Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning. Federal and local government battle over the ICE presence in Minnesota. As protesters call for accountability for a fatal shooting, NBC explains how oversight has changed in Trump's second term.
And even though ICE is now the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the entire country, not a dollar of that money went toward accountability.
USA Today breaks down a major Supreme Court case for transgender athletes being heard today, and why the first stop on your way to the American dream, the starter home, is fading fast.
Well, if you don't become a homeowner, how does that change your entire economic future?
Chapter 2: What recent events have prompted calls for ICE accountability?
It's Tuesday, January 13th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced plans to expand the presence of ICE agents in Minneapolis, city and state government is suing the administration to halt the crackdown.
Chapter 3: How has oversight of ICE changed during Trump's administration?
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the surge had sown chaos in the Twin Cities.
The deployment of thousands of armed mass DHS agents to Minnesota has done our state serious harm. This is, in essence, a federal invasion of the Twin Cities and Minnesota, and it must stop.
The administration has defended the agent's decision to fire at Renee Nicole Good, even before an investigation concludes. The FBI is looking into the incident, but has refused to involve state officials, leading Governor Tim Walz to question the legitimacy of that investigation.
As politicians debate even the nature of the investigation, it's raised questions over how ICE and Border Patrol accountability actually works in practice, with many of the protesters over the weekend demanding more scrutiny. In Chicago last October, for example, a Border Patrol officer shot and injured a woman who was driving around warning people of ICE presence.
Similar to Minneapolis, that officer claimed they were defending themselves from a car ramming. And in Los Angeles, officers last summer hid in a rental truck and detained day laborers at a Home Depot parking lot in an operation they called Trojan Horse.
So there are really two ends of the spectrum when it comes to how ICE trains its officers and what they're allowed to do.
Julia Ainsley is a senior Homeland Security correspondent at NBC News.
On one end, you have what would be outside of the scope of duties. Say an ICE officer starts a bar fight while on duty and somebody gets hurt. That's outside of their scope of what they're supposed to do as a federal officer. And so the federal government wouldn't even protect that officer in a court of law to defend those actions. Then on the far other end, you have best practices.
Best practices, Ainsley says, is what officers learn in training but are not mandated rules. And even if officers don't always follow them, they're still protected since it falls under the scope of their duties.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the Supreme Court case on transgender athletes?
That's where goods shooting falls, according to the government.
What I do hear from DHS officials who are looking at this video, they say it was not within the best practices to step in front of the car. And you see that this officer walks around the car and makes the choice to come back in front of it. And we didn't see that in the first video, but now we see a much longer interaction where he's really walking around the car.
And that was his choice to cross in front of her. And so that would be against the best practices.
Ainsley also told us federal cutbacks have hampered DHS's ability to hold its own officers accountable.
There is an office that was with Inside ICE that would do more of these investigations into officer conduct that has been eroded under this administration. You also see weakened inspector generals throughout the entire federal government.
DHS has also cut staff at agencies that are watchdogs who investigate misuse or excessive use of force. The administration called them roadblocks to enforcement.
Doge took really a sledgehammer across the federal government, but DHS was not a place where they were especially heavy-handed.
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Chapter 5: Why are starter homes becoming increasingly inaccessible for first-time buyers?
And a lot of the cuts that happened at DHS had more to do with cutting out areas that were not in line with the administration's priorities. So, for example, you saw... A lot of asylum officers, people who approved asylum applications, be taken out.
You saw the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office, the reviews whether or not immigrants' civil rights and civil liberties have been violated while they're in ICE detention or while they're being arrested, anywhere during the process. That office, I've heard the term gutted.
Last year, a whistleblower report sent to Congress alleged that staffing cutbacks had meant hundreds of complaints had been left abandoned. Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the rules for transgender athletes. It's actually two separate cases, and the plaintiffs have appealed state bans that prohibit trans girls and women from participating in women's sports.
One relates to 15-year-old Becky Pepper Jackson, who sued the state of West Virginia in 2021 when she was barred from joining her school track and field team. She recently spoke to the AP in an interview about her case.
Sport is something that everybody should have the opportunity to do. I wish these people would educate themselves just so they would know that
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Chapter 6: What factors contribute to the rising costs of homeownership?
that I'm just there to have a good time.
Over the last few years, there's been a lot of legal back and forth in Pepper Jackson's specific case, with a court at first siding with the state, then on appeal concluding it had violated her rights. Maureen Groppi is the Supreme Court correspondent for USA Today. She explained what is being considered at the court today.
There are two issues, whether these laws violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection that says that people who are in similar situations should be treated similarly under the law. There's also the question of whether these laws violate Title IX, which is the civil rights statute that prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs.
State officials have argued that the Equal Protection Clause doesn't apply because transgender girls and women are different to people assigned female at birth.
And supporters of bans like West Virginia's Republican attorney general contend that allowing transgender girls to participate basically forces cisgender girls and women to participate against athletes that would have physical advantages against them.
One of the disputes in this case is how big a problem there is that these laws are trying to address. The states that are passing these laws say there's a huge problem out there with transgender athletes unfairly competing against non-transgender females. The other side, the students who are challenging this, say these laws are way broad and they're only affecting a small group of people.
In the case of the West Virginia student who's challenging it, she says West Virginia's ban, she's the only person who the ban applies to in the entire state.
The Trump administration has issued an executive order to revoke funding for schools that allow transgender girls and women to compete on women's and girls' teams and filed a friend of the court brief in which it told the Supreme Court that these laws were reasonable. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination against transgender people did violate civil rights law.
And Pepper Jackson's lawyers have argued that the same logic should extend to Title IX.
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