The Headlines - ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, and Fauci’s Private Diary Faces Scrutiny

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Plus, why toxic wastewater is bubbling up out of the ground.  Here’s what we’re covering: ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, Opening New Front in Deportation Drive, by Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan The Choice Facing Some Immigrants: Pay $1.8 Million in Fines or Leave, by Miriam Jordan Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg Trump Will End Subsidies for Medicare Drug Premiums, by Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson Live Updates: U.S. and Saudi Arabia Target Iranian Proxies, by The New York Times In Ohio, Toxic Wastewater Is Bubbling Up Out of the Ground, by Quinn Glabicki Gunther von Hagens, Creator of Polarizing ‘Body Worlds’ Exhibits, Dies at 81, by Clay Risen Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, July 29th. Here's what we're covering. At airports across the U.S. in the past few weeks. Help. Help. Help us.

I sit 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. What is somebody? No. 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 opair 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 close. 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.

They're 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 Barbara Streisand. Times Health reporter Cheryl Gay-Stolberg has been part of the team going to 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, but in the end concluded that wasn't the case.

But on the political front, they inflame the debate about the lab leak and about Fauci's himself. Now, two quick updates on the Trump administration. Federal health officials have announced they plan to end a program that has helped keep down the cost of monthly premiums for Americans on Medicare. Under the program, which went into place two years ago under President Biden, the government has given insurance companies billions of dollars in subsidies to lower health care costs for millions of seniors, specifically when it comes to their prescription drug plans. In defending the move, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the Biden administration's approach had been a, quote, unacceptable giveaway to insurance companies.

Oz claimed that once the subsidies are eliminated, premiums for most Medicare recipients will only go up a little. But the full impact of the policy change is not yet clear. And when it kicks in for next year, Medicare beneficiaries could end up paying hundreds of dollars more per year for their drug plan. And in the Middle East this morning, the U.S. said it launched joint strikes with Saudi Arabia on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. According to the Pentagon, those militias had carried out dozens of attacks on U.S. forces and Saudi energy infrastructure this week at the direction of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps. Saudi Arabia's role in the strikes is notable because so far the country has avoided being an open combatant in the U.S. war with Iran.

But it's been increasingly dragged into the conflict, especially after another Iran proxy force. The Houthi militia in Yemen recently started firing on Saudi ships in the Red Sea. In the past few years, the fracking boom in the U.S. has made the country the world's largest producer of natural gas. One consequence of that, though, has been a huge volume of wastewater, salty liquid full of all sorts of hazards. hazardous chemicals, heavy metals, even radioactive materials. Much of that water is hauled away from fracking sites in tanker trucks and then pumped thousands of feet underground, where that water is supposed to stay forever. But my colleague, Quinn Glabicki, has been covering how in places from Oklahoma to Ohio, the toxic liquid is starting to spread. I recently went outside of

Marietta, Ohio. Oh, you're going to have more pressure than any of them. And a rural hollow with a local oil and gas producer who took me to an old-fashioned oil well, which was flooded with wastewater. I don't want to get much on the ground, but that's what we got. When he opened the valve, this jet of fluid erupted into a bucket. How about too much on me? It don't matter anymore.

I'll probably die from it anyway. Experts I spoke with said that the fact that this fluid is making its way up through these oil and gas wells is compelling evidence that the waste injected thousands of feet underground is not staying where it's supposed to. Quinn says Ohio has made itself something of a destination for fracking wastewater, allowing companies from other states to truck it there for disposal. But now, local officials in Marietta are starting to push back. I met with the city council president who told me that until roughly this time last year, she had no idea that there were four injection

wells right outside the city and that they were permitted together to inject hundreds of thousands of gallons of fracking brine every day within two miles of the city's drinking water source. One local water official described the situation as potentially catastrophic and that if radioactive materials enter their water system, it would be potentially impossible to remove them. The fracking industry argues that injection wells are safe. and the president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association told the times that when properly built, maintained, and regulated, the wells, quote, do not pose a significant threat to drinking water. Officials in Marietta, however, have now declared an emergency in the city and have asked the state to immediately stop all fracking wastewater injection nearby. And finally, Gunther von Hagen's, the scientist behind the famous Body Worlds exhibits featuring real human corpses,

has died at 81. This opens the eye, especially for the youngsters, for the people which never had a feeling for the body so far. Von Hagen's opened the first of his exhibits in the mid-90s, offering people a chance to see bodies preserved and dissected to show every tendon and bone. It just brings a real reality of the body and how it functions, and I think this is really educational.

Over the years, more than 50 million visitors pass through the touring presentations, and as NPR interviews show, some were fascinated, some not so much. I thought it was creepy and gross. To make the exhibits possible, Von Hagen's developed a process called Plastination that removed all the skin, fat, and liquid

from human bodies and replaced it with a sturdy plastic material. Von Hagen's was drawing on his own medical training and a childhood fascination with how bodies work. Body Worlds drew all. a lot of critics, though, including from religious and human rights groups. And in his home country of Germany especially, some compared his work to Nazi experiments. There were also accusations that he accepted bodies of executed prisoners from China, though there was no evidence he knew the source. His team then instituted a strict protocol for accepting donations, and as his exhibits

became more popular, thousands of people have volunteered to have their bodies preserved in body World's. Bon Hagen's himself said that's what he wants to happen to his body. He said he wants to be plastinated and put on display at the entrance of one of his exhibits wearing his trademark black fedora. Those are the headlines. Today on the Daily, how APAC, the pro-Israel lobby, is going all in on the midterms, becoming one of the biggest political donors this election cycle. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumfell. We'll be back tomorrow.