--:-- Traci Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today's Monday, March 17. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The Trump administration has set up a legal showdown and a possible constitutional crisis with its latest deportations. Over the weekend, it flew hundreds of Venezuelan migrants out of the country and turned them over to a prison in El Salvador, which is being paid by the U.S. to hold them.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The administration said it had the authority to deport them because it claimed they were members of a violent criminal gang that was invading the country. A judge in D.C. rejected that rationale, saying he did not believe the deportations were legal under federal law.
--:-- Traci Mumford: And he said that the detainees should be brought back, quote, however that's accomplished, whether turning around the plane or not. But El Salvador's president mocked the judge's order, writing on social media, "Oopsie, too late."
--:-- Traci Mumford: Secretary of State Marco Rubio re-shared that post, and the White House press secretary went further, claiming federal courts, quote, have no jurisdiction over how the president conducts foreign affairs.
--:-- Traci Mumford: It was not the only deportation to spark concerns this weekend. A woman from Lebanon who works as a kidney transplant specialist in the U.S. was also deported, even though she had a valid visa and a court order blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The judge in her case said there was reason to believe immigration authorities had willfully disobeyed his order. One could argue that we've slowly been heading towards a constitutional crisis for a few weeks now.
--:-- Traci Mumford: In several cases, we've had plaintiffs come in and say, "Hey, judge, the administration is not following the court order that you issued." Mattathias Schwartz covers federal courts for The Times. He says the big question now is if and how the courts might try to reassert their power.
--:-- Mattathias Schwartz: If the court were to find the administration in contempt, they would have the power to impose financial penalties, fines on government agencies. They would theoretically have the power to put government officials in prison if they thought that was warranted.
--:-- Mattathias Schwartz: But then there's also the question of who exactly is going to enforce these orders. In the final analysis, courts don't have the power to enforce their own orders.
--:-- Mattathias Schwartz: And this is what people really are talking about when they talk about a constitutional crisis, that if the executive decides that it's just not going to listen to the courts, there's sort of a very limited set of things that the courts can do in response.
--:-- Mattathias Schwartz: Because the courts rely on the executive branch to enforce their orders. So what do they do if the executive branch says, "We're just going to do what we want, we don't care?" No one really knows what happens then.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Also on the immigration front, President Trump has brought back family detention, the practice of locking up parents and children together while they await deportation.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The contentious tactic was used under Presidents Bush and Obama and during Trump's first term. But human rights organizations have called it inhumane, especially for young children, and it fell out of use under the Biden administration.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Now families are being held again at a facility in South Texas, and a second facility in the area is being prepared to hold more.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The number of federal employees who've been fired or taken buyout offers under the Trump administration has now climbed past 100,000.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The Times has been tracking how that downsizing effort has been rippling through the government, and my colleagues have found that the cuts have hit the agency responsible for nuclear security.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Energy, develops and maintains the country's nuclear arsenal. In the past five years, it's been busier than at any point since the Cold War.
--:-- Traci Mumford: It's in the middle of upgrading and modernizing thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads. It had been working to hire new employees to complete the work. Then DOGE arrived.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The Trump administration fired about two dozen staffers. Another 130-plus took buyouts. A Times review of internal documents, along with interviews with agency officials, shows that included nuclear scientists, bomb engineers, and safety experts who were in critical roles and that many of them had held top security clearance.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Without their oversight, the agency's effort to upgrade the nuclear stockpile could be compromised. And critics say the situation shows the broader consequences of DOGE's drastic cutbacks that people with specialized skills and decades of experience are leaving crucial government positions.
--:-- Traci Mumford: In Gaza, it's now been more than two weeks since Israel cut off all aid shipments to the territory. It's trying to pressure Hamas in negotiations over extending the ceasefire.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Israel's cut off food shipments and severed electricity to a water plant. The United Nations says that's deprived around 600,000 Palestinians of clean drinking water.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The fact that no aid is coming in now means that Gaza could be headed back toward the dark days of the war when people were facing extreme hunger, a lack of water, very low hospital supplies, and basically anything you can think of was running low.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Vivian Yee is part of the team covering Gaza for The Times. My colleague Bilal Shabert has been doing some reporting inside of Gaza, and desperation is growing again as aid groups have been forced to cut back on food packages that they give out to families.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Community kitchens have had to give out smaller rations. He's seeing people wait in these long, desperate lines for bread and people kind of crowding the bakery door, desperate for a couple of loaves for their families.
--:-- Traci Mumford: And there are people in Gaza who say that traders and businessmen are basically taking advantage of the situation and hoarding goods in order to drive up a price and maximize their profits.
--:-- Traci Mumford: From what we're seeing on the ground, in the beginning of the ceasefire, people were very cautiously optimistic that they would be able to recover and rebuild from the war.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The fighting would end, and this nightmare of searching for food every day, searching for fuel, searching for water would be over. And instead, it seems like they might be regressing towards what they had suffered before.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Obviously, we're excited to get Crew back and I know Butch and Sonny are excited to come back. And it takes a little time to get them back reconditioned and then we do the proper celebration.
--:-- Traci Mumford: NASA says that the two astronauts who've been on an unexpectedly long mission to space could be back on Earth as soon as tomorrow night.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore's return from the International Space Station has been delayed for more than eight months due to technical issues.
--:-- Traci Mumford: But yesterday, the SpaceX capsule that will take them home successfully docked at the station, and the new crew of astronauts who will take their spots floated on.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Usually, crews overlap by a week, but NASA's bumping up the return window to try and take advantage of clear weather.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The journey back to Earth will be a 17-hour affair, ending off the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the astronauts are expected to splash down.
--:-- Traci Mumford: And finally, the New England Aquarium in Boston has opened a retirement home, or retirement island, for penguins.
--:-- Traci Mumford: It's because the aquarium's fleet of African penguins has been outliving expectations. In the wild, they live to be about 10 or 15, but the aquarium's now got a bunch of birds in their mid-30s.
--:-- Traci Mumford: And, like all of us in our mid-30s, they need someplace a little quieter, a little chiller, without all of those young birds being loud and getting all the fish first.
--:-- Traci Mumford: The aquarium's penguin curator described it as a country club for older animals. Basically, it's a meshed-off area where they can still see the other birds, but they don't have to get jostled or pecked by them.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Part of the reason the penguins at the aquarium have been outliving expectations is because they don't have to deal with the threats that wild birds do, but also because they're receiving specialized care, including acupuncture for their arthritis.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Yes, the penguins are getting acupuncture. Those are the headlines.
--:-- Traci Mumford: Today on The Daily, how the fight over government funding has sparked a war within the Democratic Party. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Traci Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
