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      Influx of Migrants Exposes Democrats’ Division on Immigration

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      Democratic voters far from the border say they want leaders to do more to address the growing number of migrants in their cities, but they don’t agree on what.In recent years, Alisa Pata, a lifelong Democrat living in Manhattan, has spent far more time worrying about Donald J. Trump than immigration. But now, as she reads about the influx of migrants coming to her city, that’s starting to change.“We have too many people coming in,” said Ms. Pata, 85, as her older sister unpacked a travel Scrabble board for a game in the park. “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”Sitting a few feet away, Daniela Garduño, 24, who also supported President Biden, had the opposite view. She cringed when she heard Eric Adams, the city’s Democratic mayor, say that the asylum seekers would “destroy New York City.” It reminded Ms. Garduño of the conservative politicians in her native Texas.She left the state for New York expecting more liberal politics, said Ms. Garduño, a paralegal. “And now it seems like there’s just so many echoes.”In some of the country’s most liberal cities, Democrats are wrestling with the complications of a dysfunctional immigration system and a set of problems that for many years has largely remained thousands of miles away. The new wave of migrants, some bused north by Republican governors, is exposing fissures in a party that was for the most part unified against the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration.Most strikingly, much of the debate over incoming migrants is happening not in swing states or battleground suburban counties, but in some of the most diverse — and deeply blue — corners of the country.In interviews with more than two dozen voters in the Democratic strongholds of New York, Boston and Chicago, most embraced the migrants, whom they saw as fleeing difficult and desperate circumstances. They largely praised the Biden administration’s decision to expand temporary protected status to 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them to work legally in the United States for 18 months. Many said they believed that the new arrivals should be allowed to try to support themselves and saw plenty of available jobs to be filled.“The restaurant industry has been lacking cooks, bus people and dishwashers for years now — we were calling cooks unicorns because nobody could find them,” said David Bonomi, 47, a Democrat who owns a restaurant in Chicago’s Little Italy. “If there’s people who are here looking for a better life, looking for opportunity and willing to do those jobs, I’m absolutely for it.”But many expressed frustration with the Democratic leaders managing the new arrivals, and some worried that the Biden administration’s new order was only encouraging more people to come.“There are all kinds of empty dwellings in Chicago. Put them in there, and let them work,” said Charles Kelly, a retiree who was riding his bike in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood on Thursday. “People are lying on the sidewalks, and I’m like, why? People are begging for jobs and guess what, here’s your work force right here.”Recently arrived migrants in a makeshift shelter at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago in August.Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune, via Getty ImagesBut at the same time, Mr. Kelly wondered if the border could be temporarily closed to give cities time to accommodate the migrants already here, a policy once proposed by Mr. Trump and one that would face major legal hurdles.“It’s overwhelming the system,” he said. “They should be monitored closely. I don’t know exactly how to do that but the federal and state governments should be doing more.”The reality that Democrats like Mr. Kelly are grappling with is complex. After a drop this spring, unlawful crossings at the Southern border are rising sharply, and migrants cannot work legally while they wait to be processed through the clogged courts. While allowing some to work may ease the strain, critics note that it could also encourage more to come.For decades, attempts to pass systemic fixes through Congress have crumbled. A broad immigration overhaul is now considered a nonstarter given Republicans’ internal divisions.In New York, more than 113,300 migrants have arrived since the spring of 2022. Local officials have struggled to respond, and the city has estimated that it would spend about $5 billion this fiscal year to house and feed migrants. Last fall, Mr. Adams declared a state of emergency.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants and spent at least $250 million, while Washington has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris. In Massachusetts, the state’s shelter population rose 80 percent in the last year after the arrival of thousands of migrant families. Many of the asylum seekers who have arrived in recent months are Venezuelans fleeing the economic collapse of their home country.LaQuana Chambers, 41, saw a racial bias in the way some Democratic politicians were talking about the new arrivals and denounced what she viewed as efforts to pit the migrants against citizens.“When it was Ukrainian immigrants coming in, there wasn’t this much of an uproar,” said Ms. Chambers, who works for the city’s education department and lives in Brooklyn. “If you’re white and European, people will easily digest that, they’re OK with that. But if you’re brown — no.”The situation presents a potential political danger for Mr. Biden and his party. Nationally, Republicans have gained an edge with voters on immigration over the past year. Roughly four in ten Americans said they broadly agreed with Republicans on the issue in a June survey by Pew Research Center, about 10 points more than agreed with Democrats. That was a notable shift from a year earlier, when roughly equal shares of Americans said they agreed with each party.Polling on views about the recent wave of migrants has been largely limited to New York. A survey released this week by Siena College found that 51 percent of registered Democrats in New York considered the recent migrants to be a “major problem.” Only 14 percent, however, ranked it as the single most important issue for the governor and state legislature, far fewer than those who selected economic factors like cost of living and the availability of affordable housing.Advisers to Mr. Biden’s campaign argue that the president’s voters haven’t changed their position on immigration; they just want to see steps taken to help handle the influx of migrants. The advisers said they believed those concerns would be assuaged by steps like the decision to expand temporary protected status this week.Still, some Democratic politicians have responded by adopting talking points that sound almost like they were lifted from their Republican rivals, a sign that they fear a political backlash. They have activated the national guard, petitioned the White House for expedited work authorizations and pleaded with Mr. Biden to take a more aggressive approach.Mr. Adams, who has said the president has “failed” the city by not doing more, praised Mr. Biden’s move this week to expand temporary protected status but also pressed the White House to extend protections to migrants from other nations.Mayor Eric Adams staged a rally in August to call on federal officials to expedite work authorization for asylum seekers.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMost Democratic voters said the issue was not prompting them to reconsider their support for Mr. Biden, whom they still vastly prefer over Mr. Trump or any of his Republican primary opponents. But the political implications might be most visible among swing voters in crucial suburban battlegrounds, where voters in recent elections have punished Democratic candidates for what they perceive as the declining quality of life in cities.Robert Speicher, 60, a retired social worker on Long Island who worked with undocumented immigrant families, said his heart broke for the migrants.“They just want to work and stay in the shadow. This myth that they’re here to suck our system dry — they don’t want that,” said Mr. Speicher, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and skipped the election in 2020, after being disappointed by the former president.But he added that he believed Mr. Biden’s policies had failed to secure the border, escalating what he saw as a crisis.“Why are these 500,000 people getting to cut the line?” he said. In Watertown, Mass., a city outside of Boston, Josh Fiedler, 48, said that recent reports about cities struggling to deal with the new population of migrants made him think more about the border crisis that has animated Republicans for years.But it did not lead him to support Republican solutions. He said he would like to see an increase in foreign aid to Latin American countries to improve conditions.“I didn’t realize it was a problem until it happened,” said Mr. Fiedler, a quality assurance analyst and a Democrat. “The border states have complained for a long time. Something needs to be done.”Robert Chiarito in Chicago, Melissa Russell in Somerville, Mass., and More

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      Christine Quinn Fights for Migrants and the Homeless. Could It Destroy Her Dream?

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      Christine C. Quinn was impatient. The leader of New York City’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, she peered over her fuchsia reading glasses at her team, assembled in a conference room, and rattled off a list of instructions.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It was a few weeks after she had helped persuade the City Council to pass some of the most consequential legislation on the worst homelessness crisis in New York City’s history, and a few days before Mayor Eric Adams would veto those bills.Ms. Quinn, the former City Council speaker, directed one of her staff members to offer to brief a deputy mayor on the legislation. She named a handful of journalists who might write more about the bills, a move that she knew would frustrate City Hall’s press office.She rolled her eyes at the mention of one advocacy group she considered especially ponderous, joking it would take months to release new data. And she snapped her fingers at no one in particular as she asked whether a meeting scheduled for the next day could be moved up to that afternoon, or even sooner.“I miss being able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Do this, do it now, get it done,’” she said later.It only takes a few minutes in Ms. Quinn’s presence to understand that she is itching to return to the action and authority of elected office.Once the city’s second-most powerful politician, Ms. Quinn is now a high-profile advocate on one of the most divisive issues in New York City — one that could threaten her chances with voters in the future.As protests against waves of migrants coming into the city grow louder and larger, and New York’s Democrats cannot seem to settle on a path forward, the city’s shelter population has exploded to over 100,000 people — all while affordable housing lags pitifully behind demand.Ms. Quinn has jumped into the fray.Over the past few months, she helped set the stage for the most contentious fight yet between the Council and Mr. Adams, after leading an effort to secure enough votes for the Council to override the mayor’s opposition to the bills.The package of bills that she helped create is part of a push to help free up space in shelters for asylum seekers. The bills will reduce the time homeless people need to wait to look for permanent housing after they enter a shelter, make more homeless people eligible for vouchers that help them pay rent for permanent housing and provide vouchers for those at risk of being evicted.Ms. Quinn, 57, has spent the last eight years using her knowledge of local politics to build an advocacy arm for Win, the shelter provider, and the organization has since become a frequent thorn in the mayor’s side — even as it receives most of its annual funding through contracts with the city.She may no longer run the Council, but she has become a kind of elder stateswoman on homelessness and housing for an especially green group of legislators.For a while after she lost the Democratic primary for mayor in 2013, it was weird to come back to City Hall, Ms. Quinn said. But these days, she embraces the Council’s security guard and janitor on her way into the building.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThough Ms. Quinn is firmly back in the mix of New York politics, there is only so much an advocate can do from the outside. The kind of power she really wants is still to be found elsewhere.Ms. Quinn was once considered the person most likely to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor. That expectation evaporated in 2013 amid a disastrous Democratic primary in which she went from front-runner to also-ran. For years afterward, she operated largely behind the scenes.Now, she is not coy about still wanting to be mayor one day.That aspiration has created a conundrum for Ms. Quinn: The better she is at expanding Win’s influence, the more she risks alienating the New Yorkers who increasingly view the influx of migrants as a strain on the city and say officials have done enough for them.“Quinn is trying to have a really hard conversation with New Yorkers,” said Christina Greer, a professor of political science at Fordham University. “She’s chosen an issue that is of great import but doesn’t really do her any favors” if she wants to run for any elected office in New York.Even as she says she has no plans to run in a primary against Mr. Adams, she has emerged as a prominent foil, challenging his warnings that the migrant crisis will “destroy” New York and protesting his push to weaken the city’s right-to-shelter law and his declaration that migrant families might be moved into mass shelters.She likes to tell a story about mothers at a Win shelter pooling their extra clothes to donate to migrants as proof that vulnerable families will not be pitted against each other.But the city’s twin homelessness and migrant crises defy such neat packaging.As she looks ahead, Ms. Quinn says she knows full well that these issues are stubborn, at the very least. Making a real dent in homelessness — to say nothing of the migrant crisis — would take a decade or more, Ms. Quinn says, a challenge no mayor can credibly promise to solve in two terms.She knows that voters are not always forgiving of her perceived stumbles. And she is not surprised that some regard her as a politician playing at advocacy before she runs again.For now, Ms. Quinn insists she is unconcerned.“When are you really going to use your capital, when are you really going to do something? In the next job?” she said. “You know, I thought I was going to get the next job. I didn’t.”Crossroads of powerWin, the nation’s largest provider of shelter for homeless families with children, operated shelters but did not have an advocacy arm when Ms. Quinn became its chief executive in 2015. She quickly set about changing that.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe George Washington statue in the white marble lobby of City Hall stands at a crossroads of power.To the right are the Council’s offices, where Ms. Quinn long made her mark on the city.To the left is the mayor’s office, where she assumed she was heading as 2013 drew closer.That race was supposed to be Ms. Quinn’s coronation, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was leaving an open seat for a Democrat to seize. By then, Ms. Quinn had earned a reputation as a pragmatic speaker who vastly expanded the Council’s influence, passing legislation in part by her sheer force of will, including the occasional burst of straight-up yelling.In the primary’s final stretch, her opponents cast her as the second coming of Mr. Bloomberg, a moderate at a moment that demanded something more radical. In what ended up being a fatal blow to her chances, Ms. Quinn had paved the way for Mr. Bloomberg to run a third time by helping overturn the city’s term limits law, a move that voters had soured on.To some, Ms. Quinn seemed to be saying she should be mayor simply because she really, really wanted to be.She finished third, losing to Bill de Blasio.Ms. Quinn spent the first few months of 2014 willing herself to leave her Chelsea apartment.After finishing a distant third in the primary, Ms. Quinn endorsed Bill de Blasio, the winner. She said she spent the next few months struggling to get out of bed.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesEventually, after a stint working as a special adviser for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a fellowship at Harvard, Ms. Quinn got a call from a headhunter about Win. Part of it felt like a homecoming. She had spent the early part of her career as a tenant organizer, and, as speaker, she successfully sued Mr. Bloomberg’s administration over its push to limit eligibility for shelter spots and made it easier for tenants to sue their landlords.When she took over in 2015, she quickly began trying to shift the public’s perception of homelessness. New Yorkers knew they were seeing mentally ill people on the streets, but they often did not realize that the majority of the city’s homeless population is made up of families with children, many of whom have 9-to-5 jobs.But there was no way to get people to listen without changing something about Win, which ran shelters but did not advocate on behalf of homeless families.Ms. Quinn began training her staff to become political activists. They have distributed iPads and other devices to 1,600 homeless students learning remotely and created a legal clinic to help migrants apply for asylum.Under her direction, Win — which employs 1,000 people with an annual budget of about $150 million — added seven new shelters and now operates 14. They serve about 7,000 people nightly, and, recently, over 270 families seeking asylum, including about 700 children. Ms. Quinn makes $424,000 a year, roughly triple what she made as speaker.While she has found her way back to a version of a life she never wanted to leave, some of her former peers or rivals have struggled to do the same. Several — Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Bloomberg, and her two successors as speaker — have run for other offices they did not win. Some of her male peers fell in sexual misconduct scandals, including Anthony Weiner, who helped topple Ms. Quinn in 2013.Ms. Quinn may be the only one of the bunch who still has a job that requires telling people things they do not want to hear, over and over.She is used to that.Nice until it wasn’tMs. Quinn visited children living at the Shirley Chisholm Family Residence, a new Win shelter in Park Slope that drew some opposition from local residents.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSome years ago, Ms. Quinn and an aide walked to the back of a restaurant and found James Gandolfini, the star of “The Sopranos,” waiting for them. He was unhappy. Ms. Quinn had been pushing to open a sanitation department garage in his TriBeCa neighborhood.Mr. Gandolfini, who died in 2013, told her if she did not reconsider, he was prepared to blanket TriBeCa with fliers criticizing her. She told him to do what he needed to do.“It was a nice conversation until it wasn’t,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “You can’t have a city that calls itself fair and equitable if only some parts of the city are doing their part.”That is particularly true when you are building homeless shelters in neighborhoods where many residents do not want them.Consider Win’s newest shelter, set to serve about 200 families on Staten Island.At a 2019 town hall, Ms. Quinn sought to explain that Staten Island needed a shelter in part so that the borough’s many homeless families could remain close to their children’s public schools. Residents appeared unmoved, and Ms. Quinn was greeted by “an aggressively pissed off” group, she recalled.Afterward, The Staten Island Advance published an opinion piece dismissing her chances amid rumors of another run: “Christine Quinn for mayor? Not after homeless shelter debacle.”It is a change for Ms. Quinn, who spent years fending off criticism from progressives who found her too cozy with Mr. Bloomberg and his conservative allies. Now, she is going up against a highly passionate force that is skeptical of new shelters. While the migrant crisis has prompted a reshaping of that movement to include more Democrats, it has been led by Republican politicians and advocates.Protesters rallied against a facility housing migrants on Staten Island in August. Demonstrations against migrant shelters have become larger in recent months.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesRepresentative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, said Staten Islanders she represents are fed up with Democrats like Ms. Quinn “building shelter after shelter in communities that don’t want them” — particularly for migrants.But even some who might have been sympathetic to Ms. Quinn say they were turned off by the debate over the Win shelter, set to open later this year in an area that tends to vote Democratic.“You don’t poke a stick in the eye of a potentially favorable community,” said Michael Harwood, a member of the St. George Civic Association.Mr. Harwood said Win did not communicate effectively with residents about the impact of the shelter and noted that Ms. Quinn had opposed a new shelter in her own Manhattan district when she was speaker.Ms. Quinn says she has a new calculus for decision making.She acknowledges that some of her choices as speaker were made more because of future ambitions rather than the right policy, and she regrets it.So even as she weighs whether and how to return to elected office, she says she is focused on immediate goals: moving more families into permanent housing faster, raising more private money, making Win into a top developer of affordable housing with services for formerly homeless families — and continuing to shape city policy.But it does not always feel like enough.She recently remembered something that Judith S. Kaye, the late chief judge of New York State, once told her: She would have paid a million dollars to keep her job for just five more minutes.It was a joke, sort of. But it is how Ms. Quinn feels about being speaker, and the reason she is given to daydreaming about how much more she could accomplish on homelessness, the migrant crisis and housing if she ran the city one day.The idea of actually getting elected on the agenda of addressing those crises might seem like a bit of a fantasy.But Ms. Quinn believes, still, that there is a first time for everything in New York City politics.“In a way, it would be the greatest issue for a mayor to take on,” she said. “If you solve the unsolvable, you get credit.”Audio produced by More

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      Ex-Buildings Commissioner Expected to Surrender in Bribery Investigation

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      The former commissioner, Eric Ulrich, is expected to turn himself in Wednesday morning with at least four other defendants.New York City’s former buildings commissioner is expected to surrender on Wednesday after a lengthy wiretap investigation of bribery that ensnared at least four other defendants, according to people with knowledge of the matter.The former commissioner, Eric Ulrich, is expected to be arraigned later in the day with the other defendants, among them two generous donors to the 2021 campaign of Mayor Eric Adams. Mr. Ulrich, a former city councilman, was appointed by Mr. Adams in May 2022, but resigned six months later, after the investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office was reported.While the specific charges are not yet clear, Mr. Ulrich’s indictment is expected to include bribery-related crimes. The other men are expected to be accused of seeking favors from him related to his official position, the people with knowledge of the matter said.Among those expected to be arraigned along with Mr. Ulrich are Joseph and Anthony Livreri, brothers who own a Queens pizzeria; Michael Mazzio, who operates a Brooklyn towing company; and Mark Caller, a Brooklyn real estate developer who is expected to face charges for having offered Mr. Ulrich a discounted luxury apartment.A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, declined to comment, but the office sent out an advisory Tuesday evening saying that Mr. Bragg and the head of the city’s investigation department, Jocelyn Strauber, would make an announcement at 1 p.m. tomorrow. The arraignments will likely follow.A lawyer for Mr. Caller, Benjamin Brafman, said his client “intends to plead not guilty and fully expects to be exonerated.”James R. Froccaro, Mr. Mazzio’s lawyer, said the tow company operator would enter a plea of not guilty, adding, “He’s innocent.”Mr. Ulrich’s lawyer, Samuel M. Braverman, has said in recent months that he would not respond to any allegations against his client before seeing the charges in an indictment. On Tuesday, he cited that statement when asked for comment.A lawyer for the Livreris could not be reached for comment.In the course of the investigation, prosecutors looked into potential connections between Mr. Ulrich and organized crime. Law enforcement officials have identified Mr. Mazzio and the Livreri brothers as having connections to organized crime, though it is not yet clear what role that may play in the case.The mayor is not expected to be charged, but his name has come up several times in connection with the investigation.Mr. Ulrich told prosecutors that the mayor had warned him to watch his back and watch his phones, which the commissioner took to mean he was under investigation. The mayor has denied having done so, or having any knowledge of the investigation before its existence was reported.Several of those who face charges — including Mr. Ulrich, the Livreri brothers and Mr. Mazzio — hosted a 2021 fund-raiser for the mayor, which brought in a total of $140,900, according to the news outlet The City. Two days later, the outlet reported, Mr. Caller held a party on the roof of his Brooklyn office building that raised $47,050 for the mayor’s campaign.The investigation also made use of a wiretap on Mr. Ulrich’s phone, and the mayor was among those whose conversations were intercepted. There is no indication that the mayor’s conversations implicated him in any criminal conduct, the people familiar with the inquiry have said.A spokesman for the mayor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Border Crisis Comes to Blue Cities After Migrants Are Bused North

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      The strain of migrants in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities has taxed resources, divided Democrats and put pressure on President Biden to act.When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending migrants and asylum seekers from the southwestern frontier to New York, Washington and Chicago, he vowed to bring the border to the Democratic cities he said were naïvely dismissing its costs.A year later, the migrant waves he helped set in motion have put northern “sanctuary” cities increasingly on edge, their budgets stretched, their communities strained. And a border crisis that has animated Republican politics for years is now dividing the Democratic Party. Humanitarian impulses are crashing into desperate resource constraints and once-loyal Democratic allies have reluctantly joined Republicans to train their fire on President Biden.Eric Adams, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, declared this week that without a federal bailout and clampdown at the border, swelling migration “will destroy New York City.” The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, has promised to sue Mr. Abbott. And the liberal mayor of the third-largest city, Chicago, began pleading last month for the White House to step in.“Let me state this clearly: The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat, has declared a state of emergency, activated the National Guard and started petitioning the White House for help.The migrants on state-funded buses from Texas are a fraction of the total number arriving in northern cities. Texas brags that its “Operation Lone Star” has sent more than 13,100 migrants to New York City since August 2022, but the overall strain there stems from the total, more than 110,000. Some of those migrants have family in New York, while others are attracted to the city’s history of welcoming immigrants.Still, the rising clamor is creating a rare convergence between the two parties, which for years have fought in seemingly parallel political universes. Democrats focused on issues like abortion, the preservation of democracy and expansion of health care, while Republicans warned of a migrant “invasion” and railed against “woke” liberal ideology, socialism and expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Endless Republican news conferences at the border and threats to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, were dismissed as political bluster.Now, suddenly, some Democrats are sounding remarkably like Republicans.“Upstate New Yorkers shouldn’t be forced to bear responsibility for decades of failed immigration policy, dysfunction and stupidity out of Washington, Albany and places like New York City,” said Josh Riley, the Democratic candidate seeking to unseat Representative Marc Molinaro, a Hudson Valley Republican. Mr. Riley added that it was time for Mr. Biden to “to step up and help out.”For Republicans, the response to Mr. Abbott’s gambit has gone beyond what they could have hoped for — a spreading of the pain, as millions of migrants stream across the southern border, fleeing violence and poverty, drawn to what they see as a more welcoming administration in Washington and plentiful work.Representative Ronny Jackson, a conservative Republican from Texas, praised the bus caravans as “bold” and “thinking outside the box.” Even more moderate Republican voices have praised the move. “The reality is, Abbott was shining a light on existing issues that nobody was talking about,” said Will Hurd, a moderate Republican and former House member from a Texas border district now running for president as a fierce critic of Donald J. Trump. “Blue governors and mayors are having to deal with what Republican governors have had to deal with for three years now.”Democrats seem paralyzed by a surge of urban migration that has defied easy answers — and increasingly threatens their political aspirations, from crucial tossup congressional races in the suburbs of New York City to the race for the White House.Democrats in the cities continue to castigate their Republican opponents for using migrants as political weapons, with little regard for their health or safety. Last month, a 3-year-old child traveling to Chicago on a Texas-funded bus became ill, was put on an ambulance and later died at a hospital. The party’s candidates are quick to point out that Republicans deserve a large share of blame for blocking previous attempts to enact a bipartisan immigration overhaul in Washington.But many Democrats realize complaints only go so far as they enter an election year, when immigration, border security and appeals to nativism from Mr. Trump and his imitators will roil the electorate far from the Mexican border.“The potency of the issue has not abated, and Democrats who think that it has are fooling themselves,” said Howard Wolfson, a top Democratic strategist who steers hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“This is not just going to be a local New York City or Chicago or Boston issue,” he added. “This is going to be top of mind for voters all over the country next year, and my strong advice to the White House is they need to get off the sidelines and take action to address this.”In Chicago, migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport.Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York TimesThe numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. New York City is sheltering 59,000 migrants each night and projects that caring for them could eat up $12 billion in the next few years, threatening the viability of other city services.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants, and spent at least $250 million. Migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport, and prompted fierce recriminations from Black residents on the South Side who see disparities between investment in their communities and the money spent on migrant care.In Washington, the city has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.And in Massachusetts, the arrival of thousands of migrant families has driven the state’s shelter population up by 80 percent in the last year.“When is enough enough?” asked Representative Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat who represents a border district around Laredo, Texas. “You’ve got to be able to control your borders and be able to handle the number of people that come in. You just can’t open up the faucet and let everybody in.”Mr. Cuellar said that even before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, he warned Biden transition officials that a crisis was looming with the receding Covid-19 emergency and the end to draconian border rules imposed by the Trump administration. He recalled meeting Mayor Adams at a reception this year and listening to his complaints.“I didn’t tell him who I was,” Mr. Cuellar said. “I was just smiling and thinking to myself, ‘You guys only get a drop of what we get here at the border.’”Asylum seekers, many from Venezuela, at a Catholic Charities respite center in Laredo, Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs the appeals grow louder, the White House has slowly ramped up its response.The Federal Emergency Management Agency in June allocated huge “shelter and service” grants to cities and states unused to such attention — $105 million to New York City, $10.6 million for Chicago, $19 million to Illinois, more than $5 million to Washington. Those numbers, however, hardly meet the need: Chicago and Illinois alone have allocated about $200 million on migrant care in the city this year.After Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York traveled to Washington last month, Biden administration officials said they would ask Congress to allocate more money to reimburse cities and states and pledged to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork to obtain work permits more quickly. They also blamed Congress for refusing to take up a comprehensive immigration plan Mr. Biden first proposed in 2021.Tom Perez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has begun convening weekly phone calls with Mr. Adams and Ms. Hochul, and he spoke with Governor Healey on Thursday.White House officials said they were rushing work permits to migrants who cross the border using a new app issued by Customs and Border Protection and said the administration had spent $1 billion to ease the crisis. An additional $600 million request is awaiting congressional action.But the officials said ultimately Congress must act to broaden immigration legislation.Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesman, dismissed Mr. Abbott’s “cruel political stunts” and chided “Republicans in Congress who not only refuse to pass comprehensive immigration reform but are also not providing” the Department of Homeland Security with the resources it needs.He said the Biden administration was “using the tools it has available to secure the border and build a safe, orderly and humane immigration system while leading the largest expansion of lawful pathways for immigration in decades.”But the White House has quietly said no to more aggressive unilateral actions, such as using executive powers to accelerate work permitting. And Mr. Biden himself appears to want nothing to do with the issue publicly, forgoing the kind of high-profile leadership local officials have been clamoring for.“When some of these governors and blue cities like New York started calling out, I thought the Biden administration would get its head out of the sand, but not a lot has changed,” said Mr. Jackson, the Republican congressman from Texas. “I just think they don’t know what to do at this point. They’ve created a crisis they can’t manage.”Some Democrats fear that their standard-bearer for 2024 may be misreading the potency of a volatile issue heading into an election year.Tom Suozzi, a Democratic former congressman from Long Island mulling a comeback attempt next year, urged Mr. Biden to take a page from one of his predecessors, Bill Clinton. Mr. Suozzi said the president should propose to Republicans a moderate package of reforms that balances border security with “the very real human suffering that exists.”“If the Republicans come to the table with the president and the Democrats, America has a path forward,” Mr. Suozzi said. “If the Republicans reject the president’s moderate solution, it exposes them as simply playing politics on this issue.”Washington, D.C., has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.Valerie Plesch for The New York TimesBut Democrats are divided on how the administration should respond. Leaders in some of the affected cities want an expansion of humanitarian parole programs and temporary protected status for whole classes of migrants, such as Venezuelans. Those steps would help rush work permits to overcrowded shelters, police stations and airports now housing people who are either forced to sit idle or enter the underground economy.“This does require a national response, but it has to be a humanitarian response, not an iron hand across the border,” said Nubia Willman, who led Chicago’s Office of New Americans as the first buses began arriving.And public displays of division have liberal Democrats worried that more moderate Democratic leaders like Mr. Adams may just play into Republican hands. Former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have both quoted Mr. Adams in recent days in their own appeals to harden the southwestern border.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Chicago Democrat, said she understood the “frustration” of some Democrats. But, she said, “I just really hope that my colleagues would show why Democrats need to stick together. The blame game doesn’t get us anywhere.”She called Mr. Adams’s comments “anti-immigrant” and “despicable.”For now, even the fastest way to relieve cities’ burdens — requests for federal funds to help reimburse cities and states — has been caught up in politics. Republicans are threatening to stop any funding that would share the cost of the crisis.“The city and state made a choice,” said Mr. Molinaro, the Republican congressman from New York. “There is no willingness by the president and governor to intervene in a real way. I don’t see subsidizing the city to be a sanctuary city.” More

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      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

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      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Loyalty to Donald Trump Has Led Rudy Giuliani to Being Indicted

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      It is easy to forget, and in some ways difficult to imagine, that Rudy Giuliani was once revered for his integrity. He was seen by many as a hero long before Sept. 11, a seemingly fearless U.S. attorney who broke the back of the mob, took on Wall Street titans and sent political power brokers to prison.With each sensational indictment handed down by his office in the 1980s, Mr. Giuliani spoke like the priest he almost became about good and evil, and the seductions of power and money.“It’s a rare individual in public office who does not eventually become personally corrupt,” he said in 1988.The comment takes on new meaning when you read through the Georgia grand jury’s indictment, Mr. Giuliani’s first as a defendant. The details make it clear that the crusader of the 1980s and 1990s has completely lost his ability to distinguish right from wrong. He has gone from a moral compass in a city teeming with corruption to a long-ago leader who has descended into a moral void.He stands accused of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to upend the 2020 presidential election. It’s a remarkable irony, and a catastrophic blow to his legacy, that the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, has brought charges against him under a version of the federal RICO law that Mr. Giuliani famously employed against the Mafia. The indictment also portrays his venal, if stumbling, efforts to employ his old prosecutorial gifts to Donald Trump’s advantage.Mr. Giuliani in mid-November 2020 with a chart about plans to dispute some presidential election results.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesToday Mr. Giuliani is 79 years old and seems lost in a fog, a confused man railing on X, previously known as Twitter, about Joe and Hunter Biden and bragging about decades-old accomplishments as if his work for Mr. Trump had not turned him into a figure of ridicule and contributed to two presidential impeachments. He has been drowning in criminal investigations, lawsuits and defamation cases, and is apparently burning through the vast sums that he earned over his career, much of it from consulting and speaking fees after 9/11. He now makes Cameo videos for $325 apiece.Yet the indictment is a vivid reminder of how dangerous he was in the Trump years. In the former president’s last months in office, an untold number of Trump White House and campaign lawyers and even the attorney general labored to convince Mr. Trump that he had lost the election. But it was Mr. Giuliani who had the president’s ear. And he was telling Mr. Trump that he had won.Predictably, Mr. Trump named him to lead the postelection legal fight. Mr. Giuliani dove into the work, seemingly more than willing to cross legal and ethical lines, evolving from prosecutor to transgressor. He used his understanding of the criminal mind not to enforce the law, but to propagate what the grand jury describes as a conspiracy.A prosecutor’s job is to weave together a compelling story out of a blizzard of facts and paint a vivid picture to jurors in a trial. Mr. Giuliani was a master of the art. As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in 1974, he accused then-Representative Bertram Podell of being “a United States congressman who agreed to sell the influence of his office for money.” At trial, he conducted a withering cross-examination that rattled the congressman so much that he changed his plea to guilty. It made Mr. Giuliani’s career.His formidable talents brought him to the highest levels of the Justice Department and won him public adoration. With each victory he spoke from a moral pedestal. “If we can teach our entire society that no matter how powerful you are … you have to pay a price when you violate the law,” he said shortly before landing a racketeering conviction in 1987.In the years that followed, he applied those prosecutorial gifts to his own career, cultivating a heroic image: America’s greatest corruption fighter; the mayor who cleaned up New York; the personification of leadership on Sept. 11. The dramatic story line overshadowed acts of callousness — cheating on his wives, according to friends and colleagues; slandering Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Black man who had been killed by an undercover detective; cashing in on his 9/11 fame; and pursuing political and legal misadventures for President Trump in Ukraine.With his ethical bedrock crumbling, Mr. Giuliani attempted to put his old skills to work in 2020 and spin a gripping story to Mr. Trump’s advantage.On Dec. 3, he brought the stolen election claims to Georgia, a pivotal state that Joe Biden had surprisingly won. He was welcomed by Republicans at a Georgia State Senate committee hearing at the state capital, where he claimed, falsely, that Dominion Voting Systems equipment had turned Trump votes into Biden votes, and that almost 100,000 nonexistent mail-in ballots were counted. Mr. Giuliani looked on as a member of his team falsely characterized a video showing vote counters pulling out ballot containers from under a desk in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on election night and alleged, falsely, that the containers were “suitcases” filled with illegal ballots.A week later, Mr. Giuliani made a presentation to the Georgia House in which he accused two election workers of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.” (He recently admitted in a civil court filing that he made false statements about the election workers.) The picture he painted in the Georgia House was as vivid as it was dishonest. The Georgia indictment laid it out in great detail.“This is going to be the election that will be the dirtiest election, the most crooked election, the most manipulated election in American history,” Mr. Giuliani said at a third December appearance in front of the Georgia legislature. “Georgia is going to be at the center of it because you have what I call the Zapruder film. … If you can watch that and not realize that this was a major situation of voter fraud, then you’re a fool or a liar.”As he traveled from state to state, hearing to hearing, an increasing number of people inside and outside of the White House threw cold water on his claims. After Georgia’s secretary of state’s office proved his most serious charges patently false, Mr. Giuliani’s accusations began to irk Trump campaign officials.“When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,” one senior adviser wrote on Dec. 8, according to one of the federal indictments against Trump. “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” Two days later, Mr. Giuliani was in front of the state legislature, saying, “every single vote should be taken away from Biden.”His fabrications did not stop with false claims about the video. He helped oversee the scheme in which false elector certificates were submitted in favor of Mr. Trump rather than Mr. Biden.Mr. Giuliani had another lawyer send memos to Trump points of contact in several states, explaining how they could mimic legitimate electors, but the memo didn’t mention that they intended to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. When some Trump false electors in Pennsylvania expressed concerns about participating, Mr. Giuliani assured them that the certificates they signed would be used only if Mr. Trump won certain litigation according to one of the federal indictments. He didn’t appear to give any such assurances to the fake electors from other states, and the false certificates with their names were submitted. False electors from Michigan are now facing state charges.On the night of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani placed calls to members of Congress in an attempt to continue to spread the debunked charges in hopes of buying time to delay certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, according to one of the federal indictments against Mr. Trump. “Georgia gave you a number in which 65,000 people who were underage voted,” he said in a phone message that federal prosecutors claim was intended for a U.S. senator. The correct number was zero.After spending years of his life escaping the shadow of his father’s criminal past — Harold Giuliani served a year and four months in Sing Sing for robbing a milkman — Mr. Giuliani put his future and even personal freedom on the line for Mr. Trump. He is now facing prison time himself.Faced with the political irrelevance and collapsing client base that would accompany Mr. Trump’s defeat, he seemingly made a Faustian bargain, working to undermine democracy in order to save his career. He was ultimately thwarted by the rule of law, and his own bumbling. The disaster he has made of his life, and the ruination of his legacy, are of his own making.“I am a basically simple person,” Mr. Giuliani told a reporter back in 1989. “I think there are rules, [and] you have to try to live as best you can by those rules. If those rules are laws, you had better darn well live by them.”After a half-century crafting, enforcing and then breaking those rules, Mr. Giuliani is now faced with the reality that they apply to him.Andrew Kirtzman is the author of “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” for which David Holley served as the researcher.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Fast Living and Foreign Dealings: An F.B.I. Spy Hunter’s Rise and Fall

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      Charles McGonigal had a family, a house in the suburbs and an influential job as a counterintelligence leader in New York. Federal prosecutors suggest it wasn’t enough for him.By the time he reached middle age, Charlie McGonigal was living a comfortable suburban life.He had married and raised two children in a tidy Maryland neighborhood near the Capital Beltway. He coached his co-workers on an office softball team and went to church on Sundays. In his den, he hung posters celebrating sports teams from his native Ohio; in his home office, a sign above a doorway announced in flowing script his devotion to his job.“I want to thank the Good Lord,” it read, “for making me a F.B.I. Agent.”But Charles Franklin McGonigal was no ordinary agent. As the chief of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, he was tasked with rooting out foreign efforts to steal vital national security and economic secrets in one of the world’s most fertile cities for spying.Apart from his outward image as a wholesome and responsible G-man, however, there was another, less visible side to Mr. McGonigal, federal prosecutors and his former colleagues say. He held off-the-books meetings with foreign politicians and businessmen and accepted illicit payments while doing favors for associates, according to federal indictments filed against him in two states earlier this year.Mr. McGonigal’s arrest, in part based on accusations that he had worked for a Russian oligarch, came at a time when U.S.-Russia relations had reached their lowest point since the Cold War, leading to questions about whether one of the country’s most trusted spy hunters had become a spy himself. But a close look at Mr. McGonigal’s life and career reveals an arc that appears to have little or nothing to do with espionage and international intrigue. Instead, it seems to be a quintessentially American story about greed.Smooth and politic while navigating an upward trajectory through the F.B.I.’s bureaucracy, he was a different man with subordinates, flashing his temper at the smallest provocation, former associates say. An expert in Russian counterintelligence, he spoke publicly of international security threats. At the same time, prosecutors say, he was privately courting the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who figured prominently in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.Now, Mr. McGonigal, 55, appears set to become one of the highest-ranking F.B.I. agents ever to be convicted of a crime. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in New York on Tuesday for a possible guilty plea in the case involving Mr. Deripaska, and is in talks to resolve an indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Washington. Until any deal is finalized, it could still fall apart, and Mr. McGonigal, who has so far pleaded not guilty, could go to trial.The case has raised unsettling questions about the F.B.I.’s ability to detect corruption within its ranks. Prosecutors suggested that Mr. McGonigal traveled extensively while at the bureau, meeting with foreign officials and businesspeople who, on the surface, had nothing to do with his job. Agents are required to report such contacts and certain financial transactions and to take lie-detector tests, but the bureau relies heavily on the integrity of the people it has placed in positions of trust.Over more than three years, the investigation has so far produced no evidence that Mr. McGonigal provided national security secrets to the Russians or to anyone else, according to American officials who requested anonymity to discuss ongoing cases. Although the officials said Mr. McGonigal appears to have been engaged in simple graft, his actions stunned many in the F.B.I., where a core tenet is drilled into every agent: “Never embarrass the bureau.”The F.B.I.’s director, Christopher A. Wray, said the charges demonstrated “the F.B.I.’s willingness as an organization to shine a bright light on conduct that is totally unacceptable, including when it happens from one of our own people, and to hold those people accountable.”Peter J. Lapp, a former F.B.I. agent who once worked for Mr. McGonigal, said that the openness with which he seems to have crossed legal lines — “doing it right in front of everyone” — took audacity. But the charges did not explain what he called “the great mystery.”“Why did he need so much money?”While investigators have described brazen attempts to profit from his F.B.I. career, the actual crimes Mr. McGonigal is charged with are technical. Between the two indictments, he is accused of concealing details of his finances and activities overseas, violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Some charges carry potential prison sentences of up to 20 years, but a judge could impose far less.Mr. McGonigal was accused of working for Oleg Deripaska, second from left, shown here with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in a photo from the Russian presidential press service.Mikhail Klimentyev, Presidential Press Service/RIA-Novosti, via Associated PressSeth D. DuCharme, Mr. McGonigal’s lawyer, said at a recent hearing in New York that the indictment was more dramatic than the case actually seemed to be.“Every time I hear the government describe this as a small white-collar case, I feel a little more comforted,” he said.And the Washington prosecution, Mr. DuCharme has said, is basically “about some omissions on government forms.”What most shocked former colleagues was Mr. McGonigal’s boldness. He had behaved in ways that he most likely knew would get him caught. In 2020, two years after his retirement, he spoke on a panel about the corruption of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., Russia’s counterpart to the F.B.I., including its agents’ participation in money laundering and acting as “private contractors” for businessmen and criminals.“It has really become an organization that is rogue, in my opinion, and is at the behest of those who can pay for the services they offer,” he said.By then, prosecutors said, Mr. McGonigal had already accepted cash from a former Albanian intelligence officer — and had begun working with Mr. Deripaska.An unpolished edgeIn the Cleveland suburbs where he grew up, one of four siblings in a family of modest means, Mr. McGonigal went by “Chuck,” studied martial arts and liked to drive fast cars and party on weekends, according to his high school yearbook.After graduating from Kent State University, and working briefly for the National Bank of Canada in New York City, Mr. McGonigal joined the F.B.I. Assigned to investigations into the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island and the Sept. 11 attacks, he gradually climbed the ranks, eventually supervising a counterespionage squad at the agency’s Washington field office. He was aided by a gift for “briefing up” — impressing superiors with analysis and presentations.“He was a very hard-working, intelligent, nice guy — always, ‘Yes, sir. No, sir,’” said another colleague, Clayt Lemme, who worked as special agent in charge of counterintelligence, two levels above Mr. McGonigal, at the F.B.I.’s Washington field office.He revealed a less polished side, though, when underlings displeased him, erupting in tirades while spraying spit. Mr. Lapp, his former employee, said it became a running joke: Offending agents got a second shower — “the McGonigal hot wash” — when he yelled at them.Mr. McGonigal and his wife, Pamela, who had been a year behind him at Kent State, bought a red brick rambler in hilly North Chevy Chase, Md., where they raised their son and daughter. He joined Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a nearby Catholic church. He registered to vote as a Republican and coached the Washington field office’s softball squad. His den became a man cave, its walls covered in posters paying homage to the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Cleveland Browns and other teams.Before Mr. McGonigal retired from the F.B.I., he and his wife had raised two children in a quiet suburb of Washington.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesThough Mr. McGonigal took pride in his home state, he also played down his humble roots, leaving Kent State off his official bio and accentuating the graduate degree he later earned at Johns Hopkins University.All the while, he had access to some of the F.B.I.’s most sensitive and important information, even helping to lead the investigation in 2012 into the compromise of C.I.A. informants in China.By early 2016, Mr. McGonigal was running the bureau’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section in Washington, where agents analyzed Russian and Chinese hacking and other foreign intelligence activities.In that senior position, Mr. McGonigal became aware of the initial criminal referral that led to the investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane — an inquiry into whether Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and associates were coordinating with Russia.That October, then-director James B. Comey appointed Mr. McGonigal special agent in charge of counterintelligence in New York, overseeing hundreds of agents and support staff. It was a return to where Mr. McGonigal had gotten his start, but in a vastly more important role.The job would be the culmination of Mr. McGonigal’s law enforcement career.“If you want to learn and work counterintelligence, New York City is the pre-eminent field office,” Mr. McGonigal told a gathering at the Foreign Policy Association seven months after his appointment, adding that audience members who traveled overseas should expect to be under surveillance by foreign intelligence agencies.Despite urging caution, it seems that Mr. McGonigal had already thrown it aside in his own life.He had left his family in Maryland, and, soon after moving to New York, begun an affair with a woman who socialized in law-enforcement circles.Mr. McGonigal met the woman, Allison Guerriero, 49, of Florham Park, N.J., through her work volunteering at a nonprofit organization called the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation, which says it raises money for the families of federal agents injured or killed in the line of duty — in part by hosting galas and golf outings with celebrities such as the “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf and the actor Stephen Baldwin.Ms. Guerriero, who has been publicly critical of Mr. McGonigal since his arrest, has said he led her to believe his marriage was dead, only to end their affair after he retired from the F.BI. in 2018. In the aftermath, Pamela McGonigal, citing harassment, obtained a restraining order against Ms. Guerriero, who has acknowledged overstepping during periods of alcohol abuse.Ms. Guerriero has said that, in her anger, she drunkenly sent an email to the head of the F.B.I.’s New York office suggesting he investigate Mr. McGonigal, which has led some to suspect that his marital indiscretion was what ultimately led to the federal inquiry that resulted in his arrest.During their 18-month relationship, Ms. Guerriero said, she and Mr. McGonigal sometimes stayed at a Brooklyn apartment and enjoyed the swirl of the city. He loved Sparks Steak House and other upscale restaurants and was fastidious about his appearance.“Suits, shoes, expensive ties,” Ms. Guerriero said. “If he went out, he would have to be dressed to the nines.”Over dinner in Manhattan one evening in 2017, Mr. McGonigal was introduced to a man who would figure heavily into his undoing: Agron Neza, an Albanian-born businessman living in Leonia, N.J., who is labeled “Person A” in the Washington indictment. As a young man, Mr. Neza had worked for the Albanian State Intelligence Service before moving to the United States. Now, balding and bearded, Mr. Neza was brokering deals overseas.In August 2017, according to prosecutors, Mr. McGonigal proposed the men make their own deal, in which Mr. Neza would lend him $225,000 in cash.The Vienna clientProsecutors have not said why Mr. McGonigal needed that money or what he may have agreed to do in return. But over the next several months, they said, he injected himself into foreign political and business affairs, apparently while trading on his F.B.I. position, in dealings that would culminate in his arrest.He befriended the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, and used his position to drum up foreign business for his associates, according to the indictment filed against him in Washington.On one occasion, Mr. McGonigal opened an F.B.I. investigation into a lobbyist for the Albanian prime minister’s main political rival, the prosecutors said. On another, prosecutors said, he helped secure an oil drilling license benefiting Mr. Neza and others.Prosecutors said Mr. McGonigal also cultivated ties to Prime Minister Edi Rama of Albania. The accusations caused a scandal there, with protesters carrying effigies of the two men in prison jumpsuits.Adnan Beci/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAlong the way, there was some indication that the F.B.I. was aware of his dealings with the Albanians. According to two people who spoke with him, Mr. McGonigal said the F.B.I. had authorized him to approach U.S. contractors about working with Mr. Rama to help reform the Albanian government, which had long been plagued by corruption and inefficiency. Perhaps none of Mr. McGonigal’s associations was as alarming as the one prosecutors said he had with the Russian oligarch, Mr. Deripaska. A billionaire metals magnate seen as shrewd and ruthless, Mr. Deripaska built his fortune after the fall of the Soviet Union, as state resources were taken over by businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin. He also cultivated ties to the West, hosting parties in Europe, courting politicians and hiring lawyers and lobbyists to look after his interests.He did business with Paul Manafort, a lobbyist and political adviser who later served as chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. F.B.I. agents attempted to recruit Mr. Deripaska as an informant, in part to find out whether Mr. Manafort had been a link to the Kremlin, which Mr. Deripaska denied.In April 2018, the Treasury Department added Mr. Deripaska to its sanctions list, citing his ties to the Kremlin and accusations that he laundered money and threatened rivals, among other things. Before the sanctions were made public, Mr. McGonigal reviewed a list with Mr. Deripaska’s name on it, the New York indictment said.By late 2018, prosecutors suggested, he was laying the groundwork for a future business relationship with Mr. Deripaska.Mr. McGonigal is accused of setting up an internship at the New York Police Department for the daughter of an unnamed aide to the oligarch — a reference to the Russian businessman Evgeny Fokin, according to people familiar with the case. (A senior police official said that the woman received a multiday “V.I.P.-type” tour of specialized units, not an internship.) Mr. McGonigal had been introduced to Mr. Fokin by a former Russian diplomat who had become an interpreter for U.S. courts, prosecutors said.After retiring from the bureau in late 2018, and taking a job as vice president for security at the real estate firm Brookfield Properties, Mr. McGonigal began working for Mr. Deripaska, prosecutors said. He and the former diplomat connected the oligarch with an American law firm, Kobre & Kim, in 2019 to aid in getting the sanctions lifted.They referred to Mr. Deripaska as “the individual” or “the Vienna client” in electronic communications, and Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska and others in London and in Vienna, prosecutors said.Mr. McGonigal was paid $25,000 per month by the law firm for the sanctions-related work, using Mr. Deripaska’s money, prosecutors said.In August 2021, Mr. Fokin retained Mr. McGonigal and the former Russian diplomat for a new brief: investigating a rival oligarch with whom Mr. Deripaska was involved in a business dispute. The two men were paid $218,000, until F.B.I. agents seized their devices that November, prosecutors said.Last year, federal prosecutors in New York charged Mr. Deripaska and others with scheming to evade sanctions by engaging in real-estate deals.In January, F.B.I. agents met Mr. McGonigal at Kennedy Airport and arrested him as he returned from an unrelated business trip to Sri Lanka. He had lost his job at the real-estate firm, but in the following months, the wholesome Midwesterner became a celebrity in Albania, where Mr. Rama’s opponents and the media took to short-handing the scandal in a particular way.They called it “the McGonigal affair.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Ex-F.B.I. Official in Talks to Resolve Charges of Working for Oligarch

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      Once the F.B.I.’s top counterintelligence official in New York City, Charles F. McGonigal was charged with concealing contacts with foreign nationals.A former senior F.B.I. official is in talks to resolve criminal charges in two separate indictments, including entering a possible guilty plea as early as next week in a case involving accusations that he worked for a Russian oligarch, according to a public filing and statements by his lawyer in court.Charles F. McGonigal, who retired in 2018 as the counterintelligence chief in the F.B.I.’s New York field office, one of the agency’s most sensitive posts, has been accused by federal prosecutors in New York of violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering and conspiracy in connection with Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch once seen as close to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.Mr. McGonigal was also charged by federal prosecutors in Washington with concealing his relationship with a businessman who paid him $225,000, as well misleading the F.B.I. about his contacts with foreign nationals and foreign travel, creating a conflict of interest with his official duties.Mr. McGonigal pleaded not guilty to both indictments. But on Monday, the district judge overseeing his New York case, Jennifer H. Rearden, set a plea hearing for Aug. 15, saying that she had been informed that Mr. McGonigal “may wish to enter a change of plea.”At a hearing in the Washington case on Friday, Mr. McGonigal’s lawyer, Seth D. DuCharme, told the federal judge there, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, that discussions about resolving the charges were ongoing and that he hoped to update her by the next scheduled hearing in September.Although some of the current charges carry up to 20 years in prison, a judge could also impose a far lighter sentence.Mr. DuCharme declined to comment on either case. Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s offices in New York and Washington also declined to comment.Judge Rearden’s order in New York and the discussions in Washington were reported earlier by CNN. Mr. McGonigal’s co-defendant in the New York case, Sergey Shestakov, has also pleaded not guilty to sanctions violations and money laundering in connection with Mr. Deripaska, as well as making false statements to the F.B.I. (Mr. McGonigal does not face that last charge.) There has been no public indication that Mr. Shestakov is about to change his plea; his lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.The arrest in January of Mr. McGonigal, 55, reverberated through the F.B.I., shocking colleagues who had worked with him over his 22-year career on some of the bureau’s most sensitive cases, including an investigation into the information breach that led to the disappearance, imprisonment or execution of C.I.A. informants in China.The accusations also raised questions about what agency secrets Mr. McGonigal might have compromised. But a more than three-year F.B.I. investigation produced no evidence that he had done so, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. That a plea agreement may be reached relatively quickly also suggests that Mr. McGonigal’s former colleagues at the F.B.I., and Justice Department prosecutors, have concluded his behavior stopped at corruption and did not extend to espionage.The New York indictment accused Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov of working for Mr. Deripaska, a wealthy Russian metals magnate. Mr. Shestakov, 69, is a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who lived in the U.S. and worked after his retirement as an interpreter in U.S. courts in New York.Federal prosecutors suggested that while still at the F.B.I., Mr. McGonigal attempted to build a relationship with an aide to Mr. Deripaska by arranging for the aide’s daughter to do an internship with the New York City Police Department. (A senior police official told The New York Times that the woman was given a “V.I.P.-type” tour over several days that included spending time with specialized Police Department units, including the harbor patrol and mounted units, but it was not an internship.)In April 2018, Mr. Deripaska was placed on a sanctions list by the U.S. State Department, which cited his connections to the Kremlin and Russia’s interference in the presidential election of 2016. Mr. McGonigal reviewed the proposed list of people to be sanctioned, including Mr. Deripaska, before it was finalized, prosecutors said.In 2019, after Mr. McGonigal’s retirement, he and Mr. Shestakov connected Mr. Deripaska to a law firm for aid in getting the sanctions lifted, federal prosecutors in New York said. Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska and others in London and Vienna and was paid $25,000 a month through the law firm as a consultant and an investigator until about March 2020, the indictment says.Then, in the spring of 2021, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov negotiated an agreement with Mr. Deripaska’s aide to investigate a rival oligarch, for which they were paid more than $200,000, according to the indictment. The criminal charges in the indictment appear to relate primarily to this arrangement, which ended, prosecutors said, when the men’s devices were seized by the F.B.I. in November 2021.Adam Goldman More