The Headlines - Deportations Threaten Constitutional Showdown, and DOGE Cuts Hit Nuclear Agency

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Plus, a retirement home for penguins. On Today’s Episode:With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch, by Mattathias SchwartzTrump Administration Revives Detention of Immigrant Families, by Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam JordanDOGE Cuts Reach Key Nuclear Scientists, Bomb Engineers and Safety Experts, by Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim and Julie TateBread Lines and Salty Drinking Water: Israeli Aid Block Sets Gaza Back Again, by Vivian Yee and Bilal ShbairNASA Schedules Quick Return of Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule, by Ali Watkins and Kenneth ChangAt a Penguin ‘Retirement Home,’ a Slower Pace and Plenty of Fish, by Amanda HolpuchTune 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, March 17th. Here's what we're covering. 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.

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. disagreed with that rationale, saying he did not believe the deportations were legal under federal law, and that any flights should return immediately to the U.S., quote, however that's accomplished, whether turning around the plane or not. But El Salvador's president mocked that order, writing on social media, oopsie, too late. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reshared that post, and White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt went further, claiming federal courts, quote, have no jurisdiction over how

the president conducts foreign affairs. Separately, a woman from Lebanon, who's a kidney transplant specialist and a professor at Brown University, was also deported this weekend, even though she had a valid visa and a court order blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer. On Sunday, the judge in that case said there was reason to believe U.S. Customs and Border Protection had willfully disobeyed his order. One could argue that we've slowly been heading towards a constitutional crisis for a few weeks now. 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. If the court were to find the administration in contempt, they would have the power to impose financial penalties, fines on government 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.

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. 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. 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 gonna do what we want, we don't care? No one really knows what happens then. ["Dreams of a New World"] we want, we don't care. No one really knows what happens then. 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. 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. 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. The number of federal employees who've been fired or taken buyout offers under the Trump administration has now climbed past 100,000. The Times has been tracking how that downsizing effort has been rippling through the government.

My colleagues have found that the cuts have hit the agency responsible for nuclear security. 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. 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 that work. Then Doge arrived.

The Trump administration fired about two dozen staffers. Another 130 plus took buyouts. A spokesman for the Energy Department said the staffers mainly handled administrative tasks and oversaw federal contractors. But a Times review of internal documents, along with interviews with agency officials, shows the people who left included nuclear scientists, bomb engineers, and safety experts who were in critical roles.

Many of them held top-secret security clearance. Without their oversight, the agency's effort to upgrade the nuclear stockpile could be compromised, and billions of dollars set aside for the project are at risk of being misused. 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. 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. The fact that no aid is coming in now means that Gaza could be headed back

towards the dark days of the war when people were facing extreme hunger, a lack of water, very low hospital supplies, no fuel, no electricity, and basically anything you can think of was running low. Vivienne Yee is part of the team covering Gaza for the Times. My colleague Bilal Shabair has been doing some reporting inside of Gaza. Desperation is growing again as aid groups have been forced to cut back on food packages that they give out to families. 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. But it's not just food, obviously. There's also things like medical supplies, fuel for your car, for ambulances, or to power generators that then give electricity to hospitals. Basically, you're seeing Gaza slowly grind to a halt without fuel coming in. From Israel's perspective, enough aid went into Gaza during the first six weeks of the ceasefire

to keep everyone fed. They say about 25,000 product loads of aid went in. 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 the price and maximize their profits. But 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. 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. Obviously we're excited to get crew nine back and I know Butch and Sunny are excited to come back. It'll take a little time to get them back reconditioned and then we'll do a proper celebration. 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. Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmorse' return from the International Space Station has been delayed for more than eight months due to technical issues. 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. Usually, crews overlap by a week, but NASA's bumping up the return window to try and take advantage of clear weather.

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. And finally, the New England Aquarium in Boston has opened a retirement home, or retirement island, for penguins. It's because the aquarium's fleet of African penguins has been outliving expectations. In the wild, they lived to be about 10 or 15, but the aquariums now got a bunch of birds in their mid-30s. 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. 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. Part of the reason that the penguins at the aquarium have been living so long is that they don't have to deal with the threats that wild birds do, but also because they're receiving specialized care, including acupuncture. Yes, the penguins get acupuncture for their arthritis.

Before you ask, Penguin Retirement Island is not accepting applications from humans. Those are the headlines. 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. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.