The Headlines - Trump Sends Marines to L.A. Protests, and Kennedy Fires Vaccine Experts

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Plus, remembering a funk legend.   On Today’s Episode:Trump Administration More Than Doubles Federal Deployments to Los Angeles, by David E. Sanger, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Laurel RosenhallTrump Targets Workplaces as Immigration Crackdown Widens, by Lydia DePillis and Ernesto LondoñoKennedy Removes All C.D.C. Vaccine Panel Experts, by Apoorva MandavilliWelcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT., by Natasha SingerSly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82, by Joe CoscarelliTune 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 Michael Simon Johnson. Today's Tuesday, June 10th. Here's what we're covering. The standoff between the Trump administration and the state of California escalated on Monday as the president ramped up deployments of federal troops in response to protests. For days, demonstrators there have railed against the administration's crackdown on immigration.

Trump mobilized a battalion of 700 Marines and an additional 2,000 members of the California National Guard yesterday over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom. Federal officials described it as a limited mission to protect federal property and agents in Los Angeles. The move especially worried state and city officials and legal experts who say active duty Marines should not be carrying out domestic law enforcement except in extreme and rare cases and that this is not one of them. Trump had already deployed 2000 National Guard troops over the weekend and on Monday there

appeared to be fewer clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. — Thank goodness we sent out some wonderful National Guard. They've really helped and a lot of problems they were having out there. — At the White House, Trump described the situation as, quote, very well under control. That mixed messaging, claiming early success while flexing additional military power, has frustrated local officials who say they don't need or want federal help. Do you know what the National Guard is doing now? They are guarding two buildings.

That's what they're doing. So they need Marines on top of it? I don't understand that. That's why I feel like— Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said it's Trump who's provoking the unrest. And on Monday, the state pushed back. With this order, Trump and Hegseth ignored law enforcement's expertise and guidance and trampled over our state's sovereignty.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that the state was suing the administration, alleging that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated federal law and the Constitution when they took control of the state's National Guard. The complaint sought a judicial order to return control of the National Guard to Newsom. In an interview with The Times yesterday, Newsom said that Trump's actions are designed to sow fear and anger, and that, quote, this is a provocation, not just an escalation. Meanwhile. You're saying these operations, the ICE operations in the Los Angeles area

are continuing right now. Yes, absolutely. They'll continue every day, not only in California, Los Angeles, they're gonna continue every city across the country. White House border czar Tom Homan said last night that the immigration operations that prompted the protests in the first place will continue.

Recent immigration raids have started targeting workplaces and are part of a broader strategy to boost the administration's deportation numbers. In the past few weeks, those raids have included arrests at a construction site for student housing in Tallahassee, a flood control project in New Orleans, and a landscaping site in Western Massachusetts. My colleague, Ernesto Londoño,

has been reporting on the administration's crackdown. Initially, they said the priority was gonna be to go after people who were hardened criminals who had formal deportation orders. So that requires a lot of manpower and knocking on doors and trying to find people, which is very labor intensive. Later, we saw federal agents going very aggressively after international students and revoking hundreds of visas.

Now, the clampdown on illegal immigration is entering a new stage as work sites become a major focus. You have many people working illegally in just a handful of industries. We're talking things like construction, farms, food production, warehouses. So the government has long known that these sectors rely very heavily on people who do not have papers. And if you send agents to, for instance, a meatpacking plant or a construction site, there's a good bet you're going to find a good number of people who don't have permission to be here. So that means that overnight you can really boost the number of people you put into the deportation pipeline. I spoke to a woman in Los Angeles recently who said that she had been fired from her job at a

laundromat because her boss, who has long known she was here without permission, recently decided it was too risky to keep people like her on payroll. So this is definitely having a preemptive effect in people's risk assessment. And it's happening at a time when the government is trying to persuade people who are here without papers to self-deport. It's essentially telling them you can either go on your own volition or you may wind up in our custody and face really unpleasant circumstances on your way out of the country. In Washington, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of a federal vaccine panel.

The group was made up of experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who review vaccine data, debate evidence, and wield enormous influence, voting on vaccine recommendations. Those decisions inform insurance companies and programs like Medicaid, which are required to cover those vaccine shots. Kennedy noted that two-thirds of the panel

had been appointed by Biden during his final year in office, and he said the move would restore the public's trust in vaccines. Kennedy alleged that members of the panel had conflicts of interest, which drove decision-making, a claim experts said was unfounded. The health secretary is a longtime vaccine skeptic and, in just a few months, has dismantled decades of policy standards around immunizations. Public health experts called the firings reckless and extreme.

The chair of the Infectious Disease Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics said the firings will only drive up mistrust in vaccines, calling the action a quote, unmitigated public health disaster. disaster. The Times has been looking into how the so-called AI arms race is playing out on college campuses. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is actively working to integrate its artificial intelligence tools into nearly every aspect of college life, from tutoring to career training. And some schools, rather than fight the oncoming AI title wave, are deciding to lean in.

Earlier this month, Duke University began offering unlimited chat GPT access to students and staff, and rolled out Duke GPT, a school-specific interface. OpenAI has been courting schools across the country with similar offers. It's a significant pivot, given that AI has been courting schools across the country with similar offers. It's a significant pivot given that AI has been associated with a surge in chatbot-fueled cheating over the past few years, and it comes as other tech giants like Google and Microsoft are vying to embed their chatbots into universities, cultivate future customers, and prepare young

people for what some schools are calling a, quote, future AI-driven economy. But the widespread adoption of AI is also essentially a massive national experiment with unknown long-term consequences for students. Early studies suggest that offloading tasks to chatbots could diminish critical thinking skills. Some critics are concerned that colleges are overlooking societal risks, AI labor issues, and its huge environmental costs. Not to mention that it's still unclear how trustworthy or reliable large-language models

actually are. They can still make significant mistakes and confidently state false information as true. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft over copyright infringement, both companies have denied wrongdoing. And finally, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and pioneering bandleader Sly Stone died yesterday from lung disease. He was 82 years old. He was 82 years old. I have everyday people. Stone led the mixed-race, mixed-gender band Sly and the Family Stone, who had a string of soul and funk hits in the 60s and 70s, including Everyday People and Dance to the Music.

Dance to the music. Let's do the music. Stone's music had a massive influence on later major artists, ranging from Prince and Michael Jackson to George Clinton and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Born Sylvester Stewart, Stone grew up immersed in the gospel music of his Bay Area Pentecostal Church, and as a child, he sang in a gospel group with three of his siblings. As a young man, he became a radio DJ in San Francisco. On and on and on, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cats and kitties, hippies and square, 17 pairs, six with sly. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Bad Bad Charlie. And he eventually formed another band with his siblings

and a few others, The Family Stone, with an overarching message of acceptance. But increasing drug use and erratic behavior led him to essentially shut himself off from the world by the 1980s. For several years, he lived out of an RV. Stone published an autobiography a few years ago where he responded to the question

of what people could take away from his life. He said, quote, music, just music. I don't wanna get in people's way and I don't want them to get in my way. I just wanna play my songs. I don't want to get in people's way, and I don't want them to get in my way. I just want to play my songs. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, why the US is so dependent on rare earth metals from China,

and how the growing trade war is cutting off access. That's next in the New York Times audio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Simon Johnson. We'll be back tomorrow.