For the second time in three months, the office of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, said it was recusing itself from investigating the death of a prisoner whom other inmates said was brutally beaten by guards.

As occurred in the case of the earlier death, a special prosecutor will take over the inquiry into the death of Messiah Nantwi, 22, who died last week after being held at Mid-State Correctional Facility in central New York, Ms. James’s office said in a statement on Thursday.

The statement said the recusal was necessary because lawyers in her office were already defending four of the 15 corrections employees involved in the events that preceded the death in unrelated civil lawsuits.

Ms. James appointed William J. Fitzpatrick, the Onondaga County district attorney, as the special prosecutor. Just last month, Mr. Fitzpatrick brought charges against 10 officers in connection to the killing of another prisoner, Robert L. Brooks. Six of the officers were charged with murder.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

House Republicans on Wednesday accused the Democratic mayors of New York, Denver, Boston and Chicago of harboring criminal immigrants in an acrimonious congressional hearing over what role large cities should have in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Under fiery and angry questioning from Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, the mayors defended their policies and their cities’ efforts to house and feed migrants, tens of thousands of whom were bused to their communities by Republican governors. The mayors rejected the notion that the local police should help in the administration’s deportation efforts.

“We do not have the capacity for our law enforcement to be doing federal immigration enforcement,” Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver told lawmakers. “But we want to be partners in making sure we are pulling violent criminals off the street.”

Mr. Johnston spoke of the influx of 42,000 migrants two years ago, many bused from Texas, “mostly women and children in 10-degree weather with only sandals and a T-shirt.”

The hearings seemed to capture the political moment. It was a clash of the law-and-order Republican Party led by President Trump and liberal politicians running cities, broadly known as sanctuary cities, that have large populations of immigrants.

Even the language employed by both sides underlined the stark differences in the ways the two parties approach the issue. The chairman of the committee spoke of “illegal aliens,” a term now out of favor among Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates, who prefer the term “undocumented.”

At the heart of the hearing was a question seemingly unique to America’s decentralized political system — the extent to which one segment of government is allowed to curb its cooperation with another.

Republicans are seeking a more proactive approach by cities, saying that local police departments should be doing more to facilitate the transfer of undocumented immigrants to the federal authorities. Democrats counter that if cities were deputized to help enforce federal immigration laws, they would have to divert resources away from other priorities, such as investigating crimes and apprehending violent criminals.

“There is no place in America, not one, that actually provides sanctuary from federal law,” Representative Dave Min of California, a Democrat, said at the hearing. “The real issue here is whether state and local governments should spend scarce taxpayer dollars to help the federal government enforce its immigration priorities.”

Republicans repeatedly sought to induce the mayors into the kind of stumbles that derailed the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who lost their jobs after testifying before Congress about campus antisemitism.

At the start of the hearings, the committee’s chairman, Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, referred to a number of cases where undocumented immigrants were charged with rape or murder. He asked the mayors whether they would hand over the “criminal” to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Our local law enforcement works hard every day to get criminals off the streets of Chicago,” replied Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago.

Mr. Comer interjected, “Will you turn that criminal over to ICE?”

“We do not harbor criminals,” Mr. Johnson said, adding details of criminal procedure without directly answering the question.

The exchange ended with Mr. Comer concluding that it proved that Democratic mayors were shielding criminals from federal law enforcement.

“We have to have cooperation,” he said.

The past several years have seen record levels of unauthorized immigration into the United States, and Americans have become more supportive of stemming the flow. A poll from The New York Times and Ipsos in January found that a vast majority of Americans — 87 percent — supported deporting undocumented immigrants with a criminal record. A majority said they favored “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally.”

Republicans stepped up their confrontational tone as the hearings wore on, with Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, asking questions like whether the mayors hated President Trump more than they loved their country. She accused the mayors of having “blood on your hands.”

A number of Republican lawmakers who spoke at the hearing said the mayors were violating federal laws and should be prosecuted. They cited specific cases where people had been attacked or killed by undocumented migrants, suggesting cities’ immigration polices had contributed to those crimes.

“Every one of you is exposed to criminal culpability here,” Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, told the mayors. “That’s the reality of it.”

Several times in the hearings the mayors turned Republicans’ accusations back on them to try to score their own political points, urging them to focus on the economy, pass immigration reform, strengthen gun laws and oppose other Trump administration policies the mayors described as harmful.

“If you wanted to make us safe, pass gun reforms,” Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston said.

At another point, Ms. Wu spoke to the damage that deporting large numbers of migrants would have on cities.

“I do not support mass deportation,” she said. “That would be devastating for our economy. There are millions of people who are running our small businesses, going to our schools.”

Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who has talked of allowing ICE into jails in spite of his city’s sanctuary laws, did not come under the same level of scrutiny from Republicans.

But he was questioned by Democrats about accusations that he had engaged in a quid pro quo with the Trump administration, which dropped federal corruption charges against him, saying that it needed his help on immigration. Representative Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, called on Mr. Adams to resign; the mayor said he had done nothing wrong.

Mr. Adams grew weary of the line of questioning. “It appears as though we’re asking the same questions over and over and over again,” he told Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas. “My comments are not going to change. No quid pro quo, no agreement. I did nothing wrong.”

Although Republicans spared Mr. Adams from the most aggressive questioning, the vision he laid out did not fully jibe with the Trump administration’s talking points.

“I must create an atmosphere that allows every law-abiding resident, documented or not, to access vital services without fear of being turned over to federal authorities,” he said during the hearing.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Maya C. Miller reported from Washington and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco. Jack Healy and Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting.

The Trump administration is threatening to cut tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for Columbia University, making the school the first major target in its effort to root out what it considers antisemitic harassment on college campuses.

A comprehensive review of Columbia University’s federal contracts and grants was announced Monday night, shortly after Linda McMahon was confirmed as the secretary of education in a party-line vote.

The review, which will be led by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, has already identified $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government that could be subject to stop-work orders. Health and Human Services said in a news release that the review was necessary “given Columbia’s ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.”

Far more could be on the line: A federal task force will conduct a comprehensive review of the “more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia University to ensure that the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities,” the news release said.

Much of that money flows through Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, one of the largest academic medical centers in the country. In announcing the review, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary, said in a statement that “antisemitism — like racism — is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues.”

More than a quarter of Columbia’s $6.6 billion in annual operating revenue comes from federal sources, according to its 2024 financial statements. Of that, about $1.3 billion comes from federal research grants, the category of revenue most immediately at risk from this review.

The National Institutes of Health gives the most federal research money to Columbia, providing $747 million in 2023. An additional $206 million came from other Health and Human Services programs.

Columbia said in a statement Monday evening that it was reviewing the announcement and that it looked forward “to ongoing work with the new federal administration to fight antisemitism.”

The nation’s research universities stand to lose billions in federal funding because of Trump administration actions. For example, a new policy regarding overhead costs will have drastic effects on institutions that rely on N.I.H. grants. Under the new measure, the additional money that institutions get to offset overhead costs is capped at 15 percent of the total of the grant, instead of the 50 or 60 percent some universities receive. (That reduction is on hold because of a court decision.)

A letter to schools from the Department of Education also threatens to cut federal money to those that do not end diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Columbia is additionally exposed to Trump administration pressure because of the prominence of its pro-Palestinian movement, whose tents overtook the university’s grassy quads last spring, giving rise to a wave of encampments nationally. The Trump administration considers many of the chants expressed at pro-Palestinian rallies, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as antisemitic.

“Columbia is the only university named in all three investigations — a terrible trifecta — which leads us to the unappetizing conclusion that our alma mater will bear the brunt of whatever the Trump administration decides on,” said the Stand Columbia Society, a group of alumni that has been analyzing Columbia’s financial exposure to the Trump administration’s moves.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian Columbia students were arrested last spring after participating in the encampments and the takeover of Hamilton Hall, a campus building. But the disciplinary process is ongoing in most of these cases, and no expulsions have been announced. On Tuesday, a Columbia official, speaking on background to discuss student disciplinary matters, said that four students had already been suspended in connection with behavior related to Hamilton Hall and the encampments and that other cases were expected to be concluded shortly.

The loss of federal grant funding would be devastating, said Gil Zussman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia who has been calling for Columbia to take more aggressive action to protect Jewish and Israeli students from protesters who break rules.

“This crisis should be used by the Columbia leadership to make immediate changes related to enhancing and enforcing the university rules, despite objections from a vocal minority of faculty, most of whom do not rely on federal funding for research,” Dr. Zussman said.

Dr. Brent Stockwell, the chair of the department of biological sciences, said that threatening research funding was exactly the wrong lever for the Trump administration to pull to fight antisemitism, in part because many Jewish faculty members will lose their jobs if their funding is eliminated.

“They just don’t understand that if they wipe out all the Jewish researchers who are doing frontier, cutting-edge research, that will just make things more difficult,” said Dr. Stockwell, who is Jewish. “It’s adding salt into the wound.”

Representative Tim Walberg, the Republican chairman of the House Education and Work Force Committee, wrote in a Monday news release, “For more than a year, Columbia’s leaders have made public and private promises to Jewish students, faculty, and members of Congress that the university would take the steps necessary to combat the rampant antisemitism on Columbia’s campus. Columbia has failed to uphold its commitments, and this is unacceptable.”

Writing on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, President Trump underscored his stance regarding what he considered the appropriate penalty for pro-Palestinian demonstrators who take over a building and cause injury or property damage.

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”