--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, March 18th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, Trump's plans to expand Guantanamo Bay are starting to unravel, an investigation into a secretive policing unit in New York City, and how Severance fans are looking for real-world connections. But first, after weeks of relative calm in Gaza under the ceasefire deal, Israel launched a series of strikes overnight, killing at least 400 people, according to Palestinian authorities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The surprise attack came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and called into question whether this was a one-off pressure campaign to get Hamas to give into Israel's demands in negotiations or a full-on return to a state of war. Israel says Hamas is stalling progress on peace talks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The AP reports Israel wants Hamas to release half of the remaining hostages in return for a promise to negotiate a lasting truce. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying Israel will, quote, act against Hamas with increasing military force until it releases all remaining hostages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hamas says Israel is trying to sabotage the initial ceasefire agreement and endangering remaining hostages in Gaza. And Hamas instead wants to follow the terms of the original deal reached by the two sides, which calls for negotiations to begin on the ceasefire's second phase, which is supposed to lead to a permanent end to the war, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and a return of all hostages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the start of the ceasefire, people were finally able to return to northern Gaza, and a surge of crucial aid and food started coming in. But in recent weeks, Netanyahu has been threatening to resume the war and has stopped aid from entering to pressure Hamas to accept a new proposal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Humanitarian organizations, rights groups, and countries in Europe and the Middle East say this violates international law and amounts to collective punishment. This is a developing story, and you can follow the latest in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to domestic news. The executive and judicial branches clashed in a court hearing yesterday where a federal judge pressed Justice Department officials to explain why flights carrying more than 200 Venezuelan migrants were allowed to land in El Salvador, despite a ruling he issued to turn the flights back.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Associated Press reports U.S. District Judge James Bosberg was incredulous after Trump administration lawyers argued the judge didn't have jurisdiction in the case because the flights had already left the United States when the directive was issued for them to turn around.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The government also said it couldn't reveal the timing of the flights, citing national security concerns. In response, the judge said he did have jurisdiction and that it would have been better for the flights to turn around and for the government to appeal the issue in court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And he demanded the government provide more information on the flights by noon today. Here's how White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt defended the government's actions in yesterday's press briefing.
--:-- Caroline Levitt: This administration acted within the confines of the law, again, within the president's constitutional authority and under the authority granted to him under the Alien Enemies Act.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We mentioned the Alien Enemies Act yesterday. It's a somewhat obscure 1798 wartime law that gives presidents broad authority to deport immigrants without them going before an immigration or federal court judge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Trump administration has said the group that was deported over the weekend were suspected members of a Venezuelan gang that conducting quote irregular warfare in the United States although officials did not provide any evidence they are in fact gang members or that they committed any crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yesterday's hearing was a critical moment and the latest in a standoff between the Trump administration and the judiciary. And it comes as over the past several weeks, Trump administration officials have suggested they would be OK with defying the courts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, early yesterday, Trump's border czar Tom Homan told Fox News the administration would continue its deportation actions despite court rulings.
--:-- Tom Homan: We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And on the day of the flight, El Salvador's president seemed to openly mock the judge's order to turn the flights around, posting on social media, quote, oopsie, too late, with a laughing emoji.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That post was shared by Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. University of Virginia law professor Amanda Frost spoke to NPR about Trump's recent actions and whether we've entered constitutional crisis territory.
--:-- Amanda Frost: The administration continues to say that it is not refusing to comply with court orders, But we have seen it behave in disingenuous ways in terms of ignoring what courts have told it to do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There is a difference in kind if an administration says we no longer have to do what a court tells us to do. And this administration has yet to say that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nonetheless, I think it is extremely disturbing that this administration is playing so fast and loose with the courts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, Republicans are also saying words like constitutional crisis, except they're talking about the judge in this case, not Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Texas Congressman Brandon Gill, who's a Republican, says he plans to file articles of impeachment against the judge this week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said we're headed for a constitutional crisis if the Supreme Court or Congress doesn't step in to check the judge's ruling.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Politico describes this as the sort of crescendo moment of the tension that's been building since Trump took office again, saying the administration's legal tangles underscore its make decisions first, figure out a legal defense later approach to policymaking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Continuing with immigration, The Wall Street Journal has new reporting on how one facet of Trump's immigration agenda has fallen apart, his plans to send tens of thousands of migrants to Guantanamo Bay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent weeks, Trump sent just shy of 300 Venezuelan migrants to Guantanamo, placing many of them in a military prison meant for suspected terrorists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Others were put in a migrant center. And he promised to build an expansive tent city to house up to 30,000 people total.
--:-- Shamita Basu: His administration said it would prioritize deporting people with serious criminal backgrounds, people they called the worst of the worst.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Though the journal reported that a significant number of migrants at Guantanamo were deemed low risk, meaning that a judge had ordered them removed from the country, but they hadn't committed crimes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These days, there are zero migrants detained at the U.S. naval base. That's because operational and legal challenges forced the Trump administration to largely abandon their plan and move people to facilities in the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shelby Holliday, a senior video reporter with The Journal, told us, one reason why the plan failed is because the tent encampment set up by the Trump administration didn't meet government standards for migrant detention.
--:-- Shelby Holliday: They don't have air conditioning. They have dirt floors. There's no electricity. There's no running water. Lawmakers who toured the facilities described them as extremely hot, extremely humid. Some of the tents had mold in them
--:-- Shamita Basu: The operation was also very expensive The Journal reports it cost over $1 million just to get the tents out of storage and set up Government officials who recently briefed lawmakers said the plan has cost at least $16 million so far overall, though that total didn't include the cost of flights to carry migrants, U.S. troops and supplies to the island.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of those flights involved expensive military aircraft before ICE later switched to using cheaper civilian planes. The journal calculated that in order to send one migrant that way, it was more than $20,000.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And these migrants are going for just a few days and then leaving. So that raised a lot of questions about whether those trips were even worth it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even though there are no migrants being detained at Guantanamo anymore, there are still roughly 1,000 military personnel at the base who had been deployed to guard the facilities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A defense official told the journal there are plans to reduce the number of troops in the coming weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are also many outstanding questions about the conditions that people were subjected to while they were detained. We recently told you the story of several Venezuelan men who were held in the military prison, known as Camp 6, for weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They and other migrants have described inhumane conditions. Court cases allege mistreatment, attempted suicides.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We still don't know a lot about those first few days at Guantanamo, but it is something that I know lawmakers and lawyers are certainly looking into.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to an investigation from ProPublica into a policing unit in New York City and its history of hidden abuse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Please be warned, this story involves graphic descriptions of violence. The NYPD's Community Response Team, or CRT, was founded in 2022, several months after Mayor Eric Adams took office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Crime in New York was rising at the time, and Adams, a former NYPD captain himself, promised to take action against not just violent crimes, but also general quality-of-life issues that New Yorkers were complaining about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of this policing unit's first priorities was cracking down on people using motorcycles and ATVs around the city unlicensed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica editor-at-large Eric Umansky told us about one of the most troubling cases he encountered, involving a father from the Bronx named Sammy Williams.
--:-- Eric Umansky: He took an unlicensed motorcycle out for a ride on Memorial Day in 2023. Officers with CRT saw him approaching and swerved their patrol car into oncoming traffic, hitting Williams head on.
--:-- Eric Umansky: And so he flew off of it and had horribly broken bones and begged the officers for help and said, why are you doing this over a motorcycle? That's a ticket, which he's right about.
--:-- Eric Umansky: It's not a criminal violation even to have a unlicensed motorcycle. And the officers handcuffed him and Sammy Williams ended up dying the next day.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The officer who was driving that police car did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment. The NYPD said he forfeited 13 vacation days after Williams' death.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the department's website shows he's still part of the CRT unit today. Mayor Adams declined to be interviewed for this story, but ProPublica learned that Adams is closely connected to this unit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's been led by close allies of his and often focuses on his priorities. At one point, he had special access to a live stream of the body cameras worn by officers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A former top NYPD official told ProPublica the unit effectively reports directly to City Hall. And when people inside the department raised red flags about officers conduct leadership in the unit would complain to Adams.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On numerous occasions NYPD officials tried to warn that CRT policing tactics were too aggressive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In one audit from 2023, one official wrote that officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document those incidents.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica also learned that many of the officers assigned to CRT had concerning records. About half of them have been found guilty of engaging in misconduct.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's not a criminal finding. It's a finding by a civilian oversight board. But half of them have been found to have engaged in misconduct.
--:-- Shamita Basu: By comparison, 15% of officers across the entire NYPD have been found to have engaged in misconduct.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Umansky told us he learned that many officers involved with CRT were hired not because of their record, but because of their personal networks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They weren't vetting people. They were just picking them based on who they liked and who they know.
--:-- Shamita Basu: An NYPD spokesperson told ProPublica the new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is making changes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She ordered hundreds of officers to return to their assigned units. And in January, she ordered officers to curtail high-speed chases.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This spokesperson said she's working to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. The Texas Tribune reports a Houston-area midwife and her employee were arrested for allegedly providing illegal abortions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's the first such arrest since Texas implemented an almost complete ban on abortions when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Texas Attorney General says 48-year-old Maria Margarita Rojas is charged with practicing medicine without a license and the illegal performance of abortion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The charge is a second-degree felony, which means she faces up to 20 years in prison. A lawyer for Rojas couldn't immediately be reached.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The astronauts, stranded at the International Space Station for over nine months, are now on their way home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Crew-9 mission undocked early this morning and is scheduled to splash down off the Florida coast later today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore were initially scheduled for an eight-day mission, but were left behind after the Boeing Starliner they arrived in experienced serious technical problems.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the work may not be mysterious or important, but that hasn't stopped people on social media asking companies named Lumen whether their employees are severed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's a term from the hit Apple TV Plus series Severance, where workers at a fictional company called Lumen have their psyches split between their in-e work personas and their out-e outside work ones.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal looks at several companies in the real world named Lumen who are now trying to figure out if they should ignore or embrace this opportunity to connect to the pop culture zeitgeist.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For some, it's an easy call. You've probably heard the saying, there's no such thing as bad press. But let's just say Lumen isn't the hero of this story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it's not quite that simple either. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wired investigates how Elon Musk and the Doge team have gained access to dozens of federal agencies and cut tens of thousands of jobs since Trump took office.
--:-- Shamita Basu: To get more insight into the inner workings of the group, journalists interviewed more than 150 current and former federal employees, experts, and Musk supporters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
