Title: Morning Headlines: NYC Council Pushes Back on Rikers Immigration Plan, Climate Law Loophole Under Scrutiny, Last Chance to Join a Community Board, and OMNY Fraud Concerns

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Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, February 14th. Here's the morning headlines from Michael Hill.

Michael Hill: Some City Council members are criticizing Mayor Adams for allowing federal immigration officers into Rikers Island. Manhattan Council member Gale Brewer serves on the Immigration Committee. She says most inmates who are being held at Rikers are pretrial.

Gale Brewer: Nobody there who is not convicted should be subject to ICE. I think having ICE there would put them in a situation compromise where they would in fact could end up at Guatemala Bay. I'm totally opposed to that.

Michael Hill: The mayor's statement comes after meeting with President Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, yesterday. Adams says ICE agents would be focusing on violent criminals and gangs at Rikers. The city's sanctuary policies have long largely prevented cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents. Today's your last chance to apply for a spot on our community board in Brooklyn. WNYC's Verónica Del Valle has more.

Verónica Del Valle: Why not spend Valentine's Day applying to join Brooklyn's most local level of government? Mike Racioppo has served on or worked with the borough's Community Board 6 for the last 12 years. He says local bodies like community boards shape the building blocks of people's lives.

Mike Racioppo: My life day to day and for this community is different because of this decision for better or worse.

Verónica Del Valle: People 16 and older have until 11:59 tonight to submit their applications. The borough president's office says anyone who lives, works, or has a significant interest in a community can apply. The borough president then decides who gets appointed to the board.

Michael Hill: Two New York City Council members are introducing legislation to prevent landlords from buying their way out of complying with the city's landmark climate law. Owners of the city's largest buildings are supposed to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and be completely carbon neutral by 2050 under what's known as Local Law 97. The current rules allow them to buy credits that subsidize clean energy projects instead, and the credits are cheaper than making some of the required upgrades.

Council member Carmen De La Rosa says that goes against the spirit of the climate law.

Carmen De La Rosa: If we water Local Law 97 down to the point where we're not meeting those objectives, then we won't see the benefit of Local Law 97. We want to keep the law robust.

Michael Hill: The law would reduce the amount of greenhouse gas reductions landlords can offset by buying those credits. 31 and clear now, sunny, and a steady 32 for a high. A cold one today, feeling as cold at times as 20, breezy, and gusty. Then tomorrow, afternoon Rain, high near 35, feeling like the mid-20s. Rain and snow at night.

Janae Pierre: Up next, our weekly segment of On the Way, covering all transportation news. That's after the break.

Sean Carlson: I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's Friday, which means it's time for On the Way, our weekly segment breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us is WNYC's transportation reporter Stephen Nessen and editor Clayton Guse. This week we're talking kids. We're talking babies on trains. We're going to start with the kids. First Stephen, you reported today that a New York City public school student had their OMNY card flagged for fraud. How's that even possible? What happened? Why is it notable?

Stephen Nessen: Let's start with OMNY for students. That's new this school year. In the fall, all students who live more than half a mile from their school got a brat green OMNY card.

Sean Carlson: That's what we're calling it now.

Stephen Nessen: It's the color. It's that greenish trendy green. It's different than previous Metro cards for students because it's good for four rides a day, every day of the week, even weekends and during the summer. Pretty nice capabilities. Of course, something this good has some restrictions. The card is only for the student that was issued the card. Immediately, you may recall, after these came out, we saw them pop up online for sale, which is of course not allowed. Those cards were deactivated.

Clayton Guse: The city has a big interest in preventing people or students or anyone from abusing these cards. The money for the program comes right out of the city coffers. That's our tax dollars, but there's a really good reason for this. There's a million-plus school students in the city. The MTA and the city want them to pay the fare like everyone else to get to school. Some of the other programs, when you lose your card, what are kids going to do to get home or get to school? They're going to evade the fare. There's a balance that they're trying to strike here.

Stephen Nessen: The MTA is also trying to crack down on that culture of fare evasion that we've talked about so many times. The question is, how do they track fraud with this? We got an inside look this week when we got our hands on an email that was sent from the Department of Education to a parent whose Kid's card had been flagged for fraud.

Sean Carlson: I really want to hear what happened here. How does an OMNY card get flagged and who's monitoring it?

Stephen Nessen: There are really two parts to this. First, the MTA is monitoring the cards, but they insist they just have card numbers. They don't know the individual's name or any personal info attached to that, but if their computers detect, for example, the card isn't being used near the school it was assigned, it gets flagged for fraud. Also, if it's not being used at all, it's also flagged. Now the MTA insists that that's all it does from its end.

The Department of Education then contacts any student whose cards are flagged for fraud. This email that I mentioned that we got sent from an administrator at the DOE to a parent, in this instance, the parent claims that their student took their OMNY card to school so the parent used the student's card to get to work, and it was flagged for fraud. The email to the parent revealed more than what the MTA had claimed.

The email said, "The MTA expects the first use of the OMNY card to be near the home address, the second stop to be near the school, and the final stop of the day to be near the home address." Part of this program is they can take extra stops. Like we said, there's four a day, so they can go to an after-school appointment or an activity. All of this has raised concerns with privacy watchdogs. Here's Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Albert Fox Cahn: So easy to imagine really vulnerable kids who are going to be falsely flagged by the system. Someone who is evicted from their apartment and changes where they're commuting to and from or is couch surfing with family, they might be falsely flagged. So often, these mass surveillance systems aren't just invasive and creepy and prone to abuse, they're prone to get it wrong.

Stephen Nessen: The MTA insists it's not tracking people, it's just identifying abuse in the system, and in this case, it worked. A parent used the student's card. That's not supposed to happen. The DOE didn't dispute the info in the email but did say it doesn't track students' immigration status or country of origin, hoping to put to rest any concerns about, say, ice, for example, using the system to track students.

Clayton Guse: There's a way that this is a rogue email just explaining it, but the very least-- What Fox Cahn and the overall thing here is that there's at least some location data used in monitoring fraud with these student OMNY cards.

Sean Carlson: We're going to move on now to one of the most dramatic subway stories of the year. You might have seen this on social media. It was all over yesterday. Yesterday a woman gave birth to a baby on a W train. Clayton, break it down for us. What do we know about the mother?

Clayton Guse: Yesterday morning on a Downtown W train, it was halted at Herald Square for a really, really unusual reason. Passengers flagged down the crew saying a woman gave birth in one of the cars. Other passengers chipped in and helped the situation. It was a very New York moment of people helping people in need, especially this mass transit system that access our main public comments. The woman and her baby girl were taken to Bellevue Hospital, and are said to be doing well and in good condition.

Stephen Nessen: Our reporter, Julia Hayward actually spoke with a woman that was on that train. Her name's Brianna Brown. She said it really was a team effort like Clayton said. She said there were two women helping deliver the baby. Another man was blocking the view for a little privacy. At one point, someone was asking, does anyone have a knife or scissors to cut the umbilical cord?" Another woman came over with a Swiss arm army knife, and that was used to cut the cord.

This woman, Brianna Brown, is, I should say, active on TikTok and as far as I've seen, posted maybe the only video of the baby being born. Here she is talking about the experience.

Brianna Brown: Wow, New York really isn't a real place. That's one of the jokes that as a New Yorker, you have because so many things just happen out of the ordinary that you wouldn't expect. You would never expect to get on a train and head to work or you're just commuting and somebody to just have a baby on the train.

Sean Carlson: Yes.

Clayton Guse: We also learned a little bit more about the circumstances that led to this woman giving birth on a train, which is really unimaginable. Our newsroom confirmed that the mother is a 25-year-old woman from Florida. Back in the fall, when she was early on or midway through her pregnancy, her family reported her missing. A detective on the case down in Florida said she was found a few days later, but at some point since then, she made her way to New York. She's been estranged from her family.

Reporters at the New York Times published a story that said they got in touch with her family, her siblings, and her mother, who were elated to see the news that their family has a new member. It is a miracle that this all happened and no one's heard. Everyone's fine, but the center of the story is really this woman who came to New York under dire circumstances.

Sean Carlson: Now, I have no surprise at all that you guys went deep on this today. This is not New York City's first subway baby, right?

Clayton Guse: No. We found two at least recent examples. In 2012, a woman also gave birth on a J train at Chambers Street. Back in 1993, a woman gave birth on a 3 train at Wall Street. This happens from time to time, once in a generation. The joke that I've been making, a lot of people in town like to compete over who's a real New Yorker. If you're born on the subway-

Sean Carlson: That qualifies.

Clayton Guse: That's a birthright. You're the realest of real New Yorkers.

Sean Carlson: Fair enough. Every week in our On the Way newsletter, we answer a question from a curious commuter. This one is from Rebecca in Queens, who asks, "What is going on with this wild wrapping of parts of the JMZ?" It's a huge job. Frankly, a little creepy to drive under. How long is the work going to take?

Stephen Nessen: It's not a work of the artist Christo, but Rebecca's talking about these Hazmat-style white covers around much of the elevated structures in Brooklyn and Queensland. It's part of the MTA's painting of the structure, and the new style involves sandblasting to clean the steel before applying a special paint formula. Supposedly, the plastic she's looking at is the shielding platforms, and it's a work surface and a safety barrier for people underneath it. Transit officials say it is more cost-effective.

It's going to last 30 years as opposed to 10 years, which the current paint technique does. This work is expected to last on the J line until spring of '26 and the M line until summer of '26.

Sean Carlson: Thanks to Rebecca for the question and thanks to WNYC transportation reporter Stephen Nessen and editor Clayton Guse. You can stay in the know on all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter. That's @gothamist.com/ontheway. Wild week on the transit system. Thanks so much, my friends.

Stephen Nessen: Thank you.

Janae Pierre: Thanks for listening. This is NYC NOW from WNYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More soon.

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