The NPR Politics Podcast - Roundup: Immigration Policies; New Surgeon General Nominee

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

The Trump administration announced plans, currently on hold, to deport migrants to Libya, even if they are not from the country originally, and offered a financial incentive for people to "self-deport." Then, President Trump pulled his previous nominee for surgeon general, and nominated a wellness influencer recommended to him by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And, we say so long — but not farewell — to a podcast stalwart. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, immigration policy reporter Ximena Bustillo, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, science correspondent Will Stone, and White House correspondent Asma Khalid.The podcast is produced by Lexie Schapitl, Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Your support means so much to us now more than ever. You help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you. Okay, here's the show. Hi, I'm Kristin. Hi, I'm Rachel. Hey, I'm Stephen. I'm Mary Katherine. I'm Griffin. And I'm Amanda. And we just won Bar Trivia again. This is Nick. Oh, Nick the host. The only thing we're more competitive about than winning is learning. This podcast was recorded at 1121 a.m. on Friday, May 9th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll continue to study our presidents and

state capitals. Enjoy the show. Love a good bar trivia. Yeah, congratulations, guys. I hope that we have imparted something that helped you win, but I kind of doubt it. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ximena Bustillo and I cover immigration policy. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And it's time for our Friday roundup and we're going to start by unpacking some of the developments this week on immigration, including news the U.S. is planning to deport some migrants to Libya, among other places. Xemenna, explain this new third country policy.

Hemenna Hickman Right. So the idea of a third country is that you already have migrants here in the United States. You're trying to deport them back home, wherever it is that they're originally from, but for some reason, the United States can't. There are several countries that have said that they won't take their people back. There are also countries that have limits on how many flights they'll take in or how many people they'll take in. So then that means those people, if the United States wants to remove them, they need to go to a third country.

And so we've seen the Trump administration really utilize this in brokering deals with various countries. Of course, El Salvador is the biggest example of this, that $6 million deal to send people there. We saw this earlier in the administration with Panama as well. Mexico has been a third country. But now we're really seeing this spread across to other continents beyond Central and South America, you know, Libya being the latest. Olivia to me is striking because I also think of sending people to places or countries that are not exactly known for their own stable governments or ability to handle human rights issues or anything that might go along with taking in new groups of people or even necessarily a shared language. Right. So there were lawyers that filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts to stop the potential

flights to Libya. They said that their clients were Vietnamese and Filipino, and those are obviously people who might not normally go through Libya for any sort of migratory pattern. And Libya is notoriously known for having a poor human rights record, particularly when it comes to migrants who are trying to pass through it to get to European countries, for example.

Tam, how is the White House justifying, obviously they've been focused on these deportation flights but sending people to these new countries? Well, President Trump was asked about that this week and he said, ask DHS. So that's to say that the president is not defending this or otherwise advocating for it in any sort of full-throated way, more broadly the administration has made it very clear that they want to get people out of the United States who don't belong here. Any means necessary. By any means necessary.

And as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that when you're dealing with criminals and people who are dangerous, we want them as far away from America as possible. Well, Libya is pretty far away, but it is remarkable to me that the president just punted on it. And he did say ask DHS, and I'm a DHS reporter, so I did ask DHS. And they were like, ask the White House.

I heard nothing back. Emailed a few times, didn't hear any response to these plans. And so, you know, I think that there are moments in which we are kind of seeing the different parts of the executive branch trying to play a little bit of a hot potato with these different plans. Hemanah, do you know if the end goal, if say they take a group of migrants to Libya, is the end goal to ultimately get them back to their home countries or does the U.S. just

get them to Libya and sort of wipe their hands of it? I think they kind of get them to Libya and then wipe their hands of it. You know, I think we've definitely seen that attitude with folks who are sent to El Salvador, for example. Now they're in the hands of another nation. And I think it would be logistically really difficult for any agency to send dozens of people, hundreds of people, thousands of people around the world, and then somehow keep track of them. The goal is removal from US borders.

And once that's accomplished, all bets are off. I don't have the word for it, and I don't know what the word should be, but these are one of those moments where I feel like our existing terms don't always describe the moment. Because to me, deportation doesn't seem to capture what this is by sending a migrant to a country that's not their home country. You know, you're starting to hear- It's a removal. Yeah, you're hearing this word more. Maybe removal is the right way to put it because deportation is a legal process, all these things, and we're in this sort of gray area

now. Yeah, and I think that part of what's going on here is that the White House is looking for a deterrent effect. We've seen this in the way they talk about immigration, the way they talk about deportation, the dangers to the people who are here now, that we will find you, we will scare. They want people to be afraid. They want people to be so afraid that they will self-deport or not come here, or even try to come here in the first place, which obviously border crossings are way down, the deterrent effect is

working. But the idea of sending people to a very unstable country all the way across the world, well, that's one heck of a deterrent. Heather Shammar There's also news that the administration is trying to speed up people, quote unquote, self-deporting. What are they doing there? Amanda So this week, the administration announced that they will give a $1,000 reward to anyone that Announces on the CBP home app that they are gonna quote-unquote self-deport and then actually does so once they get to their home country They will allegedly get this $1,000. DHS didn't respond to my questions about you know, how they're gonna get the money

How are we sending this money to them? How can they track whether or not people do this? And then also the most important thing is they say once people return, they can come back the legal way. But if you mark that you've been in the country without authorization, that is a stain on your immigration record. And it could be over a decade before you're even allowed to try and come back into the United States. And so there really is not a lot of clarity

into the true incentive to believe or trust what the administration is doing. But on the other hand, the administration isn't necessarily worried about that. They want the stick to be harder than the carrot here. So the stick is, if you don't leave, we will find you, we will arrest you, we will arrest you, we will detain you, we might deport you to another country altogether. We might throw

you into Guantanamo, a naval base, we might send you to El Salvador. And so they're banking that the fear of that encounter with ICE, that, you know, potentially, you know, really bad moment that could be scarring for you, your children, your family, and then, you know, potentially be worse. You might not even get home is what allows people to ultimately leave. Now tracking self-deportation is really hard. You know, there are very few ways to actually guarantee that someone has left the country versus like moved to a different part of this very vast nation and you know when you kind of think about the estimates of people who are in the country without authorization you know that's in the

millions you know 11 million people is the most credible recent statistic you know they say that about 7,000 people have signed up on the app that's a drop in the bucket yeah all right Hamed, thank you so much for your reporting. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break. More when we get back. On the indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory, a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is for insight every weekday listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. And we're back and NPR science correspondent Will Stone joins us now. Hello Will.

Hey there. So President Trump withdrew his first pick for Surgeon General and has named a new nominee. Before we get to who these nominees are, Will, briefly, can you explain exactly what the job of Surgeon General is and why it's important? Sure. So, the Surgeon General, we usually refer to it as the nation's doctor, top doctor. They oversee the U.S. Public Health Services Commission Corps, so that's about 6,000 uniformed public health professionals. And interestingly, I learned that when the position was first created, the Surgeon General

actually had some real power to issue federal public health orders. But over time, that has changed. Nowadays, the position really functions like a health communicator-in-chief. We saw that with the last Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. He issued reports on loneliness, being an epidemic. He called for health warnings on social media. So I'd say the power of the position really lies in you know, the person's ability to champion certain issues and bring exposure. So who did President Trump withdraw?

So Trump had initially tapped Dr. Jeanette Neswat. She was a Fox News contributor. Now she's a former contributor. She had come under fire recently, partially because of a pattern of misrepresenting her medical credentials, including where she had gone to medical school. This was reported out first by an independent journalist named Anthony Clark. At the same time, she'd also come under fire from the far right, namely Laura Loomer and others who did not like her past positions, especially on COVID policy, her support of vaccination and encouraging masking, and what exactly tipped the scales, you know, the White House didn't say, but, you know, this week we learned that Trump had decided to pivot and he has picked Dr. Casey Means

instead. She's actually someone who I'm familiar with in part because I have seen her in recent years a lot in my Instagram feed. Can you explain more about who Casey Means is? Yeah, well, maybe not surprising you've seen her because she's really, I'd say, catapulted into the wellness scene, you know, online kind of sphere around nutrition, lifestyle. What really brought her, you know, into the mainstream area is that she published a best-selling book called Good Energy, kind of a self-help diet book about chronic disease and the problems with our

Western style of healthcare and its lack of focus on root causes. And she actually published this with her brother, Callie Means. He is an advisor to Secretary Kennedy and he was a big player, it seems, in the Make America Healthy Again coalition that emerged around Trump, you know, leading up to the election. So Casey Means herself is a Stanford-trained physician. She went to undergrad and medical school there. She then went on to surgical residency, but ultimately dropped out of that residency before finishing it.

In her book, she talks about being disillusioned with, you know, medicine's focus on surgery and drugs and not paying attention to lifestyle. This really kind of forms her narrative, but I will say it is unusual for someone to drop out of surgical residency, especially when they're getting close to finishing up. Tim, how did the White House explain why they picked her? Well, this was like the week of President Trump just saying like, yeah, I don't know, man, ask somebody else. So he was asked in the Oval Office yesterday about concerns about her credentials because

she did drop out of that residency program. She doesn't have an active medical license. And, you know, typically the surgeon general has an active medical license and has actually practiced medicine in a robust fashion before going into the role. And here's how he responded. Because Bobby thought she was fantastic. She's highly, she's a brilliant woman who went through Stanford. And as I understand it, she basically wanted to do, she's a brilliant woman who went through Stanford. And as I understand it, she basically wanted to do, she wanted to be an academic as opposed to a surgeon.

I think she graduated first in her class at Stanford. And Bobby really thought she was great. I don't know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby. I met her yesterday and once before. She's a very outstanding person, a great academic, actually. Bobbi, of course, being Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Junior, Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

Robert F. Kennedy Junior, yep. You know, the interesting thing is that he has not withdrawn that many nominations at this point. Obviously, there was Matt Gaetz, and there have been just a handful of others. But, you know, often, as often as the case when a nomination is withdrawn, there's something going on under the surface, or maybe senators quietly making it clear that they are not going to give the support

that this person needs. I don't know the exact scuttlebutt that led to where we are, but based on Will's reporting, this may not be an easy confirmation either. Yeah. Well, I do think something else you said really stuck out to me because I think you're right that being in the Surgeon General in the modern era is like a communications job. And in that regard, I can see why she has appealed. She's very poised. She's a very strong communicator.

But as someone who has seen her a bunch on social media, I do think we should note that like she does kind of embrace positions that are not backed up by robust medical studies. For instance, she has been a proponent of drinking raw milk. She's questioned hormonal birth control and how that might affect women's health. She also owns a glucose monitoring company and she advocates for people to continually monitor their glucose even though there's not much science that suggests you should do that if you don't have blood sugar issues as if you were a diabetic. She seems very well-versed in sort of the wellness industry more so than potentially the medical industry.

Yeah and interesting Trump is talking about her being an academic. That is not, if you asked most academics, that is not what they would, how they would define an academic. And she also, if you look back at some of her newsletters, she kind of gets pretty woo and she even uses that word to describe herself. I mean talking about Speaking to trees and spiritual mediums and full moon ceremonies plant medicine And also let's just not forget vaccines, right? She has not been Kind of as outspoken. I would say about vaccines as secretary kennedy, but she has Repeatedly brought up concerns about their safety, about the vaccine schedule, and things along those lines.

All right, Will, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was great to talk to you. Sure thing. Okay, one more break, and then it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back, and NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid is with us. Hello, friend. Hey there. And Asma, we're having you on for a very special episode of Can't Let It Go because you have

some news to share. I do. Folks, this is so long. I'm going to be stepping away from the podcast, which feels so strange because it has been so many years with you all. But I'm going to be filling in as a guest host on NPR and WBUR's midday new show called Here and Now. It's something I've long wanted to do. I love anchoring and as much as I love politics, there are so many other things that I would also love to talk about from time to

time. And this is an opportunity to do that. And you know, normally we would go around and talk about the thing we can't let go of the week, but I think this week the thing we can't let go of, Asma, is you. We're really going to miss you. And I'm going to miss you guys too. I just feel like I was thinking about, you know, we've been covering the news together for the better part, or at least the entire last decade. And it's like, man, we have lived some lives together. I don't like doing that math, but the podcast started in November of 2015.

And Asma, you were part of the original crew. I was in the studio with you all. Yes, I remember that. And we actually found the first episode that you appeared on. Please intersect. First, some introductions. I'm Sam Sanders, campaign reporter here at NPR. And I'm Asma Khalid, cover demographics and politics. I'm Domenica Moshmar. Oh demographics and politics. Do I sound like a little baby then? We were all babies then.

You know when you're like, oh my god I've birthed children, I have lived lives during this time, so much has happened since then. I mean three elections, two impeachments, a pandemic, any number of insane political events in between those years. And you have also, you left us once before and you came back, so this may not be goodbye forever. We never know. So the thing, Asma, about you that I just cannot let go of

is your can't let it go. Which are often, this is the part of the show where we talk about the things, politics or otherwise, that we just can't stop thinking about and we're supposed to have fun. And you're like, and Usma's like, let me bring it down. Let me tell you, the thing I can't let go of is deadly serious. I want to put a cloud over the rest of your weekend, folks, by the thing I can't let go of. I want to put a cloud over the rest of your weekend folks by the thing I can't let go. I was actually thinking if I have one regret I regret not keeping a list of all the

things Asma wanted to be I can't let it go. That were beat-up. That list would probably be epic because I do feel like you always wanted to bring sort of like the darkest thought to the end of the show. Genocides, pandemics, death rates, something terrible happening in the world. Asma wanted to talk about it. I don't think technically those were any of her can't let it go. No, those were not. But look, like, you know, the world is a heavy place. And sometimes it's like, you know, I think people are like, I wanna end on a light note. And this is how much I will say our camaraderie, our friendship has meant that like sometimes

bringing those heavy things to you all is a chance to like talk it through and be like, all right, it's not that bad. So in my defense guys, it is a sign of how much I have endeared and enjoyed talking to you all over the years. And sometimes it is that bad. It's okay. Like, life can be a downer.

Things are difficult in this world. And you talk it through with your friends. Yes, exactly. And it feels a little bit better. I'm also going to miss you because before I knew that this was going to be the Asma farewell, my Can't Let It Go for this week was going to be about Rihanna at the Met Gala. Oh my gosh. And I also would say that the other segments

I always liked being in with you was when you either brought death or fashion. And I think that very few in between. To be fair, even on our White House group chat this week, I was sending people the picture of the former vice president who attended the Met Gala. And I had to offer my fashion take on her outfit. So, yes, that is another deep, deep love of mine,

which, hey, folks, when you cover a broad, big radio show, you might be able to talk about sometimes. So for the fashion hot takes, I'll say join me from Midday News on NPR now. And we did joke, our producer, Casey Morrell, did joke you could do a whole segment called Death or Fashion now that you're a host. Yeah, so we will be tuning in for that segment on Here and Now.

I'm sure everyone there will be glad to have that segment. I love that. I love that. But no, really, guys, in all sincerity, it has been a ride. We've been through a lot together. And I was just thinking, you mentioned pandemic. I think one of the things about covering elections with people is that you really form a deep bond. And I was thinking about the fact that when we got COVID as a family early on, Tam, you were here and

you dropped off an entire goody bag of stuff for our family. And that meant a lot. And I just think that there are experiences you live through when you're in the trenches covering campaigns with people that bond you forever. So guys, even though I'm leaving, you're stuck with me forever. I will also say, one of the things I will never forget about you is how you covered the pandemic pregnant. And I just remember being like, this is like some of the bravest things I've seen people do. You were out on the road.

She covered the campaign in a pandemic. Yes. Like you really and I remember like when a lot of people weren't going out on the road more than anybody else. She covered the campaign in a pandemic. Yes. Like you really. And I remember like when a lot of people weren't going out on the road, you were very pregnant going out and telling stories. And I was like, she is committed to this when you are willing to go out there. So we love you. We'll miss you. And the good thing is we still get to hear you all the time. You'll be on Monday to Friday.

So if you miss Asma's voice, you will know where to find her. Good luck, friend. Thank you, guys. Okay, that is it for Asma. And that is it for us today. Our executive producer is Mathony Maturi. Casey Morrell edits the podcast. Our producers are Lexi Shapiddle, Bria Suggs, and Kelly Wessinger. Special thanks to Christian of Kalamer. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. Oh my gosh guys and one last time I must McCall it. I cover the White House. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.