The Headlines - Plane Flips Over in Toronto, and Migrants Trapped in Panama Hotel

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Plus, meat raffles: like bingo, but with beef.  On Today’s Episode:What We Know About the Toronto Plane Crash, by Tiffany May and Neil VigdorAs Trump ‘Exports’ Deportees, Hundreds Are Trapped in Panama Hotel, by Julie Turkewitz, Hamed Aleaziz, Farnaz Fassihi and Annie CorrealEducation Dept. Gives Schools Two Weeks to Eliminate Race-Based Programs, by Zach MontagueTop Social Security Official Leaves After Musk Team Seeks Data Access, by Alan Rappeport, Andrew Duehren and Nicholas NehamasThousands Gather on Presidents’ Day to Call Trump a Tyrant, by Minho Kim, Stephanie Saul and Winnie HuPalestinian Displacement in the West Bank Is Highest Since 1967, Experts Say, by Fatima AbdulKarim and Patrick KingsleyLike Bingo, but With Beef: Why Meat Raffles Are Blowing Up, by David AndreattaTune 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 is Tuesday, February 18th. Here's what we're covering. This is an active investigation. It's very early on. It's really important that we do not speculate. Authorities are investigating the dramatic crash landing of a Delta

Airlines flight in Toronto yesterday. The small jet was carrying 80 people on a flight from Minneapolis when it tried to touch down amid heavy winds and drifting snow. As it landed, it flipped upside down, losing its tail and a wing. No one was killed, but 18 people were injured. There was no like real indication of anything. And then, yeah, we hit the ground and we were sideways and then we were upside down, hanging like that.

I think drop it. Come on. And then everybody was just like, get out, get out, get out. We could smell like jet fuel. And then we just crawled out the back of the airplane. Passengers described having to climb out of the overturned plane as part of it burst into flames. It's not clear what caused the crash, but it's the latest in a series of recent airline disasters that has travelers on edge, including a crash in South Korea where 179 people died

after a plane slid off a runway and the midair collision near Washington between a passenger jet and an army helicopter that killed everyone on board. As the Trump administration tries to carry out its plan for sweeping deportations, it's faced a major challenge. Many migrants in the US have come from countries it's not easy to deport them back to for various reasons, like Afghanistan, Iran, or China. Now the administration has come up with an alternate plan. Send them to another country that is willing to take them. In the last week, the U.S. military flew hundreds of people who come from countries

in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East to Panama. My colleague Hamed Al-Aziz was able to speak with some of them. Your window, is it to the street? Can you see the street from your window, hotel? Hamed says over 300 migrants who were deported, including children, are now locked in a hotel in Panama City. Since they're no longer on American soil, the U.S. is not obligated to make sure they're treated humanely or have the chance

to seek asylum. They've been stripped of their passports, barred from seeing lawyers, and told they'll eventually be sent back to their home countries. The government of Panama is not allowing journalists to come and visit these migrants and interview them, but they're visible from their windows of their hotel and they were able to get their messages out through holding up signs, such as one woman did, holding up a piece of paper that read Afghan. Another family of Iranian asylum seekers who had fled for America wrote in lipstick on the window, help us.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the migrants deported to Panama were in the US illegally and that quote, not a single one expressed fear of returning to their home country. But Hamid says many feel they are in danger. One 27 yearyear-old woman from Iran said she'd converted to Christianity, a crime punishable by death if she's sent home. Others in the hotel described people desperate to escape. One man broke his leg trying, another attempted suicide. The plan to send migrants to other countries will soon

extend beyond Panama. Costa Rica announced yesterday that it will also accept deportees. A flight carrying around 200 people from Central Asia and India is expected to land there this week. This is an indicator that countries that are hoping to come into the good graces of the United States are willing to do things like this, take on hundreds of migrants from countries across the world. And the Trump administration has not been shy about saying that they will look for all avenues to deport people and that just because an individual is from a country that is hard

to deport to, it will not prevent them from being removed from the United States. And this is an indication that they really mean that. Three other quick updates on the Trump administration. The Education Department is warning schools they will lose their federal funding if they take race into account in any, quote, aspects of student, academic, and campus life. The new directive could be especially disruptive to colleges and universities, including those that have race-based scholarships

and grants, or even housing, like sororities or fraternities intended for students of a specific background. It's the latest push by the administration to frame diversity and inclusion efforts as a form of racial discrimination, particularly against white and Asian students. Schools were given two weeks to comply. At the Social Security Administration, the agency's top official has abruptly resigned

after refusing to give Elon Musk's team access to sensitive personal data about millions of Americans. Musk has been leading a push to shrink the federal government and cut spending. He's claimed that the Social Security program is rife with fraud and waste, but a recent audit showed less than 1% of payments were improper. It's not clear if Musk's team did eventually get access to the Social Security systems, which include medical records and financial data. In recent weeks, they've also been trying to get access to private data at the Treasury Department and the IRS. And across the country yesterday, The events over the past month have been built to break our wills. But we are the American people. We will not break.

Thousands of people took to the streets to protest the Trump administration. Many of them said they feel Trump is acting like a king, not a president. And they held signs with messages like this is a coup and save democracy. Protests were largely organized by the 50 51 movement, which has been pushing back against what it sees as Trump's overreach in the first weeks of a second term. In the Middle East, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold, but Israel's military has been ramping up its operations in the West Bank. A weeks-long operation by the Israeli military there has forced about 40,000 Palestinians from their homes. It's the biggest displacement of civilians in the territory in over 50 years.

Residents tell the Times that soldiers used megaphones to order them out of their houses and threatened to shoot them if they didn't leave. The military has demolished scores of buildings, used armored bulldozers to rip up roads, and destroyed water pipes and power lines. Israel says its goal is to root out militant groups to prevent them from attacking Israelis, and that it never ordered any evacuations. But the current far-right Israeli government has been tightening its grip on the West Bank for years. The country's finance minister once proposed a plan to permanently control it by taking away the right to vote from Palestinians there and using deadly force

against people who fought back. And finally, it's the meat. blowing up depending on where you live. They're pretty much exactly what they sound like. You buy a raffle ticket, you hope you win some meat. For a dollar, maybe $5, you could win a nice steak, a pork tenderloin, I won a ham once. The events have been kicking around Minnesota and Wisconsin for over a hundred years. Now they're spreading to other states, also states with cold weather, where people want to pack inside in the winter and cross their fingers for a rack of ribs.

Some churches and kids' sports teams rely on them as fundraisers. Organizers say they can raise $5,000 to even $15,000 a night, depending on the turnout. One woman who runs meat raffles in western New York says they've really taken off. She now runs a hundred of them a year. For some, the appeal is obvious. A snowplow operator who went to a raffle at a VFW in a suburb of Buffalo told the Times, you can win meat, you don't have to go to the grocery store. How can you go wrong with that? Those are the headlines today on The Daily, an interview with one of President Trump's key economic advisors

on how he thinks tariffs can change America's relationship with China. 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.