The Headlines - Inside Trump’s Strategy to Push Out Immigrants, and How Tech Giants Targeted Teens at School

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Plus, the Friday news quiz. Here’s what we’re covering: Republicans Defeat Move to Bar Trump’s Payout Fund, by Annie Karni and Robert Jimison Trump Squeezes Immigrants by Cutting Them Off From Jobs, Health Care and Housing, by Nicholas Nehamas, Miriam Jordan, Coral Davenport, Hamed Aleaziz, Lydia DePillis and Zolan Kanno-Youngs ‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School, by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries Marjane Satrapi, the Author of ‘Persepolis,’ Dies at 56, by Amelia Nierenberg and Ségolène Le Stradic Listen to the end of the episode for an audio news quiz. If you want to take The Times’s weekly online news quiz, go here. 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 Friday, June 5th. Here's what we're covering. We've been sitting here for almost 12 hours, listening to nonsense after nonsense. I've had enough. Very, very early this morning, the Senate finally wrapped up a marathon voting session. We're here to complete our oath of office, which is to provide security and safety for the American people.

Ultimately, Republicans prevailed in pushing through $70 billion in funding for President Trump's immigration crackdown. They used a special filibuster-proof process to do it, which kept lawmakers up working all night, and they effectively muscled it through over the objections of Democrats, who'd spent months calling for more restrictions on ICE agents. The measure will now go to the House where it's expected to be passed quickly. Meanwhile, as Republicans push forward on fire, funding ICE, the most visible part of President Trump's immigration policy, the Times has been looking at some of the more behind-the-scenes efforts the administration's been making to squeeze immigrants. Separate from the high-profile raids, there's also been a wave of new rules and

regulations to try and cut non-citizens off from services and opportunities. My colleagues talked with one woman, originally from El Salvador, who for almost 30 years had a job cleaning airplanes at Logan Airport in Boston, the bathrooms, the seats, the aisles. But she was abruptly fired, along with dozens of other immigrants who worked at Logan legally. She lost her job when the Trump administration made a bureaucratic tweak about who could access secure areas at the airport. Her immigration status no longer qualified her. That's one example of all the kinds of tweaks the administration is making to immigration in this country. Nick Nehamas covers the Trump administration for the times. The administration is making changes across the board. So green card

holders can no longer get a government-backed loan. American children will no longer be able to get daycare subsidies if their parents aren't citizens. Many immigrants won't be able to get commercial truckers licenses. People like refugees can't sign up for Medicare or receive Affordable Care Act subsidies. Many people seeking asylum won't be able to get work permits. Really what we're saying is the Trump administration trying to pull every lever to make life harder for immigrants in the United States and compel them to leave the country. It's really a fundamental transformation of how welcoming the United States is to immigrants. Across the country, the social media giants meta, snap, TikTok, and YouTube are facing a wave of more than 1,400 lawsuits from school districts.

The districts say the companies have made teachers jobs harder by distracting students. As part of the lawsuits, the companies have had to share thousands of pages of internal documents, including some of their strategies around young users. Digging through them, my colleagues have found that the companies spent years, actively trying to get teens to use their products during the school day. It was striking to see these companies discussing ways to reach kids in the classroom, knowing that that was what they were doing, getting pushback from people within the company saying that this might be disrupting the class and they went ahead and did it anyway.

Jennifer Valentino DeVries is an investigative reporter at the Times. She says that one of the documents surfaced by the lawsuits is an internal YouTube memo from 2015, where employees noted that Saturdays drew tens of millions more hours of viewing than a weekday. They concluded that, quote, increasing usage in schools Monday to Friday could decrease this gap, exclamation point. Jennifer says other companies talked about kids in schools as an opportunity as well. It was surprising to me just how blatant it was sometimes. For example, SNAP had a strategy document that referred to phone use in schools as under the desk time. They sent alerts to students during class time telling them that they should post about what was in their backpack.

Meta had a program where it paid teenagers to act as its ambassadors in schools and hand out swag or post about new products online. and Google knew that kids were looking at YouTube during class and watching videos that were not related to their academics, and they really did not invest in ways to keep that from happening for many years. In response to questions from the Times, a Google spokesman said the documents surfaced in the lawsuits are outdated. Meta said its school outreach program was about soliciting feedback on products, among other things,

woman for SNAP said, quote, we do not target schools. Overall, the social media companies have argued that parents, schools, and cell phone makers bear responsibility for kids' phone habits. Recently, the companies settled for about $30 million with a small school district in rural Kentucky. That served as a test case for the broader litigation nationwide, and it suggests that as more of the lawsuits work their way through the courts, the companies could be on the hook for potentially billions of dollars. And finally, I wanted to show as an insider

how I lived the thing, without wanting to make a listen of history or of, I don't know, of politics or whatever, not at all. Just to say, you know, in my life, from my point of view, that is the way I live the thing. Marjan Satrapi, the Iranian French author behind the groundbreaking

graphic novel series Persepolis has died at 56 years old. Through her books, she introduced millions of readers to the struggles of everyday Iranians during the Islamic Revolution. Released in the early 2000s, the graphic novels combined comics and memoir, telling the story of the Iran-Iraq War, the overthrow of the Shah, and what it was like for her growing up in a repressive society. It's a human point of view, and really, if there is one message, is the humanistic message,

is that human being anywhere is the same. The books were later adapted into an animated film, which was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi was born in Iran in the late 60s, and her family resisted the changes the country was undergoing when she was growing up, especially the new restrictions on how women could dress and what they could do. Her family sent her abroad as a teenager. She then came back to Iran to study art in her 20s, but eventually left for good, landing in France, where she wrote Persepolis. Across all of her work, which included children's books and several feature films, she frequently explored a sense of dislocation

of living away from her home country but thinking of it constantly. In an essay she wrote for the Times, she said that despite the fact that she became a French citizen, quote, to me the word home has only one meaning, Iran. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday News quiz, stick around. It's just after these credits. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kedifa,

Jake Lucas, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabelle Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Sam Dolnik, Miles McKinley, and Zoe Murphy. Now, time for the quiz. Every week, we ask you a few questions about stories the Times has been covering. Can you get them all? First up. If we separate as an individual province or become part of the 51st state, either or.

But I think we need to stand up. This week, the Times has been reporting on the push by some Canadians to have their province break away and become its own country. We would easily be one of the richest countries in the world right off the bat. We have trillions of dollars in resources. For decades, this was kind of a fringe idea. But polling shows that now roughly a third of people in that province support the separatist cause, which is set to come up for a preliminary vote this fall.

Your question, which Canadian province? is it? A hint? It's been called the Texas of Canada, in part because of its vast oil reserves. The answer? This is our moment. Alberta will be free. Alberta, where people are generally more wealthy and more conservative than the rest of Canada, and where they felt that they've been paying more than their fair share of taxes. As they tried to build support for their secessionist cause. Activists from the province who want to break away have even met with Trump administration officials at least three times in the past year.

Next question. The former Congressman George Santos is back in the news this week. Santos, of course, has been expelled from Congress and was sentenced to years in prison for fraud until President Trump commuted his sentence last fall. Now, the Times has learned Santos is under investigation again for alleged misconduct. Your question, what new allegation is he said to be facing? Here are four options. Only one of them is right. Is it? A. Getting unemployment benefits while working full-time at an investment firm making six figures.

B. Making multiple fraudulent credit card transactions. C. Insider trading on a prediction market. or D, lying on official government forms. So again, that's getting unemployment benefits he shouldn't have, credit card fraud, insider trading on a prediction market, or lying on official forms. The answer. C, insider trading on a prediction market.

All of the other options are crimes Santos previously admitted to, but the prediction market allegations, those are new. And weirdly, they all center around, this year's State of the Union speech. At the time, there was a lot of speculation about whether Santos would be in the audience, and people were placing bets online. According to a person familiar with the situation, Santos decided to bet, putting down money that he wouldn't go.

And he didn't. Obviously, this kind of situation is exactly why prediction markets are facing a lot of questions about the potential for insider trading. And last question. The NBA recently rolled out some brand new music. The league is basically looking for a kind of signature sound. And to craft it, they brought in the composer behind one of the most distinctive TV show theme songs of the last decade. If you listen closely to the NBA song, there's definitely some shared DNA in here.

Your question, which TV show did this composer also write the theme? for. The answer? The NBA brought in the composer of the succession theme, Nicholas Brutel, who actually hosted some NBA players at his home when he was working on it to run his drafts by them. Quick bonus round now. The NBA's new song is, of course, not the only signature tune in pro sports. We're going to play you three quick clips here. You name the sport. That was an easy one. It's football, Fox NFL Sunday, to be specific. Next one. If you got that, I'm clapping quietly for you. That is golf from the Masters.

And last one. That is the official FIFA-2020s world cup song, Shakira coming in with another earworm. The tournament kicks off in just a few days, so prepare for that song to be absolutely everywhere. That's it for this week's news quiz. If you want to tell us how you did, our email is The Headlines at NYTimes.com.

The show will be back on Monday.