NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who owned a New York City day care center where a toddler died after ingesting fentanyl has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty to federal drug charges.
Grei Mendez, 37, dropped her head into her crossed arms in anguish as Judge Jed S. Rakoff announced the sentence that triggered sobs among Mendez’s family and the mother whose 22-month-old child, Nicholas Feliz-Dominici, died in September 2023.
Rakoff had previously given the same sentence to Mendez’s husband, Felix Herrera-Garcia, after he pleaded guilty to drug charges and causing bodily harm related to the death. The couple each faced a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life for their crimes.
Mendez had pleaded guilty to drug charges including conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death.
Before the sentence was imposed, she apologized to the families of children who attended the Divino Niño day care that she operated out of a Bronx apartment where the couple stored and packaged narcotics.
“I do want all to know it was an accident,” she said through an interpreter. “I am very sorry. I hope that someday I may be forgiven.”
When the poisoning occurred on Sept. 15, 2023, Feliz-Dominici was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died. Three other children exposed to the fentanyl at the day care survived after medics administered the overdose-reversing drug Narcan.
Police found a brick of fentanyl stored on top of playmats for the children, along with equipment often used to package drugs, as well as packages of fentanyl beneath a trap door in a play area.
Both of Feliz-Dominici's parents spoke at the sentencing, with the child's mother saying it was not possible to forgive Mendez and the father describing the lasting pain, saying: “We're living, but we're not alive.”
Rakoff cited the emotions he once felt when his older brother “was murdered in cold blood,” but he added that the “glory of the law is not to ignore emotions but to put them in broader perspective.”
He said Mendez had chosen to put the welfare of her own children and her husband above the welfare of the families and their children that became customers of her day care business.
In a presentence brief, a defense attorney submitted proof that Mendez had suffered trauma herself as a child. Prosecutors urged a lengthy sentence, saying she ignored “clear warning signs” that the babies were becoming seriously ill and took no action to call for lifesaving medical intervention.
“And after tragedy struck, she lied to law enforcement and destroyed evidence in an effort to protect herself and her co-conspirators from their culpability in the death of one baby and poisoning of three others,” they wrote.
In a release, Acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky said Mendez put babies as young as 8 months old “in harm's way as they slept, played and ate in a room where over 11 kilograms of fentanyl was hidden underneath their feet.”
FILE - In this photo provided by the New York City Police Department, narcotics, including fentanyl, and drug paraphernalia lie stored in the floor of a day care center, Sept. 21, 2023, in New York. (Courtesy NYPD via AP, File)
President Donald Trump hosts NATO secretary general Mark Rutte. The leader of the 32-member transatlantic military alliance meets Trump at a key moment for Europe and NATO, with Trump’s apparent pivot toward Russia leaving members uneasy. Trump meanwhile threatened 200% tariffs on European wine, champagne and spirits if the EU goes forward with a retaliatory tariff on American whiskey on April 1. And the Trump administration has launched a review of organizations that provide temporary housing and other aid to migrants, suggesting they may have violated a law used to prosecute smugglers.
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Steve Witkoff was in Moscow on Thursday, just the latest high-profile assignment for a real estate magnate turned White House foreign policy fixer.
The longtime Trump pal is also a key player in the Republican administration’s efforts to end the war in Gaza.
Now he’s expected to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a U.S. official who also confirmed Witkoff’s arrival in Russia for the sensitive engagement. The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of the anonymity.
Ukraine agreed Tuesday to a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. Trump said he hopes Russia will quickly agree.
▶ Read more about Witkoff’s rise in Trump’s foreign policy apparatus
“The US-EU spirits sector is the model for fair and reciprocal trade, having zero-for-zero tariffs since 1997,” says the statement by Chris Swonger, president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council.
“The U.S. spirits sector supports more than $200 billion in economic activity, 1.7 million jobs across production, distribution, hospitality and retail, and the purchase of 2.8 billion pounds of grains from American farmers,” it says.
“We urge President Trump to secure a spirits agreement with the EU to get us back to zero-for-zero tariffs, which will create U.S. jobs and increase manufacturing and exports for the American hospitality sector. We want toasts not tariffs.”
The Labor Department reported that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers — was unchanged from January to February, and core wholesale prices that exclude volatile food and energy costs dropped 0.1%, the first drop since July.
Thursday’s numbers hit as President Donald Trump ramps up his trade war, threatening to send inflation higher.
Gasoline prices fell 4.7% last month, while food prices rose 1.7% from January to February, led by a 28% surge in the price of eggs.
▶ Read more on producer prices and inflation
Trump issued his threat on social media, saying he’d impose a 200% tariff on European wine, champagne and spirits if the European goes forward with a planned tariff on American whiskey on April 1.
Trump called the longtime U.S. ally “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”
He said the 200% tax on U.S. consumption of the European products “will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.”
▶ Read more on Trump’s trade wars
It’s not clear when job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency will show up in the weekly layoffs report, though some analysts expect them to surface in data in the coming weeks.
Those layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce through billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Senior U.S. officials set the government downsizing in motion weeks ago via a memo dramatically expanding President Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back the workforce. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired, and now the Republican administration is turning its attention to career officials with civil service protection.
▶ Read more about U.S. unemployment numbers
Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have remained mostly in a range between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.
U.S. jobless claims filings fell by 2,000 to 220,000 for the week ending March 8, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s fewer than the 226,000 new applications analysts forecast.
The four-week average, which evens out some of the week-to-week swings, ticked up by 1,500 to 226,000.
The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 1 fell by 27,000 to 1.87 million.
The U.N. humanitarian chief says more than 300 million people across the globe need humanitarian support and many will die because funding from the United States and others is drying up.
Tom Fletcher told a U.N. news conference that the cuts have caused “a seismic shock.”
The Trump administration has dismantled the U.S. aid agency, USAID, and terminated 83% of its programs.
Across the humanitarian community, he said, programs have been stopped and staff have been laid off including about 10% in February from nongovernmental organizations doing humanitarian work.
Fletcher said that in December global experts estimated that 300 million people needed help in 2025, and the U.N. prioritized 190 million it was aiming to reach, which would cost $47 billion.
That number increased to 307 million in recent days, he said, but with the funding cuts, he can’t say with confidence that the U.N. will get anywhere near $47 billion. Now, U.N. colleagues in Geneva are trying to identify how to prioritize saving 100 million lives and how much that would cost.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio disembarks from a military airplane upon arrival at Quebec City Jean Lesage International Airport in Quebec, Canada, March 12, 2025, as he travels to a G7 Foreign Ministers meeting. (Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP)
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be walking into unusually unfriendly territory this week when he meets his counterparts from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies — strong American allies stunned by President Donald Trump’s actions against them.
Just hours after Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs kicked in — prompting responses from the European Union and Canada and threatening to ignite full-scale trade wars with close U.S. partners — Rubio arrived at the scenic Quebec town of La Malbaie on the St. Lawrence River for two days of talks starting Thursday with the top diplomats of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. All of them have been angered by the new American president’s policies.
Rubio will likely be hearing a litany of complaints about Trump’s decisions from once-friendly, like-minded countries in the G7 — notably host Canada, to which Trump has arguably been most antagonistic with persistent talk of it becoming the 51st U.S. state, additional tariffs and repeated insults against its leadership.
▶ Read more about Rubio’s G7 meeting
Mark Rutte, who heads the 32-member transatlantic military alliance, will meet with Trump at a pivotal moment for Europe and NATO.
Administration officials are pressing ahead with talks with Moscow to sign off on a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire that Trump believes could usher in a permanent end to Europe’s biggest land-war since World War II.
Thursday’s talks also come as Trump’s rhetoric on the alliance continues to leave members uneasy.
Trump last week suggested that the U.S. might abandon its commitments to the alliance if member countries don’t meet defense spending targets, a day after his pick for NATO ambassador assured senators that the administration’s commitment to the military alliance was “ironclad.”
The U.S. president also expressed doubt that NATO would come to the United States’ defense if the country were attacked. However, the alliance did just that after Sept. 11 — the only time in its history that the defense guarantee has been invoked.
The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.
Among a total of more than 1,300 layoffs announced Tuesday were roughly 240 in the department’s Office for Civil Rights, according to a list obtained and verified by The Associated Press. Seven of the civil rights agency’s 12 regional offices were entirely laid off, including busy hubs in New York, Chicago and Dallas. Despite assurances that the department’s work will continue unaffected, huge numbers of cases appear to be in limbo.
The Trump administration has not said how it will proceed with thousands of cases being handled by staff it’s eliminating. The cases involve families trying to get school services for students with disabilities, allegations of bias related to race and religion, and complaints over sexual violence at schools and college campuses.
Some staffers who remain said there’s no way to pick up all of their fired colleagues’ cases. Many were already struggling to keep pace with their own caseloads. With fewer than 300 workers, families likely will be waiting on resolution for years, they said.
▶ Read more about how layoffs are impacting the civil rights branch
An hours-long outage Wednesday on StudentAid.gov, the federal website for student loans and financial aid, underscored the risks in rapidly gutting the Department of Education, as Trump aims to dismantle the agency.
Hundreds of users reported FAFSA outages to Downdetector starting midday Wednesday, saying they were having trouble completing the form, which is required for financial aid at colleges nationwide. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a group of people who handle colleges’ financial aid awards, also received reports of users experiencing technical issues and having trouble completing the FAFSA.
The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs Tuesday, along with staff buyouts and the termination of probationary employees. In all, the Education Department has reduced its staff by half, to roughly 2,000, since Trump took office.
▶ Read more about the layoffs at the Education Department
This combo of pictures show President Donald Trump, left, addressing a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, March 4, 2025, and a handout of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attending a ceremony in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis - Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)
Steel workers work at the ArcelorMittal Dofasco steel plant in Hamilton, Ont., on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.(Nathan Denette /The Canadian Press via AP)
A construction crew works at a site in San Bruno, Calif., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, along with his son X Æ A-Xii, speak to reporters near Tesla vehicles on South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, March 11, 2025, in Washington. (Pool via AP)
