ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, and Fauci’s Private Diary Faces Scrutiny
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I'm Dani Blum. I'm a health reporter at The New York Times. We're bombarded with claims about how to live better and feel better. It's really hard to separate fact from fiction. I am scouring the science, speaking with leading experts, making sure that everything I write is rigorously researched, reported, and that I can back it up. When the science isn't clear, sometimes that is the story. That's a level of nuance and depth you're not going to get just floating around the internet. And it's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times.
From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Here's what we're covering.
At airports across the U.S. in the past few weeks.
Help! Help! Help us! ICE is here! Help us!
The Trump administration has been carrying out a surge of immigration arrests as it opens a new front in its aggressive effort to deport immigrants. Please stop it! No! Please stop it! ICE officers had already been arresting some people with deportation orders at airports using personal information provided by airlines. But The Times has learned that federal agents are now arresting people with expired U.S. visas, too. That is a much bigger group, potentially hundreds of thousands of people who largely weren't prioritized for deportation under past administrations. Many of them have permission to work in the U.S. and are waiting for visa extensions or green cards. A broad range of people are being caught up in the new crackdown, including newlyweds who've just married U.S.
citizens, a former au pair from Ecuador, and an Indian engineer waiting for a new work visa. They've been detained at check-in counters and arrival gates by immigration agents in plain clothes. Immigration lawyers told The Times that these kinds of arrests are unprecedented and that they are now rethinking the advice they give to immigrants whose legal status is in a gray area, warning them not to travel. In response to questions from The Times, the Department of Homeland Security did not confirm the expanded airport arrests effort, but it comes as ICE is under pressure to hit a White House target of 2,000 arrests a day. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement that it's working to ensure that, quote, aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.
Today in the Senate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's former top infectious disease expert, is set to testify involuntarily. He's been subpoenaed by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, who has for years accused Fauci of funding research that triggered the COVID pandemic and lying about it. Accusations that lack evidence. And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you. Fauci has forcefully denied the allegations before, as Paul has pushed the so-called lab leak theory. There are animal viruses that became more transmissible in human, and you funded it. What's new this time is that the senator is coming in with more than 1,100 pages of Fauci's private diary, where he typed daily notes during the pandemic.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared the pages with the senator, saying they were written on a government computer. My colleagues have gone through the diary, and they say there's no smoking gun in there. The diary shows Fauci wrestling with the crisis of the pandemic in real time, as scientists' views on what was happening and why were rapidly evolving. What the pages do show, though, is Fauci musing about his own importance and fame, and writing about celebrities he crossed paths with, like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand.
What are ICE’s new airport arrest tactics and who is being targeted?
Times health reporter Cheryl Gay Stolberg has been part of the team going through Fauci's writings ahead of his testimony today.
There's a scientific element to them and a political element. On the science, they don't really add anything new to the question of where COVID-19 originated. They really confirm what we already knew, that Fauci was handling a fast-moving situation in which some scientists suspected a lab leak.
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