The Headlines - American Children Sent to Honduras, and A.I. on the Battlefield

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

 Plus, teaching student athletes how to go viral.On Today’s Episode: 2 American Children Were Sent to Honduras With Their Undocumented Mother, by Rachel NostrantWisconsin Judge Arrest: What We Know, by Isabelle TaftRubio Says Trump Will Decide This Week on Continuing Ukraine War Talks, by Edward WongCanada Votes: What’s at Stake?, by Matina Stevis-GridneffNews Is Blocked on Meta’s Feeds in Canada. Here’s What Fills the Void, by Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Stuart A. ThompsonIsrael’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns, by Sheera Frenkel and Natan OdenheimerThey’re on the Varsity Influencer Team, by Sapna MaheshwariTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, April 28th. Here's what we're covering. Immigration advocates are sounding the alarm about some of the Trump administration's latest deportations, warning that children who are American citizens have been caught up in the crackdown. They're pointing to two cases out of Louisiana in the last week. In both, women who were undocumented were detained along with their children after showing up for routine check-ins with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One woman was then sent to Honduras with her four-year-old and seven-year-old

who have U.S. citizenship. The other was also sent there along with her two-year-old and seven-year-old who have U.S. citizenship. The other was also sent there, along with her two-year-old, who's a U.S. citizen. Lawyers for both families say the mothers were not given the option to leave their kids in the U.S. and that they weren't even able to communicate with their lawyers until after they'd arrived in Central America. In the case of the two-year-old, the child's father had filed an emergency petition to try and keep his daughter in the U.S., but she was flown to Honduras anyway. A federal judge overseeing the case wrote that he had a, quote, strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process. In an interview on CBS yesterday,

President Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, pushed back on that. The mom signed a paper saying, I want my two-year-old to go with me. That's a parent's decision. It's not a government decision. It's a parent's decision. But Homan also warned other parents who are undocumented that their families may face consequences, too. Having a U.S. citizen child doesn't make you immune from our laws of the country. American families get separated every day by law enforcement. Thousands of times a day when a parent gets put in jail, the child can't go with them.

If you're an illegal alien coming to this country and you decide to have your citizen child, that's on you. You put yourself in that position. — Meanwhile. — Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here! — Hundreds of people gathered in Wisconsin this weekend to protest the Trump administration's decision to arrest a judge for allegedly obstructing

its deportation efforts. On Friday, the FBI detained Hannah Dugan, a county judge in Milwaukee, and accused her of guiding an undocumented immigrant out the side door of her courtroom after she found out that ICE agents were standing by waiting to arrest him. He was later apprehended outside the courthouse. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, posted a photo of the judge online showing her in handcuffs, and he wrote, quote, no one is above the law. She's since been released and has a hearing scheduled for next month.

We think we brought the sides closer than they've been in a very long time, but we're not there yet and it needs to start happening. I think this is going to be a very critical week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. will decide this week whether or not to give up on its efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. We don't walk away from something that can actually work or that can actually lead to peace, but we also don't want to continue to spend time on something that's not going to get us there.

He told NBC's Meet the Press that the U.S. was close, but not close enough, to negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. It wasn't clear, though, if Rubio's deadline was simply an effort to pressure the two sides to make a deal, or if the administration might actually pull back from negotiations altogether if there's no progress. In the past few days, Trump sent his special envoy to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They talked for three hours in Moscow.

And Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally while they were both at the Vatican for Pope Francis' funeral. Officials haven't said what, if anything, came out of those discussions. Trump's visit to Italy was his first foreign trip this term. It lasted just 14 hours, Trump leaving shortly after the funeral.

The Times learned that he told his aides he wanted to be back at his golf club in New Jersey by the end of the day. In Canada today, voters will head to the polls for an election that's broadly considered one of the most important in a generation. It will determine who leads the country as prime minister at a time when Canada is facing a cost of living crisis and an unexpected trade war with the US. We've got to face up to Trump. I've got the experience of managing crisis. I have the top two contenders are the leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, took over from Justin Trudeau, and the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Polyev.

Many voters are making their decision based on who they think is best positioned to stand up to the U.S., not only on tariffs, but also to President Trump's repeated threats to make Canada the 51st state. One thing to note about this election is what's happening on social media. Go on Facebook or Instagram in Canada, and there are no news articles about the election. Meta, which owns both of those platforms, blocked news on its apps in Canada back in 2023, after a new law required social media companies to pay news outlets for publishing their content.

Instead of paying, Metta made news unavailable. The situation has created a news void, and dozens of partisan pages, especially right-wing ones, have stepped in to fill it, sharing misleading posts that can go viral and running ads that mimic legitimate news sources. OnePage, Canada proud, now has more followers than either of the country's major parties.

Its posts have taken particular aim at Carney, the liberal leader. And most Canadians aren't aware that what they're seeing online has changed. Research shows only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram. In Israel, the country's military has a history of testing new technologies out in the field. It was among the first to experiment with drones and to pioneer spyware for hacking into cell phones for intelligence gathering. And in Gaza, the Israeli militaries used the territory as a testing ground for artificial intelligence.

Some of the tools being developed by Israel include facial recognition that's powered by AI and can recognize people in real time. They developed an AI tool that can quickly sort through data and help them pick targets for bombing campaigns. And a new AI audio tool helped them locate some of Hamas's top militants. My colleague Shira Frankel, along with Natan Otermeier, has been looking at Israel's developments in AI. Several Israeli officials told her new technologies were cleared for use after October 7th, and they moved quickly to develop more. They even pulled in reserve soldiers who had

day jobs at tech companies like Microsoft and Google to add their expertise. That's made Israel among the first militaries in the world to use the tools, giving a preview of what's possible and what can go wrong. Facial recognitions led to some mistaken identifications and arrests of Palestinians, and other AI technology has led to civilian deaths, according to Israeli officials. That's raised some concerns among Israel's allies. Some of the questions being raised by American and European defense officials are whether Israel is using tools that are too experimental in a real-time battlefield.

When it comes to the use of AI in a war, those small errors or those small false positives can cost real human lives. ["Dreams of a New World"] And finally, here's my day off as a D1 athlete. Okay, so first off, I'm definitely going to need to pick up some new lounging pieces and athletics are top tier. Ever since the NCAA changed its rules to let college athletes make money from sponsorships

and endorsements, social media has seen the rise of the student athlete influencer. That's where the Uber One for Students membership to save on Uber and Uber Eats comes in clutch. Some students have racked up millions of followers and are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for branded posts. What I've been looking at is the next phase of this trend, which is colleges actually trying to help

a ton of their student athletes become social media stars. Sapna Maharswari is a tech reporter at The Times. I went down to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a huge sports school where there's a firm that is basically giving presentations to student athletes and telling them how much money there is to be made in social media, how they can become influencers. They're handing out 50-page documents saying,

here's how to make a great TikTok, here's how to make a compelling Instagram. Here's how to make a compelling Instagram. And what they're teaching these students is that once they build a big profile, they can also connect with brands and make a few thousand dollars. Sapna says that while the schools don't make money when their athletes sign these kinds of deals, they see it as a way to raise the profile of their athletic programs.

If they can help more of their students become stars, they can attract more talent. Sapna says she even talked to one coach who's carved out time before and after practice so that his athletes have time to make content. There are certainly critics of this effort. There are people who say that it's adding too much to the workload of really busy student athletes. There are those who say it's adding to the mental health pressures that young people already face.

And then there's this idea, too, that young women in particular might feel the pressure to pose in certain ways or present their bodies in certain ways for followers and likes. But already, the firm that I spoke with at UNC has fielded interest from Michigan. They said they're in talks with other D1 schools. I think in a couple of years, this is going to be very commonplace.

And it's going to be something that all of us will see on our social media feeds. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a new poll from The Times breaks down how Americans feel about President Trump almost 100 days into his term. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.