Later this fall, counties across the state will pay more to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, running after a sharp decline in federal support.

Over 2.7 million New Yorkers are enrolled in SNAP, also known as food stamps; last year, the average household received $376 in monthly benefits. For decades, the costs of administering the program — from processing applications to issuing benefit cards — were evenly split between the federal government and states.

States will soon be responsible for 75 percent of program expenses, thanks to President Donald Trump’s 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill.” Starting this October, that will amount to an additional $168 million annually in New York. Beginning in fall 2027, as states start covering a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time in the program’s history, New York will also have to pay an estimated $1.1 billion in direct benefit costs.

Rather than using state funds, New York is making counties pay for most of the increase. Counties, in turn, are likely to pick up the tab through higher property taxes — or cutting other social services and staff.

New York’s approach makes it an outlier, says Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties, or NYSAC, which represents a coalition of county governments. Just two other states, New Jersey and North Carolina, are doing the same.

Acquario said the decision — based on the state’s interpretation of a law that puts New York counties in charge of public benefits — offloads a “state responsibility” onto counties, which have fewer ways of raising revenue than the state. County social services departments are already navigating fast-moving federal changes to SNAP eligibility that have strained their budgets and staff.

The state has tied individual counties’ cost increase to how many of their residents rely on SNAP and the amount of benefits they receive. Under state guidelines, the annual increase could range from roughly $27,000 in rural Hamilton County, where a few hundred residents receive SNAP benefits, to nearly $111 million in New York City, where more than 1.7 million residents across five counties are enrolled in the program. The projected median cost increase across the state is about $555,000.

Several counties that spoke to New York Focus set aside funds to cover the cost increase in the last fiscal quarter of 2026, but have not yet figured out what they’ll do next year. More permanent changes, like property tax hikes, require formal approval from local officials.

Neither New York City’s Human Resources Administration, which oversees SNAP, nor Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office responded to requests for comment about how the city will cover rising SNAP costs.

Many county leaders have been hoping for a reprieve from Washington or Albany. NYSAC, along with counterparts in New Jersey and North Carolina, has been lobbying Congress to delay the cost shift. NYSAC has also been urging Governor Kathy Hochul to include the costs in the state budget. So far, neither effort has been successful.

In New Jersey, meanwhile, Governor Mikie Sherrill earmarked $71 million to cover higher administrative SNAP costs over the next year, affording counties a transition period. The New Jersey budget, passed in June, also established a minimum monthly SNAP benefit of $95 per household; similar efforts in New York failed to gain traction.

“While the State cannot replace the loss of federal partnership, Governor Sherrill’s budget works to blunt the impact and protect New Jersey families during this transition,” noted Maggie Garbarino, a spokesperson for Sherrill, in an email.

Hochul’s office did not respond to questions from New York Focus. The governor “has been clear that no state can backfill these federal funding cuts alone,” spokesperson Nicolette Simmonds wrote in a statement. “As these federal cuts take effect, the State will continue to work with counties and local governments to ensure residents have access to critical resources.”

Counties’ financial burden will balloon even more next October, when states will start paying a portion of monthly SNAP benefits in addition to administrative costs — a change that could cost New York an additional $1.1 billion annually. The state expects counties to foot this bill, too, says NYSAC, but has not yet disclosed how much individual counties will pay.

New York has a history of shifting the burden of public benefits onto counties, says Acquario. Amid the Great Recession, Albany permanently changed the cost share for Safety Net Assistance, a state program that provides temporary cash assistance to needy households, requiring counties to cover 71 percent instead of 50.

Property taxes remain one of the few ways counties can raise revenue, but not all are willing or able to do so. Earlier this year, a dozen counties hit a state cap limiting how much local governments can increase their levies each year — which Acquario finds alarming. It signals that counties are struggling to balance their books, he said, and that they’re likely ill-equipped to absorb additional costs.

Washington County, in the Capital Region, increased its levy by nearly 17 percent this year, but it estimates that it will have to spend $78 of every $100 it collects in taxes on state and federal mandates such as SNAP or Medicaid, leaving the county with limited room to fund staff salaries and services.

To cover its increase in administrative SNAP costs — projected at $574,558 — the county’s Department of Social Services has kept vacant positions unfilled, leaving a smaller staff with more paperwork thanks to recent changes in SNAP eligibility. It’s unclear how much the county will have to pay in SNAP benefits starting in 2027, and officials are just beginning to discuss how to cover it.

“We’re going to plan for the worst and hope for the best,” said department Commissioner Duane Vaughn.

In nearby Warren County, the board of supervisors voted to raise the levy by 12 percent, exceeding its tax cap. Director of Public Affairs Don Lehman attributed the increase to rising SNAP costs and other surging expenses like retirement and staff health insurance.

“Warren County would greatly appreciate relief from New York State on SNAP costs, Medicaid costs and other unfunded New York state mandates,” Lehman wrote, adding that staff are “looking at any and all feasible options to limit spending and increase revenue without raising taxes” next year.

By contrast, Ulster County is seeking to avoid regressive property tax increases by targeting wealthy residents. A proposed surcharge would raise income taxes by as much as 2 percent on single earners making over $250,000 or couples making over $500,000.

Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger called the proposal a “modest step” toward creating a “fairer system” in a county where a large share of residents already spend at least half their income on housing and struggle to afford basic necessities.

If the measure is approved by the state legislature in the upcoming legislative session — Ulster’s state delegates have introduced twin bills to implement the surcharge — the county could raise between $9 million and $11 million annually to help cover higher SNAP costs, including a projected $738,057 bump in administrative costs this October and nearly $8 million in direct benefits next fall. Ulster is also expecting its share of annual Medicaid costs to rise next year.

“Everyday people simply can’t afford to shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost of funding essential government services,” Metzger said.

And then there were four officers of an obscure union based on Long Island whose 23,000 members include grocery store clerks, home health aides, paramedics, and other low-wage workers.

The union, called the International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, or IBOTU, is a family business. Three of its top officers married daughters of the union’s founding president, Peter Hasho, who died in 2021.

Last year, each of those sons-in-law made about $1 million. In the past decade, IBOTU has paid them and two other officers over $27 million — a sum equal to nearly half of the dues that union members paid in that time span.

Workers and other unions have repeatedly accused IBOTU of preying on the members whose dues pay their lavish salaries: forcing them into unions they didn’t ask for, signing contracts that hardly benefit them, and failing to fight back against firings and wage theft.

The National Labor Relations Board has ordered IBOTU to disband at workplaces on four separate occasions and accused it of plotting with employers to sign union contracts without workers’ consent. In a fifth case, the union agreed to disband in a settlement.

IBOTU leaders have been arrested or investigated on suspicion of bribery, theft, and fraud. Its organizing director, Robert Scalza, once conspired with the Genovese crime family to extort a rival union. A federal judge banned him from being a union officer for three years, but once the ban expired, he was welcomed back to IBOTU with a raise. Last year, his salary crossed $1 million.

Some of the union’s dealings remain mysterious. Since 2021, it has sent over $1.4 million to an entity that its paperwork describes as a union but that the US Department of Labor has no record of.

IBOTU did not respond to detailed questions from New York Focus and refused requests for comment by phone, email, letter, and in person.

Employers have often allied with IBOTU to block more worker-friendly unions, interviews and records obtained by New York Focus reveal.

Are you a current or former member of IBOTU Local 713 or Local 7, or do you have other knowledge about the union? We want to hear from you. Reach out to sam@nysfocus.com. You can remain anonymous.

One example: the New York City-based company Caring Professionals, which employs home health aides to care for elderly and disabled New Yorkers. In the early 2010s, the company sought out a branch of IBOTU called Local 713 in order to prevent a union drive by the powerful New York health care union 1199SEIU, according to Julian Hagmann, chief operating officer of Caring Professionals.

“We knew we needed a union, but we didn’t want to be forced into 1199,” Hagmann told New York Focus. “So we shopped around.”

1199 frequently wins significant raises and benefits for its members. But when Local 713 unionized Caring Professionals, it didn’t rock the boat.

“My workers probably didn’t even feel anything different whatsoever, to be perfectly honest with you,” Hagmann said.

A similar pattern played out at a New York City hotel several years ago.

In June 2017, Arisnelda Rodriguez, a room cleaner at the then-non-union Cassa Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, was fired after mentioning potentially getting union benefits, according to allegations by the NLRB regional office and an interview with Rodriguez.

This led to the remaining workers getting a union — but not one that they had asked for.

A few days after Rodriguez was fired, management made employees sign union cards for Local 713, despite federal law barring employers from telling their workers to join a specific union.

The following week, Local 713 and the Cassa Hotel’s property manager inked a contract that allowed the hotel to begin deducting union dues and fees from workers’ paychecks. Employees got some modest benefits: a 50-cent-per-hour raise and a low-quality health plan that didn’t cover costs for family members.

But the scheme quickly unwound. After hearing about the weak benefits, a former Cassa employee told the workers there about the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, or HTC, New York’s influential hotel workers’ union.

When workers heard about HTC’s gold-standard contracts and the huge raises it often wins for members, they realized they’d been duped, Rodriguez told New York Focus.

Soon after, she and other Cassa workers met with HTC organizers in a Starbucks near the hotel. After hearing their stories, the union filed a complaint with the NLRB, alleging that Cassa and Local 713 had violated federal labor law.

Local 713 “was being used by the employer to prevent the workers from signing up with a legitimate union,” said Rich Maroko, president of HTC, who was the union’s general counsel at the time. “I thought it was disgusting.”

HTC won the case: The NLRB ordered the hotel to cease dealing with Local 713 and void the union contract, rehire Rodriguez and give her $16,000 in back pay, and reimburse employees for all union dues and fees that had been deducted from their paychecks.

Then, in June 2018, workers at the Cassa Hotel voted to join HTC, and in 2019, the hotel agreed to the union’s top-quality contract. Every worker got at least a $5-per-hour raise and became eligible for a pension, severance pay, and a free, premium health plan that covered their whole families. Rodriguez’s hourly pay nearly doubled, from $12.50 when she was fired to about $24.

Rodriguez still cleans rooms at the hotel, which is now called the Truss. As an HTC member, she makes over $42 per hour. She told New York Focus that she and her family have “the best benefits in the world.”

She’s still angry at Local 713, though.

“It’s a union for bosses, for management only,” she said. “Not for workers.”

The contract that Local 713 signed in this case wasn’t unusual. Other IBOTU contracts cap annual raises at 25 cents per hour or give workers just days to file grievances. After reviewing several examples, labor lawyer Daniel Bright said that the agreements “give management a lot of unfettered powers” and “seem to be mostly about protecting management’s rights.”

A few years before it unionized Cassa, Local 713 tried something similar a few miles to the north, according to NLRB findings.

In 2012, Sprain Brook Manor, a Scarsdale nursing home, fired its entire staff, which was unionized with 1199, and then rehired them through nonunion contractors.

1199 attempted to negotiate with the new management, but the home instead struck a deal with Local 713 that lowered wages and benefits for many workers. Workers were told they had to sign Local 713 cards to keep their jobs, and several pro-1199 workers were fired.

1199 filed unfair labor practice charges against its rival union and the nursing home. In 2017, after four years of litigation, the NLRB reinstated 1199 and ordered Local 713 to dissolve its union at the nursing home. Representatives of Sprain Brook and 1199 declined to comment.

In three other cases in the 2010s, rival unions filed charges with the NLRB accusing Local 713 of illegally collaborating with management or accepting management’s help to promote the union. At one home care company in Brooklyn, according to NLRB records, Local 713 agents were invited to solicit union cards during a mandatory staff meeting. The company threatened to withhold health and retirement benefits if employees did not sign. Like the Sprain Brook and Cassa Hotel cases, all three ended with Local 713 disbanding its chapters at those workplaces.

Workers are still complaining about IBOTU. In multiple lawsuits, former IBOTU members have said that Local 713 did nothing to help them keep their jobs when they were fired.

Last November, Joseph Franqui was fired from his job as the food service director of a Staten Island assisted living facility, where he was a Local 713 member, according to allegations in an ongoing lawsuit. His colleague, union representative Jeff Elkins, was present at the meeting where Franqui was fired. Elkins didn’t do anything to defend him and instead “aligned with management’s position,” Franqui claimed. Reached by phone, Elkins declined to comment and referred New York Focus to the home’s administrator, Patrice Ficco, who also declined to comment. None of the defendants have yet responded to Franqui’s claims in court.

In the suit, Franqui says he was never given a reason for his termination. A month earlier, he claims, the nursing home’s management had warned him to stop raising concerns about workplace conditions and said that he could lose his job if he continued.

After being fired, Franqui, who declined to speak with New York Focus for this story, sent a written complaint to Local 713’s leaders, alleging that the union had failed to represent him. The union replied to say that Franqui was not a union member — even though Franqui claims his employment papers stated that he was a member and he had been paying union dues throughout his tenure.

The union promised to refund his dues and other payments, but never did, Franqui claims. Local 713 did not respond to questions from New York Focus about the suit.

Founded in 1995, IBOTU is currently led by union presidents Richard Dombrowski and Robert Vella Jr. It’s headquartered in a small, one-story building in Carle Place, Long Island, an inner suburb of New York City.

For several years in the 2000s, it allied with another notorious management-friendly union, the International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades, which was the subject of a 2024 investigation by The City Reporter. But IBOTU went too far even for that union: in 2011, IBOTU was expelled after violating a labor peace agreement by attempting to poach members from a rival. Since 2017, IBOTU’s financial disclosures have claimed an association with the powerful International Longshoremen’s Association, but it is not clear what that relationship entails. ILA did not respond to a request for comment.

Local 713 most recently attracted attention in 2022, when it quickly abandoned an effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey amid negative reporting on the union by the New York Post. The following year, the union’s former bookkeeper pleaded guilty to stealing over $120,000 from the union in a case that made Long Island news.

Several of its leaders have checkered pasts.

After Robert Scalza, the union’s organizing director, pleaded guilty to mob-related extortion in 2014, his lawyer submitted a batch of letters asking the judge for a lenient sentence. Three came from the heads of companies unionized by Local 713, and three more came from Scalza’s subordinates in the union’s administration. Not one came from a rank-and-file union member.

Peter Hasho, IBOTU’s founder and former president, was arrested and indicted in 1975 in connection with a union bribery scheme, and indicted again in 2003 in connection with a scheme to steal $350,000 from a union welfare fund. Hasho was cleared in the second case. Records don’t indicate what happened in the first.

Hasho’s salary peaked in 2018, when he made just over $1 million as the union’s “president emeritus.” A memorial plaque on the wall of IBOTU’s Carle Place office praises his “exemplary leadership” and “dedication and tireless devotion,” which “provided the foundation upon which this organization now stands.”

Former Vice President Perry Scalza, Robert’s brother, was ejected from the Teamsters in 1994 after enrolling friends and family in a union health plan while denying insurance claims from actual union members.

Besides Local 713, IBOTU’s other sub-union is known as Local 7. There is little information available about its activities, what workers it represents, or what benefits it has won for them.

It has collected $18 million in dues since it was founded in 2018, and paid two-thirds of that money, taken straight from workers’ paychecks, to its leaders. All six are also on the payroll of Local 713. Beyond those salaries, Local 7 has spent nothing on typical union activities like contract negotiations and political organizing.

Two other IBOTU officers — Alfred Napolitano and Robert P. Vella — join Dombrowski, Vella Jr., and Scalza among the best-paid union officials in the country, each earning about $1 million in 2025, according to data from the US Department of Labor.

Other major New York unions spend far less on leadership salaries.

New York Focus’s attempts to interview union leadership were unsuccessful. A man who answered the phone at IBOTU offices declined to comment. When asked his name, he said, “That’s irrelevant,” and hung up the call shortly afterward.

When New York Focus visited the Carle Place office on a recent Thursday, a receptionist initially said that no union representatives were available because they only come to the office on Mondays. Eventually, a man who introduced himself as Robert Vella Jr., who made over $1 million last year as president of Local 7 and Secretary/Treasurer of Local 713, came to the front desk. He declined to answer any questions.

IBOTU also refused to answer questions about the large cash sums it has sent to a “union” that appears not to exist. Since 2021, Local 713 has sent over $1.4 million to an entity called IFWU Local 345, according to financial disclosures. The documents refer to IFWU as an “Independent Union,” but a US Department of Labor spokesperson said that the department “could not identify” any union with that name. New York Focus was unable to find any record of IFWU’s existence other than the cash it has received from Local 713.

The address listed for IFWU on Local 713’s financial disclosure forms points to a single-family house in Far Rockaway.

Amit Angel, a real estate investor who owns the house, told New York Focus by phone that he has “no idea” what IFWU is, and that he has rented the house for several years to a “regular family” who are “very quiet, nice people.” He declined to share the tenants’ contact information. On a recent Friday, no one responded when this reporter rang the doorbell several times, and an inquiry letter mailed to the house did not receive a reply. IBOTU did not answer questions about why it has sent over $1.4 million to IFWU.

Meanwhile, unionized home health aides at Caring Professionals — the company that invited IBOTU to block a more aggressive rival union — make “up to” $21 per hour, according to the company’s website, just above the legal minimum for New York City home care workers.

Local 713 and Caring Professionals have renewed the union’s contract several times. This is a contentious process in many workplaces, as unions seek raises and working conditions that management doesn’t want to grant. But for Caring Professionals and Local 713, it’s easy.

“It’s the template of the previous [contract], and you’re just updating it,” said Hagmann, the company’s COO. “It’s not a strenuous activity.”

As for the union making demands like big raises or benefit sweeteners, “that doesn’t happen here,” he said.

Hagmann doesn’t think Local 713’s leaders would ask for anything he’s unwilling to grant.

“They don’t strike me as the shakedown kind of people,” he said.

A Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy was patrolling near a strip mall in Watertown, 30 miles south of New York’s border with Canada, last December, when he spotted a Chevrolet cargo van. He noted three traffic violations: failing to turn on headlights, signaling improperly before making a turn, and driving with cracked glass.

The deputy, Shawn Bulger, stopped the vehicle and learned that the driver, a 52-year-old man, was a native of Brazil. He had a Pennsylvania driver’s license; his passenger was carrying a Brazilian passport. The deputy recorded in sparse detail what happened next: He called a Border Patrol officer “who came to assist.”

“Both individuals were detained and transported to BP Station for deportation,” he wrote.

The call to Border Patrol wasn’t necessary to address the alleged traffic violations, and it had nothing to do with any state crime. But that day, it was very much part of the county deputy’s job. He was conducting a special overtime patrol as part of his agency’s participation in Operation Stonegarden, a federal program that pays local law enforcement to work with US Border Patrol.

A New York Focus investigation has found that in some counties, the program has turned local cops into occasional immigration agents. Available records show that New York sheriff’s deputies on Stonegarden detail have reported turning over at least 24 immigrants to Border Patrol since 2023, mostly after traffic stops. That’s likely an undercount; the records are sourced from five of the 13 participating counties, and New York Focus’s tally does not include an additional 21 people whom deputies turned over to Border Patrol for reasons they did not explain in their reports.

Since 2009, a few years after the program launched on the US–Mexico border, Stonegarden has funneled tens of millions of dollars to the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which has doled out about $30 million to New York’s border counties for local deputies and police to conduct traffic stops and patrol marinas and trails. The counties also use Stonegarden funds to buy equipment, particularly surveillance technology like automatic license plate readers.

Several sheriffs told New York Focus that Stonegarden patrols have nothing to do with immigration enforcement, focusing instead on drug interdiction or preventing human trafficking. But at least three counties have used the funds to assist in immigration arrests, records show.

The revelations come as New York leaders vow to combat President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Earlier this year, the state enacted legislation banning a controversial type of formal partnership between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as a 287(g) agreement. Passed under the banner “local cops, local crimes,” the measure was a response to concerns that local police were assisting federal agents with immigration arrests.

“We’re sending a strong message to ICE: You will not weaponize local police officers against their own communities in the state of New York,” Governor Kathy Hochul said in January.

To obtain Operation Stonegarden contracts and daily activity reports, New York Focus filed public records requests to the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services and to all of the New York counties that participate in the program. Most counties denied the requests, claiming that the documents are exempt from disclosure, that they no longer had access to them, that only Border Patrol could release them, or that they had no records. New York Focus is continuing to press for the documents.

Yet the measure Hochul signed into law left local cops free to work with immigration agents outside of 287(g) agreements, including through lesser-known programs like Operation Stonegarden.

State Senator Andrew Gounardes, who’s among a group of legislators pushing for a broader ban on local collusion with immigration agents, said New York Focus’s findings regarding Stonegarden show why stricter policies are necessary.

“I think we should push for more guardrails and more answers to these questions, and ask why local police are being funded to turn people over to the federal government based on the suspicion that they’re here without status,” he said.

State Senator Rachel May, whose Syracuse-area district includes a sliver of Lake Ontario, described the program as potentially “an end-run around what we were trying to do” by banning 287(g) contracts.

Hochul and other Democrats have boosted Stonegarden, this year touting the $2.7 million award as part of millions in federal funding to “support counterterrorism and emergency preparedness efforts.” The governor’s public statements about the program don’t mention immigration enforcement.

In response to New York Focus’s findings, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office said in a statement that the governor “will always support local law enforcement in securing our borders and maintaining public safety.”

“This administration will not aid ICE in federal civil immigration enforcement,” the statement said. The spokesperson did not acknowledge that through Operation Stonegarden, local police are assisting Border Patrol — like ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security — with exactly that.

The federal government paid Jefferson County just over $800 for the 10-hour shift during which a deputy stopped the Brazilian man in Watertown, records show. The form the deputy completed to document his work that day included fields for number of vehicle stops, penal code violations — and total number of people turned over to Border Patrol.

The driver, who asked to be identified by his last name, Martins, told New York Focus that he and his brother-in-law had just left work at a construction site for a lunch break when the sheriff’s deputy pulled him over. He did have a cracked windshield, he said, but insisted he had signalled appropriately and didn’t need to turn on his lights because it was midday.

“He simply approached me so he could call Border Patrol,” Martins said.

Border Patrol agents showed up within 10 minutes, he said. Bulger didn’t write him a ticket, he added.

Bulger did not respond to a request for comment. Jefferson County Sheriff Peter Barnett did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

Martins, who had lived in the US for almost five years and was in the process of appealing a deportation order, wound up detained by ICE in the Broome County Jail for two months before a federal judge ordered a bond hearing. He was released on a $50,000 bond in early February; his family had to borrow money to pay it.

To keep up with payments, Martins works from 7:30 am to 8 pm almost every day at a construction site in Maryland, he said. His months-long detention was wrong, he believes, in part because of how it started, with a traffic stop on a cold winter day.

“I felt at that moment that my constitutional rights were being violated,” he said. “I felt that it was almost illegal.”

Every border county in New York receives funds through Operation Stonegarden, in amounts ranging from $100,000 to $325,000 this year, plus $90,000 for the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe.

Stonegarden’s funding for overtime patrols is meant to give deputies time and resources to help Border Patrol “secure U.S. international borders,” according to the counties’ contracts with the state. Deputies on a Stonegarden shift aren’t supposed to respond to regular calls involving local crimes unless necessary. Instead, they keep an eye on the interstates and state roads that run toward Canada, as well as waterways and trails near the border. They submit “daily activity reports” to the Department of Homeland Security to document each shift.

In Jefferson and Oswego counties, those reports show that deputies have helped detain at least 23 immigrants since 2023. Chautauqua County deputies turned over at least one person to Border Patrol in 2023. The records do not indicate that the people apprehended had recently crossed over into the United States.

In written responses to New York Focus’s questions, Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone said that Border Patrol has not directed departments participating in Stonegarden to enforce immigration law. At the same time, he wrote, department policy calls for contacting Border Patrol when officers encounter undocumented immigrants during criminal investigations or arrests.

Documents and video footage obtained by New York Focus show how some of the arrests unfolded.

On April 1, 2025, Oswego County Deputy Michael Fera summarized his shift with the line: “Turned over 8 illegal immigrants to USBP.”

Body camera footage from that day shows a deputy pulling over a red pickup truck near a church in Fulton, New York.

“You took like a big winding right, then you were just speeding a little quick back here,” the deputy says. The driver tells him that he and his passengers — all men in work clothes — are on their way to a construction job.

As the deputy walks back to his vehicle, holding the man’s license and registration, he crosses paths with a Border Patrol agent.

“Sup, man,” the deputy says. The two men bump fists. At the end of the 23-minute video, Border Patrol agents lead two of the truck’s passengers into their van.

That same day, an Oswego County deputy conducted another traffic stop that resulted in Border Patrol detaining several more people on their way to work, including a man named Antelmo Labato. In an incident report, Fera wrote that he had been patrolling with a Border Patrol agent when they arrested Labato.

The agent later told him that Labato had a 15-year-old US citizen son who would have no other guardians once Labato was deported, the deputy wrote. He contacted the county Department of Social Services so they could look for a foster family for the boy, who eventually joined his father in Mexico. Fera declined to comment.

Many of the immigration arrests initiated by Oswego County deputies, including Labato’s, were previously reported by Syracuse.com. Last year, the attorney general opened an investigation into the Oswego County Sheriff’s Office’s interactions with federal law enforcement involving immigration. The office declined to comment about Operation Stonegarden and told New York Focus it had no updates on its investigation into Oswego.

Oswego County Sheriff Don Hilton did not respond to emails and phone messages requesting comment. Last year, he told the Oswego Palladium-Times that a small fraction of traffic stops his deputies conducted resulted in a call to Border Patrol. Half of those calls involved an ongoing criminal investigation, and the other half were to ask federal agents for translation help, he said. Syracuse.com reported earlier this year that the sheriff’s office said its deputies had conducted no stops with federal agents in 2026.

In another body camera video, an Oswego sheriff’s deputy pulls over a white box truck with expired registration and discovers that the two men inside, who only speak Spanish, lack driver’s licenses. He calls a tow truck to take the vehicle they’re not allowed to drive — and a Spanish-speaking Border Patrol agent to “explain the tickets.”

The men waited nearly an hour for the agent to arrive. Local police in New York are allowed to contact federal agents to report that they suspect someone of being in the country illegally, but they can’t detain people for civil immigration offenses — like overstaying a visa — without a warrant. That includes situations where police hold someone longer than needed to process their criminal charges so immigration agents can arrive to pick them up, Attorney General Letitia James wrote in 2020.

When the agent finally arrives, he describes the traffic violations, then asks the men what countries they’re from and if they have documents to be in the US. The video doesn’t capture their full answers. The agent then pats the men down and directs them into his car.

“Good to go, bro,” the agent says to the Oswego deputy after he shuts the door.

Eleven of the Stonegarden immigration arrests that New York Focus identified took place in Jefferson County, a summer travel destination bordering Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Deputies reported turning over an additional 17 people to Border Patrol without specifying why they did so. Three of the confirmed immigration arrests took place in the first five months of 2026, the most recent timeframe for which New York Focus obtained records.

“Three subjects turned over to Border Patrol after a traffic stop on state Route 177 in the Town of Adams,” a deputy wrote after a Stonegarden detail in April.

The records show that Jefferson County deputies have also assisted Border Patrol agents with surveillance, sharing information about vehicles of interest with the agency’s Targeting Unit, which identifies people to arrest. On December 30, 2025, one officer spent 90 minutes surveilling a construction site in Watertown.

Sheriff’s departments in five counties told New York Focus that their agencies’ work with Stonegarden doesn’t involve immigration enforcement. That includes the two largest border counties in the state, Erie and Monroe. (Neither county agreed to make agency leaders available for interviews, and an Erie County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions.)

Instead, the departments said, the fund supports efforts to deter crime across an international border that receives far less attention than its southern counterpart.

“A civil immigration thing — that’s not what we do,” said Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck. “What we are concerned with is, is there some type of criminal activity connected to our border? Human trafficking, someone running guns or drugs.”

In response to questions from New York Focus, a US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said that Stonegarden enables to state and local law enforcement to “jointly enhance security along the United States land and water borders.”

Quattrone said that in Chautauqua County, the funding has been particularly useful to help his agency patrol Lake Erie and respond to marine emergencies. The resources Stonegarden provides are useful for boating accidents and search-and-rescue missions as well as working with federal partners “when activity on the lake raises legitimate border-security concerns.”

Records show that officers have spent much of their time during Stonegarden patrols conducting traffic stops that result only in citations. Some mention undercover purchases of illicit drugs or marijuana seizures. Deputies described participating in boat patrols on Lake Erie and snowmobile patrols on trails in the North Country. Many reports include lines like, “No suspicious activity was observed.”

New York Focus obtained daily activity reports from Cayuga and Wyoming counties that showed deputies on Stonegarden details recorded no immigration arrests.

“We do not enforce immigration laws in Wyoming County, and that is not part of that detail whatsoever,” said Undersheriff Colin P. B. Reagan. “We’re not asking about citizenship, we’re not asking anything like that.”

Yet with little oversight from the state, the program has sometimes resulted in the kind of formal working relationship between New York law enforcement and immigration agents that state leaders have vowed to halt.

The state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services said that Stonegarden funding “supports the fight against terrorism and transnational crime.” After New York Focus shared the key findings in this story, an agency spokesperson said that Stonegarden is “not related to civil immigration enforcement so we do not track or deal with immigration issues in the management of the grant program.”

In New York and nationally, Operation Stonegarden has largely flown under the radar, in part because it’s relatively small compared to other federal law enforcement programs, costing less than $100 million annually. A 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found weak oversight of Stonegarden spending and little effort to measure what it was actually achieving.

“Border Patrol is unable to accurately depict how border security has been enhanced by program funds,” the report noted.

Many of the daily activity reports reviewed by New York Focus contain few details. Sometimes, officers reported conducting no stops of any kind during a Stonegarden shift.

In Chautauqua County, where deputies frequently reported patrolling local beaches and marinas and talking to community members, one report appeared to satirize uneventful shifts.

“On today’s tour I showed up with a half unbuttoned shirt, dirty boots, and coppehagen in my mustache,” said a report filed in May 2023, referring to a brand of dipping tobacco. “I sat around for about an hour and a half. I drove to Hanover and got a cup of coffee and a doughnut. I went to sunset and stared at the beach for about 3 hours. Then I drove to Pizza Village and ordered ½ turkey sub, slice of pizza, deep fried mushrooms, and a root beer. I then drove to Ripley for another chew and a nap, by that time it was 2300 and I was $450 less broke, end of tour.”

Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone told New York Focus that the report was completed by someone other than the deputy under whose name it was filed “as a practical joke.”

“How it ended up in the official files I do not know,” he wrote. “The individual who completed the report has been dealt with appropriately.”

Since President Trump returned to office, officials and residents in some counties have criticized the program for potentially opening the door for local police to conduct immigration enforcement.

Last year, seven Monroe County legislators voted against accepting Stonegarden funds. This year, the grant drew more opposition, and activists who oppose local collaboration with immigration authorities launched a campaign to try to defeat it.

“We recognize that other law enforcement agencies across the country may elect to use this agreement to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement,” Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Michael Fowler wrote to county lawmakers last month. “However, our law enforcement powers are granted by NYS and we must follow NYS law. Therefore, we are prohibited from Immigration enforcement duties by NYS law.”

On August 11, the legislature voted 17–12 to accept the funding.

Earlier this year, after New York Focus uncovered that Oswego County sheriff’s deputies held immigrants at traffic stops until Border Patrol agents arrived, residents packed a meeting of the county legislature to call for police to stop working with immigration authorities. A woman named Connie Alpeter brought up Stonegarden.

“Even counties without formal ICE agreements can still contribute to immigration enforcement activities,” she said. “This is why Operation Stonegarden deserves closer public scrutiny.”

In the past, incarcerated people’s friends and loved ones could send fresh produce in care packages, or even pick it up before visits from farm stands just outside the gates of some facilities. But in 2022, New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) banned most outside packages from friends and family, closing off crucial sources of fresh fruits and vegetables. (Disclosure: One of the authors helped found the Sing Sing Family Collective, which distributed produce to families visiting loved ones at that prison and fought the ban.)

In a statement provided to New York Focus, a DOCCS spokesperson wrote that the department had moved to limit packages except from private vendors at the recommendation of the Prison Violence Task Force, in an effort to address “the significant increase in the number of packages found to contain contraband drugs and weapons.”

DOCCS data shows that while contraband seizures in the package room have fallen 96 percent since the package ban took effect, violence in New York prisons has continued to increase. The lack of fresh produce may be making the problem worse, as a growing body of research links poor nutrition to mood disorders and increased levels of aggression in institutionalized populations.

A 2024 law that sought to expand access to farm-fresh produce in state prisons has proven toothless in practice. As a result, a recent report by the Correctional Association of New York (CANY), an independent state prison oversight body, found that incarcerated New Yorkers are fed a diet that fails to meet nutritional standards and contains nearly twice the recommended amount of sodium, risking their long-term health.

DOCCS maintains that its standardized menu and portion list are reviewed by trained dieticians to ensure compliance with dietary guidelines. In response to written questions, a spokesperson for DOCCS wrote, “The Department’s accredited food production center supplies food to all state correctional facilities in compliance with state law that requires incarcerated individuals be provided with a sufficient quantity of wholesome and nutritious food. This includes daily fresh fruits and vegetables.”

The department’s online cafeteria menu appears to contradict this claim, showing no more than three to four servings of fresh fruit or vegetables most weeks. And while the spokesperson noted that “DOCCS procures a very large amount of fresh produce from NYS farms,” they also explained that “Fresh produce may be served as a standalone item or incorporated into meals as prepared by the Food Production Center.” In other words, the department counts produce used as ingredients in meals that are cooked in a central processing facility, then frozen, distributed to correctional facilities across the state, and reheated as fulfilling its mandate to provide fresh produce.

The agency acknowledged that sodium levels in DOCCS meals exceed nutritional recommendations but told New York Focus that they’re only 42 percent higher than the maximum recommended quantity if “minimum portions of starches are consumed.”

Since DOCCS instituted its package ban, incarcerated people looking to supplement the limited produce options in the mess hall or commissary have had to pre-order packages of fruits and vegetables from private vendors. Those packages offer a wider variety. For instance, one vendor offers avocados, pineapples, and mangos, among other options. But perishable food can sit in prison package rooms for as long as three weeks before staff deliver it. Nearly half of all incarcerated people surveyed by CANY reported that their food packages had spoiled as a result of delays. Others told CANY they had experienced inconsistent access, thanks to suspected theft or allegedly arbitrary denials by correctional officers.

“I’ll never order a fresh produce package again. They always are spoiled,” said Samuel Bush, who said he ordered produce packages four times while incarcerated at Green Haven, a men’s prison in Dutchess County. “They turned fruit into contraband.”

The DOCCS spokesperson said that incarcerated people should use established grievance procedures if they receive spoiled produce, but described the program as a success.

New York lawmakers tried to address the broader problem in 2024. A bill sponsored by Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs and Senator Cordell Cleare required the state corrections commissioner to create a program purchasing fresh produce from New York farms and distributing it to prisons for “wholesome and nutritious food.”

The law took effect immediately when Governor Kathy Hochul signed it that November. But the bill set no minimum purchase, no mandatory frequency for serving fresh produce, and no public reporting requirements. Consequently, the current statewide menu remains identical to the one in effect before the law passed.

“Even if they’re getting two apples, they’re in compliance with the law,” said Sumeet Sharma, CANY’s director of policy and communications. “The legislator gets to claim a win, but it’s not a win—it’s just the status quo.”

Assemblymember Gibbs did not respond to calls for comment.

The impacts of substandard prison nutrition are difficult to quantify. DOCCS does not publicly disclose the prevalence of chronic health conditions in its prisons. Nonetheless, the link between nutrition and long-term health outcomes is well-established. The American Heart Association advises that overconsumption of processed foods and inadequate access to fresh produce can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, including heart attacks and strokes. And that’s just as much the case in prisons as on the outside.

“People’s bodies don’t respond differently just because they’re in prison,” said Leslie Soble, an ethnographer and co-author of a 2025 book on food in prison.

Christopher Wynn, who is incarcerated at Green Haven, has high blood pressure and recently had a stroke — conditions he attributes partly to the food available to him in prison.

“Everything in the cafeteria is soy, or ultra-processed in the commissary,” he said, and he doesn’t have the money to regularly order produce packages. “I can’t afford it. Most of us can’t.”

It’s impossible to conclusively connect a particular stroke to a prison menu. But medical experts, including the Centers for Disease Control, note that eating fresh produce is a key factor in reducing the risk of strokes and improving recovery outcomes.

Exacerbating the problem, said Sharma, is the lack of transparency around the nutritional content of food in DOCCS facilities. New York’s law that requires restaurants and other food providers to publish the nutritional content of their meals does not apply to state prisons.

The lack of nutritious food might also be affecting the health of prison facilities themselves. Recent studies have found that providing improved nutrition through diet or supplements can lead to reductions in reported incidents of misconduct and violence by as much as 37 percent.

“If a new, high-tech security system promised to reduce prison stabbings and assaults by over 30 percent, legislatures would eagerly allocate millions to procure it. Yet, a significantly more effective remedy is already within arm’s reach, hiding in plain sight inside the facility cafeteria,” wrote John Koufos, project lead of the Correctional Leaders Association’s Healthy Prisons, Healthy Communities initiative, in a recent op-ed for The Hill. His organization is working with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to encourage “Make America Healthy Again” policies behind bars.

“When you look at diets inside, you see that they are impairing people’s ability to heal from trauma and make good decisions and participate in community in the best way possible,” added Soble.

This is a fixable problem. Other prison systems have shown that fresh produce can be served at scale. California’s Harvest of the Month program, which partners with small- and medium-sized farms to bring locally-grown fruits and vegetables into prison meals, was piloted at three prisons in 2023 and now operates statewide.

“We could get things in that would never show up on prison trays, and we were able to get them served,” said Soble, who helped launch the program while working as a program manager for Impact Justice, a nonprofit focused on prison reform.

New York already runs horticulture programs at some prisons. At least 13 DOCCS facilities participate in the Harvest Now program, which has contributed more than 300,000 pounds of produce grown at state prisons to New York food pantries since 2016. None of the produce grown at DOCCS facilities is served to incarcerated people.

More immediately, DOCCS could restore avenues for produce access that existed before the 2022 package policy, such as allowing families to bring produce during visitation. DOCCS could also increase the number of fresh produce items served in facility cafeterias.

“They need to change the policy, at least let us receive produce through the package room during visits,” Bush said. “I did not get sentenced to malnutrition.”

“A lot of teenagers don’t want to talk to adults because they don’t want to be judged,” she said.

Ortega is a peer mentor with the teen pregnancy prevention initiative at Children’s Aid, which provides sexual health education to New York City youth in schools, community centers, and foster care facilities. But parts of the initiative will soon come to an end. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration launched an effort to gut and reshape an Obama-era federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy, which Children’s Aid had relied on for over 10 years to provide sexual education in vulnerable communities.

As part of that overhaul, the federal Department of Health and Human Services notified the nonprofit that it was terminating its grant effective immediately, two years before it was set to expire. “The reason provided was that the initiative no longer aligned with HHS’s priorities,” said Rhonda Braxton, a vice president at Children’s Aid.

The organization is among three New York grantees that are losing over $4.3 million in annual federal funding to support evidence-based sexual health education for over 19,000 young people each year.

The funding cuts come at what reproductive health advocates describe as a critical time. Although the national teen birth rate remains near a historic low, teen pregnancy rates in New York state and New York City rose between 2021 and 2023 — the first increase in two decades, according to the latest available state and city data. (A vast body of research has linked teen pregnancy and birth to difficulty completing high school, pursuing higher education, and getting well-paying jobs.)

Of 67 federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, all but 14 have been terminated as HHS shifts its focus to abstinence-based initiatives.

Last week, members of New York’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. urging him to reinstate funding to the three programs that lost it.

Braxton said Children’s Aid’s initiative relies on building trust with youth, and goes beyond pregnancy prevention to address positive body image, sexually transmitted infections, and healthy decision-making.

Now, Braxton said, “young people are losing those trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and mistrust.”

Children’s Aid is looking for more funding to make up for the loss of the $936,700 annual grant. If it can’t find it, the nonprofit will have to eliminate most of its programming, including many of its peer mentors and sex ed at the city’s Children’s Center, a temporary intake facility for children awaiting placement in foster care. (Youth in foster care experience higher rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth than their peers, research shows.)

In their letter to HHS, lawmakers wrote that Children’s Aid was the only organization providing sexual health education “to a highly vulnerable population that may be at increased risk of trafficking, sexual abuse, and unplanned teen pregnancy.”

HHS also canceled funding for NYC Teens Connection, a city program that partners with schools, foster care agencies, and juvenile justice programs to improve teens’ decision-making skills and connect them with local health clinics. Since 2010, the initiative has worked with over 400 organizations and served nearly 130,000 teenagers across the five boroughs.

It’s now set to lose $3.9 million in funding over the next two years, putting 15 staff members at risk of losing their jobs. New York City Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said in a statement that the initiative and others like it have helped contribute to a 79 percent decrease in teen pregnancies in New York City over the last three decades.

“Teenagers want truth and honesty from the adults in their lives, and programs that center the real-world experience of the young people they serve,” Vick said.

There were over 20,000 fewer teen pregnancies in New York City in 2023 than in 2000. But lawmakers and advocates say that post-pandemic increases in the city’s teen pregnancy rate underscore the need for comprehensive sex ed: Between 2022 and 2023, teen pregnancy rates increased across all boroughs other than Brooklyn. It’s unclear what exactly drove the trend, but the city’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey reflected an increase in the number of sexually active students not using contraception since 2021.

The cuts also eliminate $1.4 million annually for the HOPE Buffalo program, run by health care nonprofit Cicatelli Associates. The program helped drive a 36 percent decline in teen pregnancy rates across high-poverty Buffalo neighborhoods from 2015 to 2020, according to the group.

Cicatelli Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

Meredith Ouderkirk, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York, which partnered with Cicatelli to offer the program, said that because New York is run by Democrats, people may assume that everyone has access to comprehensive sex ed. But the state’s sex ed mandate is limited and gives school districts significant discretion, she said, making a child’s access to evidence-based sex education dependent on where they live.

The state Department of Health, which does not currently receive funding through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said it may be able to fill gaps left by the federal cuts through its own initiatives that fund community-based projects.

Reproductive health organizations are less optimistic.

“If this changes the ability to reach even one young person and that results in an unintended pregnancy, that can be life-changing and devastating,” Ouderkirk said.

The guards had accused Brown of hiding contraband in his rectum, though they didn’t say what the contraband was, and Brown denied having anything. Still, he says they replaced his prison uniform with a hospital gown — which he said was stained and smelled like feces — gave him what he described as a “bucket,” and told him to pass the banned item and give it to them.

Brown says he spent the next eight days in the room, giving officers stool after stool. None had any foreign objects in them, but he says the guards told him the stool was always an “insufficient amount” and thus didn’t prove his innocence. They gave him cups of water, but it was barely enough to drink and clean himself. “You can’t shower, I got defecation all over my body,” he said. As the days passed, the room’s overhead lights never turned off.

“I was literally losing my mind in there,” Brown said.

Do you or your loved one have experience with DOCCS's "defecation rooms"? New York Focus wants to hear from you. Reach out to reporters Chris Gelardi and Raina Lipsitz at chris@nysfocus.com and raina.lipsitz@gmail.com.

Corrections officers keep incarcerated people in similar rooms across New York’s state prison system. According to a prison agency directive, officers can confine someone in one of the rooms if they have “probable cause” to believe they’ve swallowed contraband or inserted it into their rectal cavity. Officially called “special watch” or “contraband watch” rooms, they’re meant to facilitate the safe recovery of drugs, weapons, or other prohibited items that prisoners have hidden in their bodies.

Incarcerated people call them by a different name — “shit rooms” — and say they’re ripe for abuse.

“It is part and parcel of the torture, brutality, and abuse endemic to New York’s prisons,” said Jerome Wright, the formerly incarcerated co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, a New York-based advocacy group.

The rooms stirred up limited controversy in 2019, when a formerly incarcerated man sued Elmira Correctional Facility for holding him in a “defecation room” for 61 days. Officers claimed that X-rays showed a “razor-type weapon” in his rectum, but they never recovered one. (Federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, asserting that the prison was maintaining “security.”)

Since then, the rooms have eluded public scrutiny, though prisoners have continued to allege mistreatment within them. In 2021, another man sued the state for keeping him in a watch room in Elmira for over two months without recovering any contraband; a court ruled in his favor, awarding him $6,390 for wrongful confinement. Yet another man claimed that officers at the now-closed Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in northeastern New York, locked him in a special watch room for five days with no food or water. He was hospitalized for dehydration, he alleged in a lawsuit — then locked back in the room for another week. (Officers said they later found drugs in the Great Meadow watch room; the man claimed they planted them. The prison agency denied the allegations in the lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds.)

In a statement, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state prison system, said that “special watch is a security measure designed to prevent the introduction of dangerous contraband into correctional facilities and to protect incarcerated individuals, staff, and visitors.” It said that prisoners on special watch are given hygiene items and a basin of water to wash themselves, and that “lighting is maintained throughout the watch to facilitate continuous observation and ensure the safety and security of the individual and staff.”

Critics argue that the rooms are cruel overkill.

“It’s a completely inhumane practice,” said state Senator Julia Salazar, who heads her chamber’s corrections committee. While drugs remain a particularly serious safety issue in prisons, she said, the rooms are a misguided way of intercepting them.

“The response is crazy and no longer about mitigating harm,” Salazar said. “They’ve really lost the thread.”

In 2023, Jayquan Griffin was in a recreation yard at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, in the Catskills, when a fellow prisoner punched him, breaking his jaw.

Officers took him to a hospital, where a CT scan revealed a metallic object in his “rectal area.” He later told medical providers that he had accidentally swallowed a razor blade that he had wrapped in plastic and stowed in his mouth. Prison records indicate that DOCCS staff were convinced that he had inserted the weapon into his rectum.

Whatever the case, guards then transported Griffin, still with a broken jaw and a razor in his body, to nearby Eastern Correctional Facility, and placed him in a special watch room, according to two lawsuits he filed against DOCCS and the state.

Griffin tried to pass the weapon, but couldn’t. He told guards that the razor wouldn’t come out, but they insisted that he defecate it. After a day, officers took him to another outside hospital for X-rays, which showed that the blade was still inside him, but left without getting him treatment and took him back to the defecation room.

Hours passed, then days. As with Brown, Griffin wore a hospital gown in the room and couldn’t leave. There was no running water, and the lights stayed on at night. He was caught in a cycle of misery.

“I’m shitting, I’m giving it to them. My jaw is broke, I can’t eat. I’m in pain, I’m crying,” he told New York Focus. With the razor still in his intestines, he began to panic.

“I got something in me that could potentially take my life,” he said.

Griffin says he began complaining about everything he could think of, like chest pains, hoping officers would take him back to the hospital. After six nights under contraband watch at Eastern, they finally took him to Albany Medical Center, where doctors performed a colonoscopy to remove the blade and inserted titanium plates in his face. He remained hospitalized for nine days.

DOCCS said that it “does not comment on the specific circumstances of an individual case.”

During his ordeal, officers filed disciplinary tickets against Griffin for fighting, “violent conduct,” smuggling, and other infractions. He fought the charges and eventually got them reversed — but only after he’d spent most of the three months after his hospital stay serving out an isolation sentence, according to the lawsuits.

To Griffin, the experience illustrates a broader pattern of inhumane practices across the prison system.

“You can’t just treat people like animals,” he said.

According to DOCCS’s directive, prisons should generally release people from contraband watch within 48 hours, unless they fail to submit two “negative defecations” — though it doesn’t define that term nor limit how long staff can extend the watch period. If staff are relying on an X-ray or other radiological scan to accuse someone of holding contraband, the directive allows them to keep prisoners in watch rooms for up to seven days.

In practice, the convoluted parameters offer prisons wide discretion in determining how long to keep prisoners on watch. In response to the 2019 lawsuit against Elmira prison, a federal judge determined that DOCCS staff were allowed to repeatedly restart the special watch process each time they discovered “new evidence” that the incarcerated man was holding a razor in his rectum, resulting in his 61-day stint in the defecation room that ended with no contraband recovered.

In the years after that lawsuit, New York overhauled the laws governing isolation in prisons and jails. The Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, which went into effect in 2022, strictly limits the scenarios in which facilities can keep incarcerated people locked in a room for more than 17 hours a day. Under HALT, that severe form of isolation can’t last longer than 15 days, and it must include at least four hours of daily out-of-cell time. Prisons also can’t hold incarcerated people in those strict conditions unless they’ve scheduled a prompt hearing to determine whether the person violated a rule that makes them eligible for punitive isolation.

Extended contraband watch violates those requirements, according to both Salazar, who sponsored the HALT bill, and the HALT Solitary Campaign, which led the movement to pass it. It’s one of many instances over the past four years in which DOCCS either ignored the law or sought to carve out exceptions to it, the advocates allege.

In its statement, DOCCS said that “contraband watch is a security and safety measure, not a disciplinary action.”

“The procedures are separate from the disciplinary confinement process addressed by HALT,” the agency said.

That’s not a distinction that exists in the law, advocates argue. While HALT carves out exceptions for medical care and facility-wide emergencies, its limits on isolation apply to “any form of cell confinement,” according to the text of the law.

Brown’s first trip to the Green Haven defecation room came after a visit with his wife, Megan Murtagh.

In 2025, DOCCS enacted a policy requiring most visitors to pass through advanced imaging body scanners before seeing their incarcerated loved ones. Countless visitors — particularly women — have alleged that DOCCS staff misread their scans, banning them from facilities after mistaking tampons, contraceptive devices, piercings, scars, and other bodily anomalies as hidden contraband, as New York Focus reported last December.

If they want to avoid a strip search, incarcerated people must also go through the body scanners after visits. On May 27, when Brown passed through a scanner after a visit with Murtagh, he says guards claimed to see something. Throughout his eight days in the defecation room, he says he asked the guards to scan him again, but they refused.

A week after he was released from contraband watch, Murtagh returned to Green Haven. No longer trusting the body scanners, Brown chose to end the visit with a strip frisk. This time, an officer who searched him reported that he “suspected” that Brown was “hiding contraband in his rectum area,” according to a memo the officer wrote. When guards told Brown they were taking him back to contraband watch, he got upset and pulled away, at which point seven officers shoved him against the wall and forced him to the ground, according to a use of force report.

Brown says he then spent another week in the defecation room. Again, prison staff didn’t say what the alleged contraband was and never recovered anything. They charged Brown with assaulting staff and refusing an order, among other violations, and released him from contraband watch directly to solitary confinement. Jeffrey Parks, a paralegal from Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, represented Brown in his disciplinary proceedings and was later able to get most of those charges overturned.

Separately, Murtagh received a letter from DOCCS in mid-June stating that the agency was indefinitely suspending her visitation privileges because her husband had allegedly “failed to clear the body scanner and was later found to be in possession of contraband,” then was “again found to be in possession of contraband.” Murtagh is appealing the suspension. She and Brown both deny possessing or hiding any contraband, and Parks said that the prison never substantiated any of its claims that Brown was attempting to smuggle banned items.

Asked about the lack of evidence, DOCCS alleged that a woman who visited Brown at a different facility in 2024 was caught with 22 grams of marijuana. It didn’t comment on the allegations from May and June.

“I have never once seen any articulation of what the contraband was supposed to have been,” Parks wrote in an email, “probably because it never existed.”

“The DA’s fed up, they say you belong in prison,” Judge Matthew D’Emic told the man. “I’m not saying that. I’m trying to help you.”

D’Emic runs the Brooklyn Mental Health Court. Instead of sending the man back to jail, he was releasing him to a residential treatment facility. Colorful decorations softened the courtroom. A banner on D’Emic’s bench read, “Hello summer,” and images of tropical fruit adorned the walls.

“The question is,” D’Emic said, “How do we give you a foundation for the rest of your life that is built on bedrock and not on sand?”

The defendants on D’Emic’s docket typically live with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Most arrive in his courtroom facing felony charges related to assault, robbery, or burglary. In exchange for a guilty plea, they can access community-based mental health treatment, supportive housing, and other services. If they complete the court-supervised program, their charges are generally reduced or dismissed.

For many participants, it pays off. Recent graduation rates from the program have ranged from 73 to 87 percent, according to data from the Center for Justice Innovation, which runs the court in partnership with the state judicial system. An evaluation of the court found that participants tend to see significant reductions in re-arrest.

More than 40 mental health courts like D’Emic’s have sprung up across New York state since the early 2000s, part of a growing effort to provide alternatives to incarceration. Their goal, proponents say, is to stabilize vulnerable New Yorkers, interrupt cycles of hospitalization and incarceration, and create safer communities. Research, though limited, suggests that they can be effective at reducing recidivism and driving increased use of mental health services.

But while New York state’s network of mental health courts has expanded in recent years, its reach remains modest. Roughly 1,700 people were active, compliant participants in mental health courts statewide last year, according to data from the Office of Court Administration for the New York State Unified Court System obtained through a FOIL request.

About half of New York’s 62 counties still don’t have a mental health court. Unlike drug courts, which serve people with substance use issues, mental health courts aren’t required by state law. “You walk over an invisible line that divides two counties, and the legal outcomes are completely different,” said Leanne Lapp, the public defender in Ontario County, near Rochester. (A law signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December provides a stopgap, allowing a case to be transferred from a county that doesn’t have a mental health court to a neighboring one that does.)

Graphic: Eliza Fawcett / New York Focus

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, widely seen as a model for judicial diversion, a total of 1,560 people have graduated from the program from when it opened in 2002 to the end of last year. Meanwhile, about 1,600 people with a serious mental illness were incarcerated in New York City jails in December alone. Judicial diversion can be powerfully effective, participants and advocates say, but it’s a path that’s open to very few New Yorkers who might benefit from it.

In a statement, Al Baker, spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, said that the court system “relies on deep, differentiated assessments of every individual” to determine eligibility for mental health courts. Many incarcerated people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness don’t meet the criteria for diversion, he noted, and some who would be eligible for diversion choose to litigate their cases.

The leadership of the state’s court system has pledged to expand access to these courts. A dozen counties have mental health courts in development, in addition to the 30 counties with existing programs, according to Baker.

“Our goal is to have one in every county as soon as we possibly can,” Judge Debra Young, who coordinates statewide problem-solving courts, told New York Focus during an interview in her Troy courtroom. “I’m approving documents for new courts on an almost daily basis.”

Proponents of mental health courts say the legislature needs to invest more resources in this system and enshrine it in state law to maximize its impact. A proposed reform, the Treatment Court Expansion Act, would standardize mental health courts, widen eligibility for diversion, and reduce plea requirements, among other changes. The bill has repeatedly stalled in the state legislature in recent years, despite support from Court of Appeals Chief Judge Rowan Wilson and Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has also expressed support for the measure, which he described earlier this year as “one part of what it can look like to ensure that we are closing Rikers Island.” His office did not respond to requests for comment.

At a rally at the state capitol in May, Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, who represents parts of Brooklyn and has sponsored the Assembly version of the bill, urged the governor to support the bill. “It’s a damn shame,” she said, “that when we have somebody facing a psychotic break, or they’re struggling with depression, or they’re struggling with trauma, we say at this time, ‘The only answer that you’ll get is punishment.’”

While mental health courts can be life-altering, routing a defendant into treatment can be an exceedingly slow process. Some delays in the diversion process are inevitable, like waiting for the right services to come together. But extending incarceration has a serious cost, and can exacerbate symptoms of mental illness.

In early 2019, Tracy Barber, a longtime Manhattan resident, was in a destabilizing period of her life. She was in a troubled relationship, struggling with alcoholism, and had uneven access to her antipsychotic medication. One night, she pushed an acquaintance during a dispute and landed on Rikers Island with a felony assault charge.

While incarcerated, her mental health sharply declined.

“I just was not in touch with reality,” said Barber, 48, who has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. “The social workers would come by to see me, and I would just stare at them.”

Barber had difficulty accessing the right medication and spent a couple months at a jail psychiatric ward. She started hearing voices, stopped eating, and lost a significant amount of weight.

Many months later, a reprieve arrived: diversion into the Manhattan Mental Health Court. Over the next year, she participated in an outpatient rehabilitation program, worked with a therapist, and attended regular court dates.

“Mental health court is wonderful,” Barber said. “Obviously, what brings people into mental health court is not. But it’s the process of mentorship, and within the community, which is where I think change can really happen. I don’t know if jail really reforms anyone, rehabilitates anyone. I think it just breaks people.”

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, it can take more than a year to divert a case from jail, according to Center for Justice Innovation data. Last year, the median time from arrest date to first contact with mental health court clinical staff was 265 days — nearly nine months. For the typical participant, it took another 104 days to find out if they were eligible for the court, followed by an additional 56 days to actually start the program.

Demand for the court has been increasing. Aside from a dip during the pandemic, the court’s number of active participants has grown modestly but steadily, from 308 in 2019 to 364 last year. Referrals — typically from public defenders — are also up, and have increasingly outpaced the number of new participants the court accepts each year.

Graphic: Eliza Fawcett / New York Focus

In Manhattan, the drawn-out process can be “very discouraging” for people with serious mental illness, said Rebecca Azuga, a trial attorney at New York County Defender Services.

One of Azuga’s clients, a woman with schizophrenia facing multiple felony charges, recently spent about 10 months on Rikers Island, waiting to see if she could enter the Manhattan Mental Health Court. She was motivated to access treatment and wanted to be reunited with her young daughter, Azuga said. But leaving jail hinged on how a prosecutor evaluated her case. Diversion typically involves a risk assessment and the victim’s consent.

In April, Azuga said that her client often felt “hopeless,” because it seemed like nothing was happening. The following month, after nearly a year in jail, she was able to enter the Manhattan Mental Health Court.

“She was almost in disbelief that it was going to happen because of how much it had been pushed back,” Azuga said.

When Azuga’s client was released, she had one request: that her mother bring her Chipotle. In the months since then, she has settled into her residential treatment program, consistently following her treatment plan. Her daughter has been able to come for visits.

Baker, spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration, said in a statement that the court system “works closely with all our partners to streamline procedures and reduce delays wherever possible while ensuring that each case is carefully reviewed to protect the safety and security of participants and preserve the integrity of our court initiatives.”

In a late June New York City Council hearing focused on addressing delays in case processing across the court system, Chief Administrative Judge Zayas emphasized the importance of efficient diversion into mental health courts and other specialized programs.

“The faster we engage these individuals with the services and treatments they need, the more likely these interventions are able to be effective,” he said.

Mental health courts aren’t universally accepted as a solution to the significant proportion of people with mental illness in jails and prisons. Critics point to the risk of making access to treatment contingent on arrest and the reality that some participants don’t graduate and are ultimately sentenced to incarceration. Ira Burnim, senior counsel at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said that instead of bolstering judicial systems, deeper investments should be made in earlier interventions like crisis services, wraparound outpatient treatment programs, supportive housing, and employment assistance.

Advocates of these courts, like Nathan McLaughlin, the executive director of NAMI New York State, agree that early interventions are critical. But they argue that some people with serious mental illness will still land in jail — and deserve an off-ramp.

“Mental health court provides that sort of final diversion point that can actually be transformative because of its intensity,” McLaughlin said.

Still, even the most well-intentioned efforts to divert vulnerable people from jail hinge on the availability of local providers — residential treatment programs, supportive housing placements, and other services to which diversion courts refer their participants.

Dr. J. Steven Lamberti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said he sees mental health courts as an important option for people with serious mental disorders facing criminal charges. But the expansion of diversion programs must be matched with investments in community mental health systems, he emphasized.

“Any diversion approach is only as effective as the services that people are diverted to,” Lamberti said.

The mental health court in Ontario County, perched near one of the Finger Lakes, sees just a few cases each week. The county doesn’t have the service resources of nearby Rochester, said Lapp, the public defender.

Finding housing for mental health court program participants can be a challenge, Lapp said, as can identifying treatment options for people with complex cases.

“It’s my hope that when we expand mental health courts — and I think we will — that treatment providers will rise up to meet that need,” said Lapp, who supports the Treatment Court Expansion Act.

Similar hurdles persist in New York City, including significant waitlists for supportive housing, which offers tenants health care and social services in addition to a place to live, and the limited availability of beds in residential treatment programs.

Harbor House is a rare program that offers residential treatment for people with both serious mental illness and substance use disorders. Mental health court participants fill many of its 116 beds in the Bronx, said Miriam Vega, the CEO of Argus Community, the social services provider that runs the program. Harbor House clients receive integrated mental health treatment and substance use disorder counseling, as well as trauma-informed therapy, she said.

A typical stay at Harbor House is about 350 days, reflecting the significance of clients’ needs, she noted, and clients are often discharged to family or to supportive housing — which is often in short supply. As of late June, there were 36 people on Harbor House’s waitlist, according to Vega.

“If we could, we would open up one in every borough,” she said.

Experts and clinicians say that New York state needs deeper investments in treatment and housing programs for those in mental health court programs — and to ensure continued access to support after court supervision ends.

“Diversion is just the off-ramp from the criminal justice system,” said Ruth O’Sullivan, senior director of clinical practice at the Center for Justice Innovation. “But recovery is a lifelong process.”

At the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, participants often spend a year or more in the program, and their progress rarely follows a straight line. Some turn up in the emergency room, or disappear on their way to supportive housing. But the court is a place of second, third — and fourth — chances.

Judge D’Emic described a case of a woman who seemed to thrive in a residential treatment program for half a year, only to disappear and later resurface with a petty theft charge. She’ll receive another chance at diversion, he said, “because the balance between public safety and trying to do right by her hasn’t tipped to public safety.”

David Kelly, chief of the mental health unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, pointed to the community benefit of helping people manage their mental illness and the cost-effectiveness of judicial diversion. But some time ago, he said, he had “a little bit of an epiphany.”

“I said to myself, ‘You know what? This is just the fair, the right way to resolve a lot of cases,’” he said. “I’m not so sure that I think it’s really the most important cost-saving thing to do. It might be the thing that’s most right and just.”

The litigation, filed this week by two public housing tenant associations, adds to the city’s extended legal fallout from the Adams administration, whose former aides and agency chiefs are facing old and new corruption charges pursued by local authorities and the feds. It also presents an opportunity for the courts to reassert oversight of the city’s sprawling surveillance tech, which has been exported to other municipalities around the country over the last decade.

The tenant associations allege that the Adams-era effort continues to violate multiple laws governing the use of surveillance technology and civil rights. New York City law requires the NYPD to publish comprehensive documents outlining how the department uses surveillance technologies months before they’re deployed. In this case, the NYPD never published those documents. Local law also explicitly prohibits “bias-based policing” practices, a reform that took effect after public outrage and judicial action on the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policies, which disproportionately subjected Black and Latino youth to warrantless searches on the street.

The lawsuit claims that the public housing surveillance expansion flies in the face of all that precedent. “This constant surveillance of public housing residents is not supported by individualized suspicion, nor has it received judicial approval,” the filing, submitted on behalf of the Langston Hughes and Samuel J. Tilden tenant associations, reads. “This warrantless activity constitutes an unlawful search.”

By focusing on public housing complexes in particular, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black or Latino, the lawsuit also alleges that the surveillance expansion “evinces a discriminatory intent against Black and Latino families, producing a foreseeable disparate impact on these communities.”

Years ago, the NYPD and the Adams administration went to elaborate lengths to hide this surveillance expansion from public view. Dipping into the contracting budget of the city’s technology agency, they covertly used infrastructure established under Adams’s much-hyped $100 million Big Apple Connect program, which eliminated the cost of basic internet plans for public housing residents. Under that program, the city installed new internet routers in common spaces throughout the city’s public housing complexes, allowing the NYPD to connect roughly 20,000 CCTV cameras operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) directly to the police department’s real-time surveillance system.

The NYPD had sought to tap into NYCHA camera feeds for more than a decade without any luck. Instead, police officers previously had to request permission from the housing authority to review footage from those cameras on-site when investigating crimes.

The real-time video surveillance component of the free internet program remained under wraps until a New York Focus investigation last summer. Four committees of the New York City Council held an emergency oversight hearing on the program a couple months later, where NYPD and NYCHA officials confirmed that police were using the new internet connections to stream footage from a select number of public housing security cameras, a number that, the officials said, would soon grow to encompass nearly the entire NYCHA CCTV portfolio over the ensuing months.

The footage, the police department confirmed, now goes straight to the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a counterterrorism and anti-crime data fusion tool that the city developed after 9/11. The system collects an enormous amount of information from surveillance cameras, license plate readers, emergency call logs, and legal databases, and syncs it with pattern-matching and facial recognition tools to support the NYPD’s “predictive policing” approach, informing where and how to allocate police resources.

Advocates have challenged the system before, arguing it infringes on privacy, reinforces racial bias in policing, chills freedom of expression, and may be used to support the federal government’s immigration crackdown. But details of how the program has been used thus far have been hard to come by. One of the lawsuit’s goals, in addition to halting the program, is to compel the NYPD to provide information about how it has used data collected through its expanded real-time surveillance footprint in police work and in court. “We’ve tried to get that information and we haven’t been able to,” said Anca Grigore, a senior attorney at the Brooklyn Defender Services and lead counsel on the case. “We can’t possibly know what discovery and what footage has been part of this program.”

Public housing tenants say they’ve also been kept in the dark about the program. Ciprian Noel, who serves as president of the tenant association at NYCHA’s Langston Hughes Houses and as vice president of one of the NYPD’s local community councils in Brooklyn, wrote in a sworn affirmation that despite his leadership role liaising with NYCHA and the police he was never informed of the surveillance expansion. He worries that the program, developed as it was with no independent oversight or room for public discussion, “will destroy bridges rather than build them” between police and public housing residents.

“I would prefer in person presence to them watching us behind cameras,” Noel wrote. “We want young people and officers to try to talk to and understand one another.”

Gina Boatright, who leads the tenant association at NYCHA’s Samuel J. Tilden Houses in Brooklyn, voiced similar concerns in another sworn affirmation submitted in the New York Supreme Court this week. “If I had been timely informed of this new surveillance arrangement and given an opportunity to do so, I would have personally submitted a public comment expressing my concern that residents will be harassed as a result of this access and surveillance,” she wrote. “When a crime has been committed, law enforcement can already obtain NYCHA’s permission to review the cameras. In my view, if law enforcement is given unrestricted access, officers will take advantage of that access.”

The NYPD and New York City’s Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

A nurse aide who worked at the facility and was concerned about the care residents were receiving texted the photos to their supervisor and posted them on social media. The inspector’s report expressed deep concern about the treatment of the residents, noting that graphic photos of them had been shared online, and that the home didn’t report the incident for three days.

Conditions like this aren’t supposed to happen anywhere, but they especially aren’t supposed to happen at this home, the Buffalo Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing.

In November 2024, Centers Health Care — the 37-facility nursing home chain that owns Buffalo Center — settled a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James that accused the chain of chronic neglect, understaffing, and running a years-long scheme in which its owners pocketed over $80 million in Medicaid funds meant for patient care. The settlement required the chain and its owners — healthcare moguls Daryl Hagler and Kenneth Rozenberg — to pay a $45 million fine, increase staffing to safe levels, and hire independent monitors to protect residents and prevent fraud. It did not seek to remove Hagler or Rozenberg from the company, and neither admitted wrongdoing under the settlement.

At the time, James said that the settlement would lead to “major reforms” that would “ensure residents receive the care they deserve.”

Under the agreement, Buffalo Center and three other nursing homes with especially egregious records are required to provide at least 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. That amount is still well below the roughly four hours that a landmark 2001 study sponsored by the federal government found was necessary for safe, top quality care.

But Buffalo Center has missed the target on 82 separate occasions from November 2024 to December 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. During that time span, at least three instances of abuse and unsanitary conditions have been reported at the facility.

“Folks living under 3.5 hours of care are living in deadly places,” said Sam Brooks, who studies nursing home policy at the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy group for residents’ rights. “You’ll see people unable to eat, people that don’t get out of bed, pressure ulcers that are gaping wounds.”

(The other three homes targeted in the lawsuit have complied with the 3.5-hour requirement, with only very occasional misses.)

The settlement also barred Centers Health Care from reducing the “staffing level or quality of care” at its other nursing homes in order to boost care at the four targeted facilities.

But in the 20 months since the settlement, multiple homes across the chain that weren’t part of the settlement reduced the amount of nursing care they provide. The lack of staff has coincided with at least six serious incidents including falls, injuries, and in one case, death of a resident. In three instances, staff initially failed to report the harms to state authorities, in apparent violation of state law.

New York Focus reached out to Centers Health Care, the individual homes, Hagler, Rozenberg, and their lawyers. None responded to multiple requests for comment.

Abuse allegations and unlivable conditions aren’t unique to the Centers Health Care chain. In 2025 alone, dozens of New York nursing homes were cited for conditions that placed residents in “immediate jeopardy” of injury or death, the most serious category of violation.

Still, Centers Health Care stands out. Despite its apparent violations of the settlement with the attorney general, it has not faced any punishment.

In response to questions, attorney general spokesperson Grant Fox said that the office is “actively reviewing Centers’ compliance with our settlement.”

“We will continue to investigate facilities to protect vulnerable New Yorkers,” Fox said.

The 2024 settlement specified that if Centers failed to improve, the attorney general could impose fines, reopen the lawsuit, or “take any other action authorized by law.” None of those things have happened. Instead, Centers nursing homes have continued to receive taxpayer money and accept new patients, while the same patterns of neglect that prompted the lawsuit continue.

These findings come from dozens of inspection reports and spreadsheets of employment data analyzed by New York Focus. The records do not contain worker or patient names or identifying details, but do provide daily staffing data and detailed accounts of failures in care.

Since its founding in 1996, Centers Health Care has grown into one of the largest nursing home chains in New York, with facilities in every region of the state. It is a massive recipient of public money: From 2014 to 2021, the four nursing homes targeted in the attorney general’s lawsuit received hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, the government insurance programs for elderly and low-income Americans.

Those millions continue to flow into Centers’s nursing homes. And for residents whose stays are not covered by the government, Centers charges up to $725 per day, far above the roughly $500 average New York rate. The chain frequently sues patients who don’t pay up.

State regulators have the authority to bar dangerous nursing home operators from receiving Medicaid money, the largest source of funding for nursing homes. But this runs the risk of leaving patients without other options, and it’s only happened five times in New York since 2005, according to data from the state Medicaid office.

New York isn’t the only state where Centers and its owners stand accused of fraudulently pocketing public funds and leaving patients to suffer. In January, New Jersey’s state comptroller sued Hagler and Rozenberg, after accusing them and numerous codefendants of diverting $124 million in Medicaid payments to themselves at two facilities where residents endured neglect, sexual assault, and death. The case remains pending.

At Buffalo Center, the same month that the photographs of exposed residents were taken, inspectors documented dozens of flies in patients’ rooms, crawling on residents’ bodies. A nurse said she believed flies were attracted to one particular unit because of a resident urinating on their mattress and floor. In an interview, the facility’s maintenance director told the state inspector that the facility had been working with an exterminator to address the issue.

New York law guarantees “individual dignity” to nursing home residents, but an administrator told an inspector that the flies were “not a dignity concern,” the inspector recorded. The administrator admitted that the environment was “not homelike,” a standard required by federal regulation.

The low staffing levels appear to have contributed to physical injuries as well.

In August, a resident suffered a deep gash to their face after a nurse aide rolled them out of their bed and onto the floor. When the accident occurred, a nurse aide was attempting to change the resident, who was incontinent, despite documentation that the task required two staff to be performed safely. The resident was “severely cognitively impaired” and could only rarely communicate with others. Their care plan noted that they were at risk of falls.

They were taken to the hospital, where they received surgery for the wound, which stretched from their mouth to their eye.

In September, Buffalo Center failed to report alleged abuse. In an email to an administrator, a resident’s guardian said that a nurse aide threatened to give the resident a cold shower and withhold food, and stepped on their foot, all as punishment for vomiting.

The email claimed that the aide’s behavior was “a form of abuse,” but Buffalo Center did not investigate the incident or report it to authorities. When questioned by inspectors, the administrator who received the emails said they “inadvertently missed the allegation of abuse,” and admitted that they “should have read the e-mails more closely.”

“When I think about that place it brings tears to my eyes because of the way they treated me,” Buffalo resident Tanica Johnson, 39, told New York Focus. She didn’t receive wound care or rehab for weeks on end, she said, despite having been sent to Buffalo Center to recover from an amputation of part of her leg due to complications from diabetes. She thinks her stay there lasted a year, but as one identical day after another slipped by, she lost track of time. “I don’t know how long I was in the place,” she said. “I just know it traumatized me.”

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said that in July 2025, Buffalo Center submitted plans to address the nonconsensual photography, fly infestation, and failures to report abuse, and that the facility was in compliance with the state Department of Health by September 2025. The attorney general was not aware of the fall or verbal abuse incidents, the spokesperson said.

Buffalo Center did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an article about recent incidents and fines, the facility told The Buffalo News that it “takes resident care, safety, and dignity very seriously,” and that it “continues to work closely with regulatory agencies and internal compliance leadership to ensure ongoing adherence to all standards of care and resident rights.”

The independent monitors that Centers was required to hire are set to cease operation on July 31, according to the terms of the settlement. But that can be extended if any of the nursing homes fail to comply with the monitors’ recommendations.

The attorney general’s spokesperson did not say whether the office plans to seek an extension of the monitor’s term.

Federal and state regulators issued multiple fines against Buffalo Center in response to the incidents. The state Department of Health fined the facility $8,000 over the nonconsensual photography of exposed and soiled residents — $2,000 for each resident — and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services issued fines totaling $139,471 over the inspections that revealed the fly infestations and the ignored abuse allegations.

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the facility made nearly $5 million in net income. The 2025 fines are less than four percent of that sum.

“These companies are making so much money that the fines just don’t mean anything to them,” said Charlene Harrington, an emeritus professor of sociology and nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. “They’re saving a lot of money by their understaffing.”

The legal actions that New York has taken against Centers and other nursing homes are some of the most aggressive efforts in the country, experts told New York Focus.

James’s office “has really been the leader in terms of holding nursing homes accountable,” said Richard Mollot, director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, which advocates for nursing home residents.

But the persistence of poor conditions and patient neglect at Centers facilities, even after the settlement, is “beyond depressing,” he said, and shows that lawsuits “can’t be our only strategy as a society to hold nursing homes accountable.”

New York’s health department can require nursing homes to hire independent monitors to protect patients, but this tool has only been used twice since the law took effect in 2020.

The state Department of Health did not respond to detailed questions for this article. “The Department is committed to holding nursing homes and their operators accountable for the quality of care they provide, and we remain aggressive in assessing the maximum fines permissible by law in every instance,” spokesperson John Emery said in a statement.

There are other tools available to states to try to hold chains like Centers accountable, but each has drawbacks, experts say.

The state could try to rescind Centers’s license to operate nursing homes or bar the company from receiving Medicaid and Medicare funding, which is the main source of cash for most nursing homes. But there’s a reason states are often reluctant to pursue this path: It’s not easy to find better options.

In fact, when faced with aggressive enforcement, a common response by nursing homes is to threaten to close, and leave their patients with nowhere to go, multiple experts told New York Focus.

“The operators have a bit of a stranglehold on states,” Brooks said. “There aren’t a bunch of really good actors out there waiting to swoop in and buy these homes.”

In extreme cases, federal and state prosecutors have brought criminal charges against nursing home operators.

Unfortunately, that route can also endanger vulnerable nursing home patients. When a health care operator is criminally convicted of health care fraud, they are automatically barred from receiving money from the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs. Since losing Medicaid money can force a nursing home to close and effectively evict its patients, regulators may be reluctant to pursue criminal charges against operators without a plan in place to protect the residents.

“What’s frustrating to me is that the regulatory system and legal system is very slow, and these are life and death issues,” Harrington said.

As Centers’s business has boomed, so have the personal fortunes of Hagler and Rozenberg. In 2021, Rozenberg took control of Israel national airline El Al, allegedly using money that he and Hagler siphoned out of the nursing homes, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit. Both men currently serve on the airline’s board.

Buffalo wasn’t the only Centers facility where residents continued to suffer. Federal data analyzed by New York Focus shows that the amount of nursing care at some other Centers Health Care facilities has dropped significantly in the year-and-a-half following the agreement.

For one resident of the Onondaga Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, that lack of care may have proved fatal.

On July 21, 2025, the resident fell in the bathroom and told staff they felt dizzy. While there was a licensed practical nurse on duty, there wasn’t a more highly trained registered nurse, who might have been able to assess that the falls were a symptom of something more serious.

That night, a care aide noted that the resident’s breathing was “wet sounding,” and later said that it “sounded like the resident was having trouble breathing.” A nurse said they would “let the right staff know.” If that happened, there is no indication in the incident report that anyone followed up with the resident.

At around 5:30 am, a different nurse found the resident in bed, nonresponsive, with no pulse or breath. The patient’s records showed that they wanted to be resuscitated in the event of an emergency, but the nurse did not have documented CPR certification and did not perform CPR, a violation of state and federal regulations.

Instead, they called 911. Emergency medical workers arrived about 15 minutes later, and soon after, they pronounced the patient dead.

The morning before the death, the resident’s lab results had shown that they were at serious risk for seizures and coma, according to a physician who later assessed the records. But no one reviewed the results until two days later — after the resident had died.

After failing to catch the warning signs, Onondaga Center also neglected to notify the authorities about what had happened. State regulations required the nursing home to report the failure to provide CPR to state regulators. But an unsigned investigation by the facility concluded there was “no evidence” of any “neglect, exploitation, or mistreatment” of the dead patient, so it did not need to be reported.

Calls and emails from New York Focus to Onondaga Center and Centers Health Care about this incident went unreturned.

In a phone call two months later, the director of nursing who was on staff at the time of the death told state investigators that the facility’s staff knew that they were required to report it, but chose not to act after “conversations with corporate staff who did not want it reported.”

After the inspection that revealed this failure, the federal government fined Onondaga Center $177,790, and the state issued a $10,000 fine for the failure to provide CPR. The attorney general’s spokesperson said that the office was not aware of the incident.

When asked about the drop in nursing hours at other Centers facilities after the settlement, the attorney general’s spokesperson said, “Centers is not required by the settlement agreement to implement recommendations from the [Independent Health Monitor] in facilities other than the four subject homes.”

The month of the death, residents at Onondaga Center received less than ten minutes of skilled nurse care per day, on average, and less than three hours of total care — both sharp decreases from the average in the months before the settlement.

Onondaga isn’t the only Centers facility to see a drop in nursing care, or to see that drop coincide with serious harm to residents.

At Washington Center for Rehab and Healthcare, in New York’s capital region, average daily nursing care at the facility has reached new lows since the settlement, dropping below three hours in January 2025 and remaining well below 3.5. In February 2025, a dementia patient fell out of bed after being left unattended and unsecured, bloodying their head and bruising both knees.

The injured patient was a known fall risk. Their care plan called for keeping their bed in a lowered position, placing barriers on both sides of the mattress, and putting protective mats on the floor. On February 12, after the patient had a bowel movement, the nurse aide attending to them went to get fresh linens, leaving the patient alone while the bed was elevated and barriers and mats were missing on one side. Soon after, a nurse heard the patient shouting, and entered the room to find them sprawled on the floor, with a bruised and bloodied head. Washington Center was fined $9,620 by the federal government and $2,000 by the state.

Staffing decreases coincided with dangerous and degrading conditions at the Ontario Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare, too.

During a March 2026 inspection of the Centers facility in New York’s Finger Lakes region, two residents were found in rooms so cold that they were at risk of hypothermia. One was actively shivering, and another was in bed covered only by a sheet, while the heating unit blew cold air into their room. The outside temperature on the day of the inspection averaged 23 degrees.

During a January 2025 inspection, incontinent residents reported waiting up to 21 hours to be changed after urinating or defecating in adult diapers. They said they had to dump a container holding urine out the window when it overflowed. Two patients said that when they called for help changing out of soiled clothing, nursing staff came to their bedsides, said that they were too short-staffed to provide aid, and left.

On multiple days, nurses also failed to change the bandages for two residents with wounds on their legs. Unchanged bandages can lead to infection and permanent tissue damage.

When questioned, multiple staff members explicitly cited understaffing as the cause of the issues. A nurse aide said that their floor, which housed 48 patients, was staffed by two or three workers. Staffing records showed multiple night shifts where two nurses had staffed the entire 98-bed facility.

High-ranking staff did not provide any indication that they had taken steps to address the shortages. An administrator told inspectors that in response to resident complaints, some staff had been fired.

The egregious treatment recorded in the January 2025 inspection was a departure from the pre-settlement norm: Several inspections in the two years before the settlement had not resulted in any serious citations or fines.

Even if the monitor’s oversight is extended, it’s unclear that anything would change significantly for residents of the chain.

For Toby Edelman, an attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the recent troubles at Centers Health Care highlight the need for more vigorous action by the Department of Health and attorney general’s office.

Edelman suggested that the health department should aggressively issue citations against the troubled Centers facilities, and that the attorney general should reopen the case and seek to impose fines.

“They have a good settlement, but if they’re not really doing follow up, that’s a problem,” she said. “What’s the point of having a settlement?”

Salamanca City Central School District announced in a Facebook post Friday afternoon that its pilot project with tech company Realbotix has been put on hold as school officials “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” with the state education agency and engage with community members.

The news comes hours after state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa sent a letter informing Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler that “the Department remains concerned about the effect that a humanoid robot may have within a high school classroom.” According to the letter, the department met with the district to discuss the robot plan earlier this week.

“Many parents, teachers, and stakeholders are understandably concerned about the presence of artificial intelligence technology in classrooms, particularly when it involves robots that resemble humans,” Rosa wrote.

The district had planned to introduce the robot to high school students this fall, along with an artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program that allowed students to interact with an avatar of the robot on laptops. The $57,590 investment was approved at a local school board meeting last month.

In a statement provided to New York Focus, Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel said, “We fully respect any decision the school makes and encourage thorough due diligence by all parties involved.”

“We want the program to be demonstrably safe, fully district-approved, and strongly supported by teachers,” he said. “We stand firmly behind [the program] as a supportive tool designed to assist teachers and students, not replace them.”

Salamanca and the Education Department could not be immediately reached for comment.

Realbotix had been in the process of building the robot, which it named Sally. According to the company, it would have a “lifelike” appearance, with silicone skin, long, brown hair, and a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions, though it would remain seated in a stationary position.

Kiguel previously told New York Focus that students would be able to access the avatar from their devices during or after class for help with their assignments, including by uploading photos of homework for feedback or receiving real-time translation in more than 100 languages. When approaching Sally during class, students would use a unique identification code so that the robot could access their conversations with the avatar.

After the district first publicized the plan, it drew strong reactions from parents, teachers, and other observers online. Some praised the district for embracing innovation and giving students access to cutting-edge technology. Others — including the state teachers union — raised concerns about student privacy, increasing screen time, and Realbotix’s ties to the adult entertainment industry.

Education is an entirely new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based company formerly known as Tokens.com. In April 2024, it acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which creates hyperrealistic sex dolls.

In a statement released this week, New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person said “a robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms,” emphasizing that robots — no matter how “lifelike” — are incapable of the human connection students require in order to thrive.

“NYSUT is committed to fighting thoughtless expansion of this technology, and we will explore every avenue necessary to protect human-centered learning in Salamanca and in every classroom across the state,” the statement reads.

At a Salamanca board meeting on Tuesday, before the program was halted, Superintendent Beehler reiterated the district’s commitment to student safety. During a presentation to trustees, he noted that the robot and avatar would operate on a closed system that is not connected to the internet, and that Realbotix would not have access to personally identifiable student information.

After the district posted a recording of the meeting on Facebook, the comment section quickly filled with debate between local parents and community members who backed the investment and those who criticized it.

“Excited for this opportunity for our kids,” one user commented. “As someone who uses AI in my corporate career, this is a skill that will make them more employable.”

“You couldn’t just hire another normal teacher?” wrote another. “AI is killing our planet, and gets information incorrect all the time.”