Frontline Voices with Jesse Lent
In our B Block, Jesse speaks with Jose Zamora, regional director of the Americas for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Ben Grazda, advocacy manager for Reporters Without Borders about what countries are most dangerous for working reporters.
But let's start closer to home.
Even as the city is spellbound by the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs series, tensions between New York State's Governor Kathy Hochul and the Trump administration appear to be rapidly escalating with border Czar Tom Homan threatening to surge New York City with ICE against after Albany passed legislation to prohibit ALL law enforcement, including ICE agents, from wearing masks to hide their identity.
New York state's bid to reign in ICE, after the broad daylight murders of Renne Good and Alex Peretti in Minneapolis, also included protecting sensitive locations like schools and hospitals from ICE raids as well as reaffirming the right of every school age child to attend school no matter what their immigration status.
This past week, the Trump administration pushed through a massive $70 billion spending bill to fund the administration's mass deportation program on a narrow party line vote.
Meanwhile, the city's budget process continues to play out with just a couple of weeks to go before the end of the month statutory deadline for a budget agreement between the City Council and Mayor Mamdani.
At a City Hall steps press conference yesterday, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced that the City Council's economists had calculated the city could anticipate an additional $2 billion in revenue from higher than previously expected tax revenue.
And while as a percentage of the Mayor's $125 billion budget, that good news is just a little over a one percent bump, it could represent a lifeline for the UFT's paraprofessionals as well as FDNY EMS DC 37 Local 2507 and Local 2621 FDNY EMS Officers.
Despite doing essential work, both the Department of Education's 22,000 paraprofessionals, as well as the several thousand members of FDNY EMS, have long been way at the bottom of their sectors' payscale.
In addition, the city's senior citizens centers could also benefit from the additional revenue that's been flagged by the revenue projections from the City Council's economists that over the last 13 fiscal years have been more accurate than the Mayor's Office of Management & Budget, the Independent Budget Office and the New York City Comptroller's office.
“This updated forecast confirms the overall resilience of the city’s economy and provides an opportunity to more fully fund priorities that address the affordability crisis, improve quality of life, and support working families," Speaker Menin said. "Just as importantly, it allows us to continue building reserves and protecting the City's long-term fiscal health. We can invest in New Yorkers today while planning responsibly for tomorrow.”
In testimony before the Council today Local 3621 FDNY EMS Officers President Lt. Vincent Variale described the deepening crisis in EMS.
"We’re going to lose up to 1500 EMS members within the next year alone, and EMS is staring down the barrel of a stunning 70 percent turnover rate within the next three to five years," Variale said. "EMTs and paramedics simply cannot afford to remain and feed their families."
Variale continued. "This is increasing response times to 911 calls to life-threatening levels. The 2026 Mayor’s Preliminary Management Report just found that in the first four months of fiscal year 2026, response times for life-threatening emergencies have increased to 12:05, up 2 minutes and 31 seconds since fiscal year 2021."
"That’s an extra 2 and half minutes while your spouse is having a stroke, your parents or grandparents fall and suffer from a serious injury," Variale said. "Two-and-a-half extra minutes to wait while you are suffering a massive heart attack. Two-and-a-half extra minutes to wait when someone calls about a person on the street or in the subway having a severe mental or emotional crisis."
"For years, New York City has relied upon EMTs and Paramedics to serve as the frontline of the healthcare system, responding to over 1.6 million emergency medical calls annually," DC 37 Local 2507 President Michael Greco testified. "They arrive at shootings, cardiac arrests, overdoses, traumatic injuries, and countless other life-threatening situations. Yet despite their critical role, they continue to be compensated at a level that bears little resemblance to either the cost of living in New York City or the immense responsibilities they carry. EMT starting salaries remain around $39,000, with top EMT pay remaining dramatically below that of firefighters and police officers."
Greco continued. "The City has long acknowledged a recruitment and retention crisis within EMS, yet this budget fails to address the root cause: compensation. New York City EMTs and Paramedics routinely leave to seek a livable wage somewhere else. The result is predictable. Vacancies grow, overtime increases, burnout accelerates, and experienced providers walk away from a profession they once loved."
B BLOCK: REPORTERS IN THE CROSSHAIRS
"[Reporters Without Borders has] been publishing our World Press Freedom Index for the last 25 years. You're correct that the killing of journalists is on the rise," Ben Grazda, advocacy manager for Reporters Without Borders, told Jesse. "But one of the things that I'd also like to point out is we track the killing of journalists but we also track the state of press freedom overall. This is the first year that we've been tracking in a quarter of a century that the majority of countries that we track are in the bottom two tiers of press freedom."
"In 2025, we had a record of 129 journalists killed globally. And we [reported] 330 journalists in prison, according to CPJ's 2025 census," said Jose Zamora, regional director of the Americas for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "In the Americas, in our region, Mexico remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists outside of active war zones...and the biggest threat in the Americas is not only censorship, but violence against journalists that are investigating organized crime and corruption in local politics."
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