As part of the Pride Month celebration on Tuesday evening, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted the work his administration has done to expand services for LGBTQ+ communities, calling New York City a “haven” for people with alternative gender identities.

In particular, Mamdani doubled down on promises of $15 million in funding for trans communities.

“The threats will continue and so will our relentless protection of trans people across this city,” Mamdani said, referring to challenges he said LGBTQ+ communities face.

“As a first step, my administration has made a $15 million investment in gender affirming care over the next two years, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to make sure every trans and gender non-conforming New Yorker can live with the dignity, safety and freedom they deserve.”

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Mamdani’s speech builds on similar efforts in other cities and looks to follow through on campaign promises Mamdani made on the road to his mayoral victory.

It’s unclear where, exactly, the $15 million request is being allocated from or how it will be disbursed as New York City Council members continue consideration of the 2027 budget.

Progressive-led subsidized transgender initiatives have also advanced in San Francisco.

Like New York, San Francisco established an Office of Transgender Initiatives and, through its Department of Public Health, has funded guidance for hormone therapy, surgery and mental health case management.

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If implemented, Mamdani’s initiative would go further, directly funding procedures.

Despite pushing the envelope on city-led programs for trans services, the New York funding falls short of the vision Mamdani painted while on the campaign trail.

“The Mamdani administration will budget $65 million in funding to explicitly support and expand access to Gender Affirming Care (GAC) in NYC,” Mamdani’s campaign website read.

That plan detailed that up to $57 million would go to public hospitals, community clinics, health centers and non-profits that could perform procedures.

Although Mamdani’s plan for the $15 million remains hazy, he said his support of the LGBTQ community was proven — and would only grow.

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“As your mayor, I was proud to establish New York City’s first-ever office of LGBTQIA+ affairs within the first 100 days of our administration,” Mamdani said.

“This office focuses on the well-being of queer New Yorkers so that you know you have a champion and advocate within city government.”

WASHINGTON — Dozens of House Democrats are asking the new director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to roll back a policy that they say hinders their ability to speak with detainees during oversight visits.

The new policy requires that lawmakers identify detainees by name at least two business days before a visit and provide a signed consent form from each detainee. It’s the latest point of conflict in an ongoing battle over when and how lawmakers can inspect immigration facilities.

In a letter Thursday to acting ICE Director David Venturella, Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) and 77 other members of Congress, including two dozen from California, argued that they need to conduct constant oversight of immigration facilities because of historic levels of reports regarding the mistreatment of detainees, deaths in custody and substandard facility conditions.

“This Administration has enabled a revolving door of arbitrary policies, directives, and guidance on member access to facilities or on communication with detainees designed to hinder any productive oversight,” they wrote.

The letter was written in response to the new policy, which was outlined in a memo last month.

In the letter, Levin and the other members wrote that detainees have a hard time accessing the visitation form because it is at times unavailable at a detention center’s law library. They said it limits their ability to speak broadly with detainees, particularly those from vulnerable populations, such as the elderly.

Detainees previously used a sign-up sheet to meet with members of Congress or just started talking to detainees they encountered during facility tours.

In the memo outlining ICE’s new policy, then-acting director Todd Lyons said the increased visits by members of Congress have become a burden and a time suck. Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment, but previously said that the policy doesn’t prevent lawmakers from speaking with detainees.

Levin said the increase in visits was necessary because the agency slashed staffing of its oversight offices. The letter notes that for next fiscal year, the president requested additional cuts to the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

“These actions, coupled with the constant changes to policies surrounding member access to facilities, reveal a clear attack on the levers that ensure government transparency at every level,” the members wrote.

Democratic House members sued the Trump administration last July after they were repeatedly denied access to immigrant detention facilities in California and across the country.

Homeland Security officials previously implemented a policy requiring lawmakers to give seven days’ notice before a visit, but that policy was temporarily blocked in federal court.

This week, lawyers said a Belizean man who helped organize hunger strikes at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center was moved to facilities out of state and scheduled to be deported after he spoke to three members of Congress about conditions at the detention center in San Bernardino County.

Because the party out of power almost always does well in midterm elections, Democrats should be cruising toward a comfortable performance in the fall. And public sentiment has steadily drifted away from President Trump — and, by proxy, Republicans — amid an unpopular war with Iran, high gas prices and discontent with the president’s handling of the economy.

But public sentiment matters only so much in elections. The way congressional maps are drawn can have an enormous impact on which party is favored to win. Over the last year, Republicans have created a structural advantage by redrawing maps to carve out more safe red territory.

The data from the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan group that analyzes elections, lays bare this tug-of-war for House control.

Of the 88 revisions the Cook Political Report has made to race ratings since February 2025, two-thirds of them shifted toward Democrats. Yet most of the races in which Republicans gained ground were not because they won over voters, but because they redrew district lines. Four out of every five shifts in Republicans’ favor were the result of partisan redistricting.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the shifts.

The Cook Political Report typically revises its race ratings for a wide variety of reasons. Polling numbers change. Strong challengers emerge. Incumbents decide to retire. The results of primary and special elections change the political landscape. Revisions from these factors often inch a race modestly along the rating spectrum, shifting it to be slightly more competitive or slightly less so.

Redistricting, which has affected nearly half of all revisions so far this cycle, has rewritten these rules. In many cases, seats have shifted suddenly from safely Democratic seats to safely Republican, vaulting them from one end of the rating spectrum to the other and bypassing the competitive middle entirely.

Midterm elections in the last two decades have been largely seen as a referendum on the party that controls the White House. It remains to be seen if the gains the G.O.P. has built into the electoral map will be enough to overcome the Democrats’ environmental advantage.

“We still view Democrats as favorites — strong favorites — to retake control of the House of Representatives in November,” said Matthew Klein, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who focuses on the House and governors’ races. “But certainly Republicans have built a bit more of a firewall than they had at this time last year.”