Nearly two dozen kids in Los Angeles were found at risk of abuse and neglect. Will their parents be held accountable? Plus:

• What happened when the Administration turned its back on refugees
• The looming disaster of the border wall in Big Bend, Texas
• Newsletters are going hyperlocal

Ava Kofman A staff writer who first reported on this story in February

Earlier this year, I investigated the bizarre case of Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, a couple from the wealthy city of Arcadia, in Los Angeles County. They had amassed more than two dozen children by hiring many surrogates who, at first, knew nothing of one another. The secrecy and suspicious circumstances surrounding Xuan’s family prompted an F.B.I. investigation into whether he and his partner were trafficking the children. (The parents have denied that their children were for sale.)

Authorities began their investigation this past May, after police heard that one of the infants had been hospitalized with severe injuries. The baby’s siblings, most of whom were under the age of three, were found with marks, bruises, missing fingernails. The parents were briefly jailed on suspicion of child endangerment—they have not yet been charged with a crime and have refuted abuse allegations—and their kids were taken into foster care, where they remain to this day.

The juvenile-dependency court has just decided that the family, seemingly Arcadia’s largest, should not be reunified—news that I break in my follow-up piece, out this week. This ruling has far-reaching repercussions. Since the couple’s arrest, they have had at least six more children, also through surrogates. Those siblings are trapped in various stages of custodial and parentage proceedings in Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

As advances in reproductive technology have enabled men to competitively procreate at new scales, there have been a spate of reports of über-wealthy parents having dozens of, even a hundred, children, through some combination of in-vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and surrogacy. These family-making projects are often classified as outliers, but they may simply be the most well-known instances of a quietly growing trend.

The case of the family in Arcadia has raised questions about the broader lack of regulation in the surrogacy industry, especially given this tide toward reproductive maximalism. Although commercial surrogacy is a multibillion-dollar business—and growing—regulations vary by state. One scholar, in a nod to Justice Louis Brandeis, has called the U.S. a “laboratory of surrogacy.” By commissioning children across the country while facing criminal and federal investigations, the Arcadia couple is putting the industry to an unprecedented test.

On his first day back in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that froze refugee resettlement, throwing the lives of thousands of people who had already been approved to come to the U.S. into chaos. For Hiba and Ibrahim, who had fled ethnic violence in Sudan and were living as refugees with their children in Jordan, the news was devastating. “It’s like we were flying up in the sky and suddenly we fell down,” Hiba told the reporter Annie Hylton. Read or listen to the story »

• The planned border wall in Big Bend, Texas, is opposed by environmental groups, local sheriffs, and a pro-gun YouTuber running for Congress. It’s happening anyway.

• Will Trump be allowed to destroy his Presidential records? Legislation passed after Watergate makes this information government property, but the Administration has called the law unconstitutional.

• Local elections in England are usually low-stakes affairs, but this year’s results proved to be a catastrophe for the Labour Party. Will Prime Minister Keir Starmer survive?

• Longing for the days of the town crier? Good news: newsletters are going hyperlocal, and providing a sense of community that’s missing from our algorithmic feeds.

• The most-clicked story in yesterday’s newsletter was an interview with Trump’s spiritual adviser about a golden statue of the President in Florida.

Hungary avoided democratic collapse. Can we? Andrew Marantz explains how the country’s new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, won a landslide victory over the incumbent Viktor Orbán. Magyar’s strategy revolved around “old-fashioned, door-to-door, town-to-town retail politics.” Listen and follow »

• A movie: “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is still raking it in at the box office. Our film critic Justin Chang called it “a savvy, shiny reflection of our era.”

• A bite: At Lysée, a pâtisserie in New York, there is a course on the prix-fixe menu called Spring Herb which involves “a creamy herb sorbet, an icy-flaky lemongrass granita, slippery slices of kiwifruit, and bits of raw apple as crisp as snow.”

• A book: Olivier Assayas, who directed the new film “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” recommends “