, to obtain their voter rolls. Two courts have already ruled against the government, with an Oregon judge calling the Justice Department’s suit “a backdoor to grab” the personal information of Oregon voters. Is the Fulton County search warrant simply a way to obtain records to which the DOJ is not otherwise legally entitled?

Finally, an especially unusual twist to the raid of the election office was the appearance of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the scene. It is difficult to conceive of any role for the DNI in the execution of a domestic criminal search warrant.

The role of the director of national intelligence is to coordinate intelligence collection across federal agencies and keep the president apprised of threats to national security. The only suggestion of any foreign role in the 2020 election was made by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who made wild and unsupported allegations that the Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems were created in Venezuela at the direction of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to ensure he never lost an election.

Are we about to hear a new conspiracy theory linked to Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro, whom the Trump administration accused, deposed and arrested on drug charges in January? With the prospect of a life sentence hanging over him, Maduro has every incentive to tell Trump what he wants to hear.

Elections in the U.S. are entrusted to each of the 50 states to administer. Officials like Raffensperger and Carr put their duty to the people of their state before their allegiance to their party. Can we trust Albus to do the same?

Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law school, a former U.S. attorney and author of “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.” She wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

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In an outrageous expansion of its authority, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now authorizing its agents to arrest anyone they suspect of being undocumented, even if the officers don’t have a warrant and the person isn’t a flight risk.

The directive, contained in a memo obtained by the New York Times, reverses long-standing ICE policy and effectively renders the warrant requirement itself empty. Coming on the heels of another legally indefensible memo, which purported to allow ICE agents to enter the homes of suspected undocumented people without a judicial warrant, the new policy shows that ICE isn’t just exploiting legal loopholes to create massive sweeps. Instead, it reveals an agency actively attempting to change the legal landscape to turn itself into an all-powerful police force.

Federal law permits ICE to make warrantless arrests under only two circumstances. The first is when an agent sees someone actively crossing the border illegally. That scenario isn’t relevant to the current ICE sweeps, which take place in cities far from the border.

The second situation in which the law allows a warrantless arrest, the one addressed by the new memo, is if an ICE officer “has reason to believe” that someone is in the U.S. without legal authority and “is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.”

As even ICE has been forced to acknowledge, the phrase “reason to believe” in the statute means that the agent must have probable cause to think that the person is undocumented. That standard, borrowed from the context of criminal arrest, appears protective of individual rights.

But in a decision in its emergency docket last September, the Supreme Court disastrously eroded this protection by allowing street stops based merely on “reasonable suspicion” — a standard lower than probable cause. A solo opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh then extended reasonable suspicion to include factors like appearing Latino and speaking Spanish.

That brings us to the new memo, which addresses whether ICE agents can then arrest the person who has been stopped. Until now, it has been the long-standing practice of ICE to permit warrantless arrests only when the officers determined that the person stopped was a flight risk, meaning that they would be unlikely to show up for a court hearing. And until now, ICE has acknowledged that this rule was required by the statute’s demand that someone be “likely to escape” before they can be arrested without a warrant. In practice, that made it relatively unusual for ICE agents to carry out a warrantless arrest.

The new memo fundamentally transforms the meaning of the words “likely to escape.” It claims that a person who has been stopped is likely to escape if they are “unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter” by the time an arrest warrant could be obtained. Since just about anyone would walk away from an ICE arrest if they could (at least under current circumstances), it follows from this interpretation that anyone stopped by ICE is “likely to escape” — and therefore may be subjected to warrantless arrest.

The memo says that ICE’s previous position about the meaning of the statute was “unreasoned” and “incorrect.” But it’s the new interpretation that is unreasoned and incorrect. According to ICE’s interpretation, there would be no reason to ever require the issuance of a warrant, given that ICE agents can, under the new theory, effectively arrest anyone who wouldn’t stick around once stopped. Put another way, ICE’s new interpretation turns the statute into a dead letter.

I realize all these legal technical details are a lot. So let me put it simply. Under the new memo, ICE agents can detain anyone they think might be undocumented, based on factors like ethnic appearance, language, and where you happen to be hanging out when they stop you. Once they’ve stopped you, they can claim to have probable cause that you’re undocumented (for example, because you don’t have proof of citizenship on you). Then the officers can simply arrest you, without a warrant.

The total package amounts to a sweeping authorization for ICE agents to roam the streets, grab just about anyone they want, arrest and detain them.

It’s not only that such proceedings are un-American. It’s that they are plainly unlawful under the legal regime that is supposed to apply. The warrant requirement for an ICE arrest, established by statute, is meant to function as a protection against exactly the kind of massive, non-specific sweeps ICE is now performing.

Similarly, the requirement of a judicial warrant before entering a home is a foundational safeguard of individual liberty.

The good news about ICE’s attempts to get around the law is that they will come before the courts. The courts should affirm that the statute means what it says: “likely to escape” means that ICE may not arrest a person without a warrant unless they are a flight risk. Judicial interpretation of federal law is a cornerstone of preserving the rule of law itself. ICE’s actions are terrifying, and meant to be, but the law remains one of the tools that can be used to resist a descent into a police state.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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