The University of Minnesota graduate student currently detained pending deportation proceedings will be back in court later this week.

During a hearing at immigration court Tuesday, an attorney for Doğukan Günaydın, 28, asked the court to pause the removal proceedings in order to hold another hearing to address new charges filed by the Department of Homeland Security. Those charges are not yet publicly available.

Attorney Hannah Brown said she expects Günaydın will testify during the hearing scheduled for Friday morning. Another hearing in Günaydın’s case is scheduled for next week.

Günaydın appeared remotely from Sherburne County jail, wearing an orange jail uniform.

Brown had asked Judge Sarah Mazzie to close Tuesday’s proceedings to the public. She said Günaydın’s case has received a lot of public attention and she was concerned for his privacy and safety. Judge Mazzie denied that request.

Günaydın, who is from Turkey, was arrested by ICE late last month and his student visa was revoked. He sued the government, alleging ICE violated his constitutional rights, for among other things, arresting him before DHS terminated his permission to remain in the U.S.

DHS argues that Günaydın should be deported because of a June 2023 drunken driving arrest. Günaydın pleaded guilty to gross misdemeanor DWI in March 2024.

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A St. Paul man was sentenced to 22 years in prison Tuesday for shooting into a car his girlfriend was riding in and killing the 21-year-old man who was driving.

Martavious Roby-English, 21, pleaded guilty Feb. 13 to second-degree unintentional murder in the May 30 killing of Toumai Gaynor in the 800 block of Simcoe Street, off Atwater Street.

Martavious Roby-English (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Roby-English was originally charged with intentional murder. He entered the guilty plea after reaching an agreement with the prosecution that included the lesser murder charge and the length of the prison term handed down Tuesday. An attempted murder charge was dismissed, and he was given credit for 310 days already served in custody.

Just over a month before the murder, Roby-English was released from prison and into supervision after serving time for two shootings in St. Paul.

According to the criminal complaint, St. Paul officers responded to the May 30 shooting at 2:28 a.m. and found Gaynor, of St. Paul, slumped over in the driver’s seat of a Toyota Camry. He had gunshot wounds to his head, hip and arm, and died at Regions Hospital about 11:15 a.m.

Officers found five 9mm shell casings around the Camry and a .45-caliber Glock firearm with blood on it and an extended magazine inserted in it directly behind the car. A spent casing was on the Camry’s dashboard.

An 18-year-old woman told police that Gaynor was her friend and he was driving her Camry. They’d gone to Simcoe Street to see if he could stay with friends and, when he couldn’t, he asked her to take him to another location. They sat in the car and talked. Then, as he was trying to make a U-turn, a man ran up to the car and started shooting.

The woman told police she ducked down in shock and told Gaynor to drive, but he didn’t move. The shooter pulled the woman from the Camry and she realized it was Roby-English. He told her he acted in self-defense because Gaynor fired first, the complaint says. She ran and called 911.

She told police she had thrown Gaynor’s gun behind the car because she thought he “was going to live and she didn’t want him to get in trouble for having a gun,” the complaint says. “The gun was hot when she touched it, so she realized it had been fired.”

She said she’d been in a relationship with Roby-English for three years and they continued to communicate while he was incarcerated.

A search of the woman’s cellphone revealed Roby-English had sent her several texts right before the shooting, the complaint says. At 1:41 a.m., he wrote, “Don’t make me walk ova there and shoot that (expletive) up.”

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The City Council’s budget response calls for additional dollars for new construction and preservation, to address maintenance issues at NYCHA and to staff up the city agencies that oversee housing.

NYC Council members unveiling their budget response on Wednesday. (Credit John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)

The NYC Council is pushing for billions of additional dollars in the city’s next budget deal—including extra funds for residential construction and building preservation, to address maintenance at NYCHA and to staff up the city agencies that oversee housing.

In their response to Mayor Eric Adams’ $114.5 billion preliminary budget proposal, Council members said they’ve identified $6.3 billion in “available resources” that the mayor’s plan missed, including from higher-than-expected tax revenue and underspending in the current budget.

The lawmakers want to use $4.4 billion of that “to close budget gaps and invest in services that protect and uplift working people,” Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan said at a press briefing last week. “We’re also withholding about $1.9 billion in spending for now as we continue to assess the outcome of the state budget and prepare for any additional challenges that may come our way from Washington.”

Challenges from Washington are already here: on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration cancelled $1.88 million in grants for New York City to help cover the cost of emergency homeless shelters for migrants. That’s on top of $80 million in similar funds the federal government took back in February, part of the president’s ongoing immigration crackdown.

While Mayor Adams says his staff is working to get that money returned, more funding losses are likely in store for fiscal year 2026—which starts July 1—as President Donald Trump continues to slash federal spending.

“We’re totally looking at the unknown right now,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams told reporters last week, saying their expanded budget proposal is an effort to “develop this Trump-proof city.”

“We hope that the mayor will put this budget first, the concerns of New Yorkers first,” Speaker Adams added, referencing the cozy relationship Mayor Adams has struck in recent months with the Trump administration—which was successful in getting the corruption charges against the mayor dropped last week.

When it comes to housing, the Council is pushing for $114.5 million in additional expense funds and $1.1 billion of capital funds to cover a wide range of needs, including both new construction and preservation of existing apartments.

It includes an extra $600 million to expand and revamp the Third Party Transfer program—which allows the city to seize properties from neglectful landlords who fail to maintain them or pay taxes, and transfer them to new ownership—and an added $25 million in baselined funding to fix administrative delays with CityFHEPS, the city’s rental assistance program.

Funds would also go to addressing staff shortages at the agencies that oversee housing production and maintenance, including the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD), which had 383 staff vacancies as of March 25. The Department of Buildings had 216 open posts.

At a budget hearing late last month, HPD Deputy Commissioner Kim Darga said the agency has “made a lot of progress on staffing” in recent years.

“The vacancy rate there has dropped a lot,” she said. “We also supplemented those kind of staff resources with hiring temps to help us get through some of the backlog that we saw when we lost a lot of staff during the pandemic.”

Still, the agency has a 14 percent staff vacancy rate, significantly higher than the citywide rate of 5 percent. Inadequate personnel will hamper the city’s efforts to build new apartments during a critical housing shortage, lawmakers said, and undermine the mayor’s City of Yes reforms, through which the Council previously negotiated $5 billion for housing programs and infrastructure upgrades.

That funding was supposed to include 200 new staff positions between HPD and DOB, according to City Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, who chairs the Housing and Buildings Committee. But the mayor’s preliminary budget only included funding for 132 of those roles, she told City Limits in an interview last week.

“So that’s 70 lines that we are short, and that’s only one example of commitments that were made through City of Yes that we’re not seeing materialized in the preliminary budget,” she said.

One of Sanchez’s budget priorities is to expand preservation efforts, pointing to a steep recent rise in the number of building code violations across the city’s aging buildings.

“The housing stock in New York City is falling apart,” Sanchez said. She noted a 130 percent increase in the amount of units getting emergency repair funds—when HPD intervenes to make fixes directly in deteriorating properties, and charges the landlord after the fact.

“It could be twice as expensive for HPD to do a job as compared to the landlord repairing their own properties,” Sanchez said. “So we see things going in the wrong direction, and we want to push the administration on committing to preservation work.”

Housing advocates say they’re also concerned about future funding. In its analysis of the city’s capital budget plan through 2035, the New York Housing Conference, a policy and advocacy nonprofit, pointed to stark drop-off in funding to HPD and NYCHA, from $4.3 billion next fiscal year to $2.4 billion in fiscal year 2027. That means the city will lose its momentum after two years of boosted housing production.

Credit: New York Housing Conference’s budget testimony.

“The bottom line is, as a city, we need to be baselining $4 billion a year in housing capital, or production will drop,” said Rachel Fee, the group’s executive director, in an interview with City Limits. She pointed to rising construction costs and interest rates, which are “putting a lot of pressure on the capital plan.”

“The thing about housing development is, you know, it doesn’t happen overnight. You need that out-year money for developers to take risks, to acquire sites,” Fee added.

Under the capital plan, funding for NYCHA also drops off dramatically starting in fiscal year 2027 (which by the calendar year starts in July 2026). That includes repair money for both Section 9 developments and those converted to Section 8 under the Preservation Trust and Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) programs.

“Without a steady capital allocation, NYCHA cannot reasonably plan a pipeline for either preservation strategy,” the Housing Conference said its budget testimony submitted to the Council.

In their budget response, Council members have asked for an extra $500 million a year for NYCHA for the next four years, funds that will go to “support repairs and maintenance,” according Speaker Adams, as well as rehabbing empty public housing apartments—of which there were more than 5,700 in February—for new tenants.

“The administration must also prioritize fixing and filling vacant units to get them online with the urgency required in a housing shortage,” Adams said.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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

The post Council Looks to ‘Trump-Proof’ City Budget, Calls for Extra Housing, NYCHA Funds appeared first on City Limits.

The St. Paul City Council will host two public hearings Wednesday on an effort to exempt rent control for residential buildings constructed after 2004 and a separate initiative to install new tenant protections, including notification requirements after affordable housing has been sold.

Final council votes are not likely until May.

Hours before those discussions take place, a new council member will be sworn in Wednesday morning. Mayor Melvin Carter is appointing Matt Privratsky, a clean energy advocate and former council legislative aide, to fill the vacant Ward 4 seat on an interim basis through the Aug. 12 election.

Here’s an overview of what’s on the table:

Rent control

In 2021, St. Paul voters approved one of the stiffest rent control ordinances in the country, capping annual residential rent increases at 3%. Landlords have said that number falls far below inflation, property taxes, insurance and maintenance expenses elevated by rising construction costs.

Given those expenses, many residential units qualify for temporary exemptions from the rent caps, making getting around rent control when inflation is high mostly a question of filing the correct paperwork, to the frustration of those on all sides of the issue.

Developers have complained that the lending market has been unforgiving, undermining efforts to finance new housing construction, which has dwindled in the capital city. Even some advocates for more affordable housing and greater density, like the leaders of Sustain St. Paul, say it’s time to at least partially roll back rent control, provided it’s coupled with new tenant protections.

In response, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter proposed last August eliminating the rent cap for buildings that were issued their first certificate of occupancy after Dec. 31, 2004. Council President Rebecca Noecker, Council Member Anika Bowie and Council Member Saura Jost have sponsored an amendment to do that.

Council Member HwaJeong Kim has said she is staunchly opposed, and said more study is needed of the benefits of rent control.

Critics say the rent control limits have already been heavily watered down. In 2022, the previous council softened the voter-approved ordinance, exempting newly-constructed units for 20 years, with a 20-year lookback period. They permanently exempted deed-restricted and federally-backed affordable housing, while allowing newly vacant units to seek rent increases of 8% plus inflation.

The changes have made as much as a third of the city exempt.

Tenant protections

Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who chairs the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority, has said any vote to roll back rent control should be contingent upon the council fully embracing tenant protections she is sponsoring. That package has drawn a majority of the council as co-sponsors, including Kim, Noecker and Jost, while drawing concerns from Bowie that the rules may be unenforceable.

In July 2020, the previous council approved a package of wide-ranging protections aimed at limiting — but not entirely eliminating — onerous security deposits, criminal history reviews, surprise building sales and other tools used to screen or oust tenants.

The previous package also included a “just cause” requirement to force landlords to explain in writing why they had chosen not to renew a tenant’s lease. The S.A.F.E. Housing protections went into effect in March 2021, but were challenged by landlords and temporarily put on hold the next month by a federal judge who expressed open skepticism they were constitutional.

Rather than press their case in court, in June 2021 the city council voted 4-3 to rescind the package entirely.

Johnson’s newly-introduced protections do not include the “just cause” provision. Still, Bowie has expressed doubt that the new package would survive a fresh legal challenge and judicial scrutiny.

Newly-proposed tenant protections

Here’s what the newly-proposed protections call for:

• Security deposits: Security deposits would be limited to the equivalent of a single month’s rent, unless the tenant’s application might otherwise be denied because of their criminal history, credit history or rental history. In that case, a security deposit could be equivalent to two months of rent.

• Screening criteria: A landlord must make their screening criteria “readily available” to any prospective tenant. A prospective tenant could not be rejected because of a conviction for a crime that is no longer illegal in Minnesota, a petty misdemeanor, a gross misdemeanor older than three years, and most felony convictions for which the last day served was more than seven years prior.

• Criminal history: For certain crimes, such as first-degree assault, arson or murder, a landlord could look back 10 years. Screening criteria could not include an arrest or charge in an inactive case in which the prospective tenant was not convicted, participation in a diversion program, or a conviction that has been vacated or expunged. Certain federal screening rules may kick in for lifetime sex offender registrations and controlled substance crimes.

• Credit scores: Landlords would not be able to reject tenants based solely on their credit score alone, insufficient credit history or insufficient rental history, though they could use a credit report that shows a failure to pay rent or utility bills. A prospective tenant cannot withhold their credit history or rental history.

• Eviction history: Landlords would not be allowed to consider pending evictions, evictions that are more than three years old and evictions that have not resulted in an order to vacate.

• Minimum income tests: If a landlord uses a minimum income test requiring two and a half times the rent or higher, the landlord must allow an exception if the applicant can demonstrate a history of successful rent payment using a similar or lower ratio.

• Alternative assessments: A landlord applying screening criteria that is more prohibitive than any of the criminal history, rental history and credit history limits in the rules “must conduct an individualized assessment” showing why they intend to deny an application. The landlord will have to “accept and consider all supplemental evidence” provided with the application.

• Tenant notice: Landlords would have 14 days to explain in writing to a tenant which criteria they failed to meet. Any local, state or federal funding or loan requirements would trump the city’s screening rules.

• Evictions for nonpayment: Evictions for nonpayment of rent would require advance written notice to the tenant specifying the total amount due, as well as their right to seek legal help and a phone number and web address for legal and financial assistance.

• Sale of affordable housing: If affordable housing is sold, the new landlord may not terminate or fail to renew a tenant’s rental agreement without just cause, raise rent or rescreen existing tenants during a certain period of time known as the “tenant protection period” of three months without providing relocation assistance.

• Relocation assistance: Relocation assistance must be equal to three months of rent for a unit priced for a median-income family, or 7.5% of the annual area median income, adjusted for family size.

• Tenant notification: Within 30 days of the transfer of ownership, the new landlord must give written notice to each tenant in an affordable unit that the property is under new ownership and explaining whether the new landlord will require them to re-screened, whether they will be terminated without cause and whether the new landlord intends to increase rent.

• Complaints: Landlords, tenants and prospective tenants can issue a complaint to the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections, and appeal DSI determinations to the city’s legislative hearing officer within 30 days. Tenants also can appeal to the courts.

If approved by the council, the new tenant protections still require the mayor’s signature, and then take effect a year later.

The city’s Office of Financial Empowerment would oversee coordination of the new rules by creating an online portal for all landlords and tenants to view rules, resources and enforcement tools and annually publish phone numbers for relocation assistance and other “know your rights” materials.

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