A 16-year-old has been charged with several hate crimes in a gang attack on a Black teenager at a subway station this week, the police said.

The attack happened at 8 a.m. Monday at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, according to the police. The victim, 16, who has not been identified, was on his way to school when he was approached by a group of people, a police spokeswoman said. The group punched and kicked the boy, taunted him with racial slurs and removed one of his shoes, the spokeswoman said.

On Wednesday the police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with the attack. He faces five criminal charges, including hate crime robbery and hate crime gang assault in the second degree. The police did not release the name or ethnicity of the boy who was charged. The case is being investigated by the Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

Hate crimes on the subway, in line with broader trends, are down. The number of hate crimes in the system dropped 32 percent in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to police statistics. Data shows that crime on the subway has declined overall, though perceptions of criminality remain persistent: Barely a majority of riders, 56 percent, said they felt safe on the subway, according to a survey released in January.

That may be related to the increasingly random nature of subway crime and a series of high-profile violent episodes. The examples last year included a train conductor who was slashed late at night on an A train in Brooklyn in February. In December, at the same station in Coney Island where the teenager was attacked this week, Debrina Kawam, 57, died after being set on fire in a random early-morning attack on a parked train.

Nine days later, a man pushed Joseph Lynskey onto the tracks in front of a train at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan. He narrowly survived. People were pushed onto the tracks at least 25 times last year. (While riders might believe that young people are responsible for most violent crime, recent data finds that the average person charged with violence on the subway is 32 years old, compared with 24 nearly two decades ago.)

Officials at the M.T.A. have acknowledged that the rise in random attacks is concerning. Last year 1,000 members of the National Guard began patrolling the subways, on orders from Gov. Kathy Hochul. They were supported by officers from the State Police and the transit authority. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch also assigned more than 200 police officers to patrol platforms and subway cars, and reassigned hundreds more from administrative jobs to transit patrols, which allowed the department to place two officers aboard every train that runs overnight, Commissioner Tisch said.

A New York county clerk on Thursday blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a New York doctor for prescribing and sending abortion pills to a Texas woman.

The unprecedented move catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights.

The dispute is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court, pitting Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a shield law that is intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.

New York is one of eight states that have enacted “telemedicine abortion shield laws” after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022. The laws prevent officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or from responding to subpoenas and other legal actions — a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in such cases.

The action by the New York county clerk is the first time that an abortion shield law has been used.

This case involves Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide abortion pills to patients across the country. In December, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, accusing her of sending abortion pills to a Texas woman, in violation of the state’s ban.

Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers did not respond to the lawsuit and did not show up for a court hearing last month in Texas. Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court issued a default judgment, ordering Dr. Carpenter to pay a penalty of $113,000 and to stop sending abortion medication to Texas.

On Thursday, citing New York’s shield law, the acting clerk of Ulster County in Kingston, N.Y., Taylor Bruck, said he would not grant Texas’ motion seeking to enforce the Collin County order. He also refused to allow Texas to file a summons that sought to force Dr. Carpenter to pay the penalty and comply with the Texas ruling.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Mr. Bruck said in a statement. “Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.”

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had previously sent guidance to courts and officials throughout the state, directing them to follow the shield law and indicating how they could comply and which specific actions were prohibited.

“I commend the Ulster County Clerk for doing what is right,” Ms. James said in a statement. “New York’s shield law was created to protect patients and providers from out-of-state anti-choice attacks, and we will not allow anyone to undermine health care providers’ ability to deliver necessary care to their patients. My office will always defend New York’s medical professionals and the people they serve.”

The Texas attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Legal experts said that a likely next step would be for Texas to file a challenge to the shield law in a state or federal court in New York.

Texas was the first state with an abortion ban to initiate legal action against abortion providers in states with shield laws. In January, the first criminal charges against a shield-law abortion provider were filed in a second state, Louisiana. In that case, a state grand jury issued a criminal indictment, also against Dr. Carpenter, accusing her of violating Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban by sending pills to that state.

Last month, Louisiana officials issued an extradition order for Dr. Carpenter, which was immediately rebuffed by New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul.

“I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana — not now, not ever,” Ms. Hochul said then.

Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers have not commented about either the Texas or Louisiana case. The Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, an organization Dr. Carpenter co-founded, has issued statements in response to the cases. “Shield laws are essential in safeguarding and enabling abortion care regardless of a patient’s ZIP code or ability to pay,” the coalition has said. “They are fundamental to ensuring everyone can access reproductive health care as a human right.”

Telemedicine abortion shield laws have become a key strategy for supporters of abortion rights. Under these laws, which have been in use since summer 2023, health care providers in states where abortion is legal have been sending more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions.

The Texas lawsuit accuses Dr. Carpenter of providing a 20-year-old woman with the two medications used in a standard abortion regimen, mifepristone and misoprostol. Typically used up through 12 weeks into pregnancy, mifepristone blocks a hormone needed for pregnancies to develop, and misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes contractions similar to a miscarriage.

According to a complaint filed by the Texas attorney general’s office, the woman, who had been nine weeks pregnant, asked the “biological father of her unborn child” to take her to the emergency room in July “because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding.” The man “suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage,” the suit said, and he went back to their home in Collin County, where he “discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.”

In the Collin County court hearing last month, Ernest C. Garcia, chief of the administrative law division in the attorney general’s office, said that the man “then filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office.”

In response to the Trump administration’s portrayal of the subway system as lawless, New York transit officials on Wednesday shot back: Crime is down, fare evasion is falling — and the nation’s largest transit system deserves far more money.

Janno Lieber, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the agency would be taking “a very professional, fact-based approach” to the federal government’s demands last week for a list of statistics on transit crime, aiming to show that crime underground is the lowest it has been in more than a decade.

Still, a surge in unpredictable attacks in the subway remains troubling, M.T.A. officials acknowledged, and concerns about crime remain an obstacle to getting some riders to return. A January rider survey showed that a little more than half of subway customers — 56 percent — say they feel safe on trains.

New York transit officials have remained defiant weeks into their standoff with federal officials, which began when Washington demanded the halt of congestion pricing last month. When New York refused, the skirmish escalated, with Sean Duffy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, threatening to defund transit projects, if the state did not provide the crime stats. Over the weekend, he referred to the subway system as a “shithole,” WNBC-TV reported, while repeating his demands.

A formal response to the secretary is in the works, but the transit authority wanted to preview the information, Mr. Lieber said at a board meeting on Wednesday.

“We’re going to stay coolheaded because the facts are on our side,” Mr. Lieber said.

Excluding 2020 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic when subway ridership was way down, last year had the fewest number of felonies reported in the transit system in 15 years, Michael Kemper, chief security officer at the M.T.A. and a former chief of transit at the Police Department, said at the board meeting. Weekly ridership has rebounded to about 75 percent of prepandemic levels.

During its rebuttal, the transit agency attempted to turn the tables and requested a larger share of federal transportation funding, at a time when it is trying to pay for its next five-year, $68 billion capital plan budget.

The transit agency receives between $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year from the federal government, which is used for improvements, like repairing outdated electrical equipment, as well as some basic maintenance, Mr. Lieber said.

John McCarthy, the chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said the agency receives just 17 percent of a federal pool of transit funding, despite carrying 43 percent of the nation’s transit ridership.

“It’s shortchanging low- and middle-income New Yorkers,” he said.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Duffy said a spate of recent violent crimes, including the death of a woman who was set on fire on the subway last year, has left riders on edge. “The M.T.A. can try and gaslight the American people, but attacks like these make every passenger fear becoming the next victim. It should have never gotten to this point for the governor and the M.T.A. to crack down on crime.”

Mr. Duffy demanded data on the number of assaults committed on passengers and employees; efforts to prevent “subway surfing,” the practice of riding moving trains; and the money spent on a number of security-related projects.

The back-and-forth over subway crime comes as the Trump administration and the M.T. A. are battling over congestion pricing in federal court. The tolling program, which began in January, charges most drivers $9 to enter the busiest section of Manhattan during peak hours. It has reduced traffic while aiming to raise $15 billion for critical transit repairs and upgrades.

Mr. Trump has vowed to kill congestion pricing, expressing concerns that the tolls would drive visitors and businesses away from Manhattan, though there is little evidence of that so far.

While Mr. Duffy did not mention congestion pricing while demanding the subway crime stats from the M.TA., a number of transit supporters questioned the timing of the request, which came shortly after Gov. Kathy Hochul reiterated her support for the tolling program.

Last month, Mr. Duffy withdrew federal authorization for congestion pricing, which was approved by the Biden administration. Federal officials initially gave New York until March 21 to stop charging the tolls, but last week Mr. Duffy offered a 30-day reprieve in a combative social media post, in which he described the program as a “slap in the face to hard working Americans.”

Mr. Duffy also put Ms. Hochul on notice that “your refusal to end cordon pricing and your open disrespect towards the federal government is unacceptable,” according to his post.

The M.T.A. has sued federal transportation officials and promised to keep collecting tolls unless a court orders it to stop. Legal and transportation experts have said that federal officials do not have the authority to reverse course now.

In raising the specter of crime in the subway system, Mr. Duffy is poking a sensitive topic among New Yorkers. The M.T.A. has said that, even as subway crime overall was declining, there was a rise in assaults underground.

In 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, felony assaults outnumbered robberies in the subway, raising concerns that the nature of violence underground was becoming more unpredictable.

In recent months, a few high-profile crimes have shaken riders, including the one that Mr. Duffy’s spokeswoman referred to, when Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman, died after being set on fire, as she slept on a train in December. Later that month, Joseph Lynskey was shoved in front of an oncoming train at the 18th Street station in Manhattan and survived. There were 10 murders in the subway in 2024, up from three in 2019.

Late last year, following an overnight slashing attack on an A train that injured a conductor, Ms. Hochul ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to begin patrolling the subways. As of earlier this month, about 1,250 Guard members, M.T.A. officers and state police officers patrolled the system, according to the governor’s office. In addition, thousands of city police officers patrol the subway.

Fare evasion, a frequent target for critics of the transit authority, is trending down, but also remains a major concern, Mr. Lieber said. In fall 2024, 10 percent of subway riders did not pay the fare, down from 14 percent in the spring. On buses, 45 percent did not pay the fare in the fall, down from 50 percent in the spring.

It is unclear if the federal government will be satisfied with the M.T.A.’s findings, which it will formally submit before the end of the month. Some transit observers have questioned whether the administration has ulterior motives in painting the agency as inept.

Rachael Fauss, a senior policy adviser for Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group, gave the M.T.A. credit for releasing detailed data about crime in the transit system and congestion pricing. But, she added, “the Trump administration doesn’t care about the facts.”

Federal officials could threaten to delay or withhold funding to gain political leverage in their effort to end congestion pricing, transportation and legal experts said. The M.T.A. is seeking $14 billion from Washington in its next five-year capital budget.

New York’s leaders cannot count on federal funds for the transit system’s capital needs, Ms. Fauss said, and should instead look for local revenue sources, including raising money from suburban areas that have benefited from transit investments.

During Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Lieber emphasized, “We’re not out to make any enemies; we’re literally in the bridges business.”

Still, one M.T.A. board member could not resist taking a jab at Mr. Duffy.

Neal Zuckerman, the chair of the finance committee, invited the transportation secretary to attend their next meeting, in a post on social media.

“Come on down, Mr. Duffy,” he wrote. “We will protect you from the ‘scary subway.’ You’ll be ok.”