The Headlines - Inside Trump’s Deportation Push, and the U.S. Holds Talks With Hamas

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Plus, Dolly Parton’s love story.On Today’s Episode:Frustration Grows Inside the White House Over Pace of Deportations, by Hamed Aleaziz and Zolan Kanno-YoungsTrump to Pause Auto Tariffs for One Month as Other Levies Continue, by Ana Swanson and Jack EwingSupreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Freeze Foreign Aid, by Adam LiptakVeterans Are Caught Up in Trump’s and Musk’s Work Force Overhaul, by Eileen Sullivan and Maya C. MillerU.S. and Hamas Hold Direct Talks on Hostages in Gaza, Officials Say, by Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Ronen BergmanWhy Some Schools Are Rethinking ‘College for All’, by Dana GoldsteinHow Dolly Parton’s Husband, Carl Dean, Inspired ‘Jolene’, by Mike IvesTune 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 Thursday, March 6th. Here's what we're covering. Vice President J.D. Vance was at the U.S.-Mexico border yesterday to highlight the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy. Vance, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials, touted a drop in border crossings. The number of migrants apprehended at the border is now the lowest in more than two decades. But Vance was also on the defensive when asked about the rate of deportations. Let me say a few things about that. So first of all, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Trump campaigned on the promise of the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. And while the number of migrants arrested spiked immediately after he took office, the government has been deporting fewer people than last year. We'll keep on working on it. We've made a lot of progress, but we're going to keep on working on it over the remainder of the president's term. This lag in the pace of deportations has already caused concern, even frustration, among some of President Trump's top immigration advisors. My colleague Zolan Kano-Youngs has been reporting on how there's increasing pressure on Trump's

immigration team to follow through on the president's campaign promises. Our reporting has found that Tom Homan, the czar of this deportation effort, and Stephen Beller, the architect of Trump's immigration agenda, are meeting each morning, sometimes in their office in the White House, sometimes in the Situation Room, and are studying these numbers, deportations, detentions, and also talking with the president and trying to strategize on ways to ramp up these deportation numbers. Zolan says Homan and others have run into several obstacles. There's the cost, finding, arresting, and detaining migrants is expensive and time consuming, and ICE has long said

it's short on resources. There's also been a recent push in immigrant communities for undocumented people to keep a low profile and avoid authorities. Amid these challenges, Zolan says the administration is discussing new tactics. We've discovered what some of these proposals are. DHS has gone to the IRS and asked them to turn over addresses of hundreds of thousands of people it wants to deport. At this point, it does not seem the IRS has agreed to that request. And then also the administration is considering reinstating the practice of detaining immigrant families. That's a tactic that came under fire because of concerns around detaining, particularly

immigrant children and the conditions of some of those facilities. All of these are measures not just to ramp up deportations, but in some case, create an environment that's so uncomfortable that immigrants decide to self-deport. And it's also a sign of sort of a sense of urgency, the sense of, you know, some might even say desperation on this administration to get these numbers up. Now, three other updates on the Trump administration. They requested the call. They made the ask and the president is happy to do it. It's a one-month exemption. Just a day after President Trump's sweeping tariffs

against Canada and Mexico kicked in, he gave automakers a one month reprieve. The temporary exemption to the 25% surcharge came after the heads of GM, Ford, and Stellantis all got on the phone with Trump and told him that the new tariffs would effectively erase all of their company's profits. In a 5-4 vote yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked Trump's effort to freeze two billion dollars in foreign aid. The narrow

decision suggests that the court may be more skeptical of Trump's attempts to reshape the government than some expected, considering its conservative majority. It's less clear what the decision will mean for the aid itself. The court sent the decision back down to a district court, which will hold a hearing today about how much of the funding needs to start flowing again. Also, the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people. More federal workers are set to lose their jobs as the Trump administration's firing spree continues.

We'll be making major changes, so get used to it. The Department of Veterans Affairs says it's planning to reduce its workforce by 80,000 people. Democratic lawmakers and some of their Republican colleagues are warning that could force cutbacks to VA services. Overall, the administration's mass layoffs have disproportionately affected veterans, who make up 30 percent of civil service employees. In the Middle East, the U.S. has broken with its own long-standing policy and held talks directly with Hamas to discuss the release of hostages from Gaza.

For decades, American officials had refused to engage directly with groups that the government labeled terrorist organizations. But this week, a representative from the White House has been secretly meeting face-to-face with Hamas members in Qatar. They've been negotiating the release of five Israeli Americans, only one of whom is still believed to be alive. It's not clear whether the talks have been successful or what they will mean for the ongoing discussions between Hamas and Israel about extending the ceasefire. For decades, there was a rallying cry in American education, college for all, the idea everyone

should get a degree. Schools, educators, and politicians from both sides of the aisle pushed the idea. Billions of dollars were funneled into the effort. The idea was driven in part by data that shows people with bachelor's degrees have a higher median salary than those with just a high school diploma. But 40% of those who start college never finish. And over the years, concerns about those dropout rates and about ballooning student debt and a changing job market have tempered the view that college is the only path. I wanted to see how this shift is actually playing out. So I visited schools that are really focused on expanding the options they talk about and prepare students for beyond four-year colleges. Dana Goldstein

covers education for The Times. She went to schools that had once been focused on getting as many of their students into college as possible, and have since changed their approach. Now there's a lot more research on careers. So for example, students will choose three career options that interest them, and they will research what is the educational path to get there, how many jobs are actually available, is this a growing or a shrinking field? And students are encouraged to look into jobs

that might not require four years of college. So one student I spoke to had three totally different things to look into. One was being a real estate broker, one was becoming a police officer, and the one was being a car mechanic. And these were equally sort of attractive to her. And as you can see, they're really, really different

from one another. Still, this is a really fine line for the teachers, principals, and education leaders who are engaged with this work. Educators are themselves highly educated. Many of them have master's degrees, and they're wary of telling kids not to pursue their biggest dreams,

not to reach for the four-year degree. I think there's also a really pressing concern that this not go too far. The United States has a difficult history of closing the doors to higher educational achievement to low-income students, students of color, even girls. And many educators I spoke to want to make sure this doesn't swing too far in the wrong direction. And finally, this week, Carl Dean,

the husband of country superstar Dolly Parton, died at 82 years old. The couple met on the day Parton moved to Nashville. She was trying to break into the industry. He was an asphalt paver. He was famously private. Even as Parton skyrocketed to fame, Dean almost never gave interviews. But he was the inspiration behind one of the biggest songs in country music history. Parton said her 1973 hit, Jolene, came from an early moment in their marriage when she noticed Dean was making frequent trips to the bank. She realized he was getting a lot of attention there from a certain bank teller.

The song is addressed to her. Please don't take him just because you can. Jolene topped the country music chart, got a Grammy nod, and became the most covered song of any that Parton has written. Everyone from the White Stripes to Beyoncé has taken their own stab at Jolene. Parton said she thought some of the success was because no one had written a song from that angle before, addressing the other woman. For Dean and Parton, the bank teller crush didn't shake their relationship.

They were married for nearly 60 years. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look inside a Sinaloa cartel fentanyl lab in Mexico. 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.