New York
A Clean Slate for Jan. 6 Rioters From the New York Area
Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at some of the Jan. 6 rioters whom President Donald J. Trump pardoned or whose sentences he commuted in a sweeping set of executive orders.
Nearly 1,600 people charged with taking part in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by President Donald J. Trump this week. A number of the criminal defendants had ties to New York, as my colleague Ed Shanahan reported, and had been convicted on an array of charges, from trespassing to assaulting law enforcement officers. But this sweeping action has wiped clean the slate for them.
A White House proclamation called the pardons an end to a “grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, criticized the action.
“Donald Trump is ushering in a Golden Age for people that break the law and attempt to overthrow the government,” he said.
Those with ties to New York who garnered widespread attention during the riot included:
-
Thomas Webster: A former Marine and a retired New York City police officer, Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison after being caught on video shoving through a police line and then swinging a flagpole at and tackling an officer. He made a self-defense claim at trial, but the jury rejected it.
-
Dominic Pezzola: Pezzola, a member of the Proud Boys and a contractor from Rochester, was found guilty on six felony counts, including charges of assaulting an officer and conspiring to keep members of Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. He became known as a main actor in the riot when video clips showing him breaking a window at the Capitol surfaced online.
-
Roberto Minuta: Minuta is a former Oath Keeper. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for seditious conspiracy related to the riot. He has since tried to distance himself from the group, suggesting at his sentencing that he had been misled by it.
-
Thomas Sibick: After pleading guilty to assaulting a Metropolitan Police officer during the riot, Sibick was sentenced to just over four years in prison. He took responsibility for his actions in a letter to the judge, calling the trauma the officer had experienced “undeniably sickening.”
-
Sara Carpenter: Carpenter, also a former New York City police officer, was ordered to spend 22 months in prison after being convicted of several crimes that involved her pushing and slapping officers while wielding a tambourine and yelling.
-
Edward Jacob Lang: Lang was charged with a series of crimes connected to the riot and had been in jail awaiting his trial when Trump issued the blanket pardon. Investigators arrested Lang after tracing a string of social media posts back to him. Court records said that the social media posts showed Lang swinging a baseball bat at police officers and thrusting a riot shield in their direction.
Weather
Today will gradually become sunny with a high near 31. Expect a breezy evening with a mostly clear sky and a low around 19.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended to aid weather operations.
The latest New York news
Dear Diary:
Over 45 years ago, I took a class in sales at a building at West 41st Street and Eighth Avenue. At the end of the first night, I yelled out, “Anyone going to the East Side?”
“I am,” said one woman in a class of 15 to 20 people.
Making our way east across 42nd Street, we walked past peep shows, food vendors and pickpockets.
New York
An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York
Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A new Anne Frank exhibition will open at the Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.
“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is a full-scale re-creation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam, and where she wrote her diary. The show has more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time the annex has been completely reconstructed outside Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.
The exhibition aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as antisemitism is rising in the United States and abroad.
The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions as its counterpart at the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original space, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibition is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.
The presence of furniture and other possessions in the exhibition could stir controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instinct told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex empty, he was worried about commercialization and universalization of her persona.
“He actually emphasized absence as a way to represent that which is not representable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex room filled with possessions, she said, “might induce us to feel way too good about things that we should not feel good about.”
Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path, tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s through their flight to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. After that, visitors enter the annex.
“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam house and the traveling exhibition’s curator. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”
The exhibition also chronicles Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 editions of it in different languages are on display, along with memorabilia from theatrical and film adaptations.
Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially youths, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours of the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 years old are available for $16. The exhibition, a nonprofit venture whose revenues support the missions of its two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials to classes and free admission to students attending as part of New York City public-school field trips and to those from schools nationwide receiving federal education funding.
There will be programming for adults as well. Tomorrow evening, the author Ruth Franklin (“The Many Lives of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center. On Feb. 9, the novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the show in New York is under consideration; more venues will be announced in the spring.)
Leopold said that he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.
“If this exhibition is doing anything, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It is also teaching about ourselves.”
Weather
Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be high winds with a cloudy sky and a low near 32.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest New York news
Dear Diary:
Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.He’s got best sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’ —
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.— Lou Craft
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. L.F.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
New York
‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’
Artful
Dear Diary:
My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”
That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.
On my most recent visit to the Met, I heard a man behind me explaining the work to his group: And there’s another one at the Art Institute of Chicago that’s three times as big as this one, he said.
I turned around.
“You really know your stuff,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I saw ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”
— James Devitt
Bathtub in the Kitchen
Dear Diary:
Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.
But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore.
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.
He’s got best-sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’—
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)
What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)
It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.
Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.
Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.
— Lou Craft
Sounds of the ’60s
Dear Diary:
I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.
He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”
As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.
He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.
He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”
— Chris Parnagian
Northbound Traffic
Dear Diary:
It was about 10 years ago. I was in the passenger seat of our Toyota, my husband was at the wheel and we were stuck in northbound traffic on the West Side Highway.
It was warm out, and we had the windows down. I had a copy of “Life of Pi,” with its distinctive blue dust jacket and orange spine, on my lap.
I heard a man’s voice that sounded like it was next to me but much higher up. It turned out it was coming from the open window of a cab on a tractor-trailer that was idling next to us.
“Great book,” the voice said.
I looked up and saw the truck’s driver looking down at me. His elbow was resting on the edge of the open window. Beneath it was a copy of “Life of Pi,” open so I could see the dust jacket.
“Great book!” I said.
Slowly, traffic began to move.
— Connie Beckley
What Will You Have?
Dear Diary:
It was lunchtime in Midtown, and the deli counter line snaked its way along a refrigerated unit filled with cheeses, salamis and tomatoes.
It was all new to me, a recent arrival from Ireland. Finally, it was my turn to order.
“Yeah?” the counterman said.
“Do you have whole wheat?” I asked.
The counterman furrowed his brow and nodded.
“Do you have Cheddar?”
“Yes.”
“Do you … ”
I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Turning around, I saw a short, older man wearing a pork pie hat and a bow tie and peering at me though his glasses.
“Stop asking questions,” he said. “Tell him what you want.”
— Tommy Weir
Read all recent entries and our submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter.
Illustrations by Agnes Lee
New York
N.Y. Migrants Fear Expulsion After Trump Expands Deportation Targets
Marlon Luna said he and his girlfriend came into the United States three months ago after fleeing death threats in Venezuela. They waited in Mexico for four long months to secure a Border Patrol appointment instead of crossing illegally. Then they wound up in a New York migrant shelter.
Now, they fear that New York — and America — may be over for them.
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued a memo that widened the scope of people it would seek to deport, including those who, like Mr. Luna, used CBP One, a mobile app, to enter the country.
The Biden administration had used the app to manage the movement of 900,000 migrants through legal ports of entry. Mr. Luna, 23, said he had assumed that if he followed the rules he would have a fair shake. Now, he fears, deportation could happen at any time.
“Some people crossed illegally, but some people wanted to enter in the way that one should,” he said in Spanish outside a Randall’s Island shelter on Friday. “What we are hearing here, and really what everyone is saying, is that at any moment something could happen.”
For nearly three years, thousands of migrants have come to New York City under Biden-era programs that allowed migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and elsewhere to legally enter the United States and temporarily remain for as long as two years. Now the Homeland Security Department has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to expel those with a temporary legal status known as parole, which also allows migrants to work here.
The new directive could have an outsize impact in New York City, where more than 225,000 migrants have arrived since early 2022, many under parole. It raised the possibility that the city’s 187 migrant shelters, where more than 49,000 people still reside, would be prime targets if ICE aggressively pursues migrants allowed in under the Biden administration.
The action in Washington came as officials in New York City, a liberal stronghold with an additional 400,000-some immigrants with temporary or no legal status, have been bracing for an immigration crackdown.
The city has so-called sanctuary laws, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. City agencies have been racing to issue guidance to schools, shelters and social services offices on how to respond if ICE officers show up.
In a message to agency heads last month, Camille Joseph Varlack, who is chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams, said that leaders would “stand firmly by the values that have made New York City a thriving city of immigrants, regardless of immigration status.”
However, Mr. Adams’s public messaging and remarks have done little to reassure people who work with immigrants and his fellow Democrats, instead creating a sense of dissonance and discombobulation.
Mr. Adams has denigrated aspects of the sanctuary laws and expressed support for modifying them to allow the city to work with ICE to deport people charged with crimes — all while declining to publicly criticize Mr. Trump. The mayor faces a trial on federal corruption charges in April and has moved to stay in the good graces of Mr. Trump, who could pardon him.
On Thursday evening, when Mr. Adams was asked about a newly issued Justice Department memo that threatens prosecution for local officials who fail to comply with the president’s immigration initiatives, the mayor signaled that he was inclined to cooperate.
“If the federal government is stating that you cannot interfere with the actions, we can’t do anything that is going to jeopardize city employees,” Mr. Adams said, adding, “We need to read through these executive orders and fully understand what they’re saying, what our authorizations may be and what they are not.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Adams said in a statement Friday that the mayor believes that “federal immigration enforcement should be focused on the small number of people who are entering our localities and committing violent crimes.”
She added, “While the mayor and president will not always agree on everything, Mayor Adams is focused on how we can work together to do what is best for New York City.”
The measured tone from City Hall was in contrast with that of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat. She, along with 10 other attorneys general, responded to the Justice Department memo with a fiery statement: “These vague threats are just that: empty words on paper,” the statement said. “But rest assured, our states will not hesitate to respond if these words become illegal actions.”
Under current city guidelines, federal immigration authorities can only be allowed into a shelter if they have judicial warrants for specific people. Some immigration lawyers said that they had not heard of ICE showing up at New York City shelters since the migrant crisis began almost three years ago.
But they speculated whether that would change soon if Mr. Trump decides to go after migrants who entered using CBP One or under the program that allows certain migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to legally stay for as long as two years. Mr. Trump and his allies have long criticized the programs as tactics abused by the Biden administration to allow illegal immigration under the guise of legal migration, and have moved quickly to end them.
“They’re intending to cast as wide a net as possible to really try to remove as many people who were admitted in the last two years,” said Jodi Ziesemer, the co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of people, mostly families, who could be rounded up and deported. They’re very vulnerable.”
Accomplishing the directives in the Homeland Security memo would be a significant escalation of arrests and deportations, and would present a daunting logistical challenge. Some of the immigrants might have other legal shields, such as asylum or Temporary Protected Status, lawyers said. It might also prove hard for the United States to deport people to Venezuela, given the severely strained diplomatic relations between the countries.
Migrants in city shelters, many of whom speak scant English, were left to parse Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive orders and directives this week. Many wondered whether the asylum claims they have filed in immigration court would offer them a level of protection. Rumors of ICE officers showing up at shelters have swirled in conversations and text messages. Some migrants said they were limiting their time outside the shelters, while others were urgently trying to leave the system altogether, fearful that they could be easy targets.
Pedro Cumana, a Venezuelan living in a small tent outside the Randall’s Island shelter, said in an interview in Spanish that when helicopters have flown over or sirens have gone off at night this week, he has poked his head outside, wondering whether it’s immigration officials or a routine police run.
“I haven’t been able to sleep well,” said Mr. Cumana, who has a hearing related to his asylum claim this month. “I feel uncertain. I’m not sure how to feel, because what if at my own court hearing they arrest me? It’s not easy. You don’t know what to expect.”
Immigration lawyers and activists expressed outrage at the memo’s suggestion that immigration officials could retroactively strip migrants of parole status and seek to move them from formal deportation proceedings to a sped-up exit.
“The barrage of things that have happened this past week is very intentional, obviously,” said Deborah Lee, the lawyer in charge of the immigration law unit at The Legal Aid Society. “But it’s also intended to be so overwhelming that people cannot fight back and make legal challenges because of the full volume of everything.”
Still, other migrants, like Ramon Cortez, 43, also from Venezuela, refused to panic about what was brewing in the news and on social media. Mr. Cortez, who arrived in New York two months ago after using the CBP One app to enter the country, said in an interview in Spanish that he would not fret until he received official notice that he was at risk of deportation.
“If I receive a formal document, a court or something that tells me, ‘This is going to happen there,’ I’m going to start to believe what they’re saying,” he said.
Wesley Parnell, Olivia Bensimon and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
-
Culture1 week ago
American men can’t win Olympic cross-country skiing medals — or can they?
-
Culture1 week ago
Book Review: ‘Somewhere Toward Freedom,’ by Bennett Parten
-
Education1 week ago
Report Projecting Drop in Freshman Enrollment Delivered Incorrect Findings
-
World1 week ago
‘Fields were solitary’: Migration raids send chill across rural California
-
News1 week ago
Who Are the Millions of Immigrants Trump Wants to Deport?
-
Politics1 week ago
Trump administration planning illegal immigrant arrests throughout US on ‘day one’
-
Business1 week ago
Opinion: Biden delivered a new 'Roaring '20s.' Watch Trump try to take the credit.
-
News6 days ago
Judges Begin Freeing Jan. 6 Defendants After Trump’s Clemency Order