The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: March 12th

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Scott Detrow shares his reporting on the day, one year ago, that it felt like everything changed. And President Biden is dealing with an influx of people seeking refuge at the US southern border.This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Katie calling from Concord, Massachusetts, where I'm about to start baking a cake for my daughter Eleanor's first birthday today. We've been using Eleanor's age to keep track of how long we've been living this homebound pandemic life, and here we are at one year. This podcast was recorded at 1216 p.m. on March 12, 2021. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I'll still be enjoying some delicious lemon cake with my family and thinking about how much everything has changed in the past year. Okay, here's the show. That child is never going to know what normal times were like. I don't know, maybe soon. Also, lemon cake sounds delicious. That too. It does. All right. Hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover

politics. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And that was a very appropriate timestamp because yesterday marked one year since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. It was a year ago that we all very quickly learned how to make this podcast from home. Our listeners definitely know and I imagine, I hope, are forgiving that there were some glitches along the way, but as they adapted their lives to this new reality, so did we. So we are going to get to the politics later in the podcast,

but first today, we are going to start by reflecting on the last year. March 11th, 2020 is considered the unofficial beginning of the pandemic. And Scott, for Morning Edition this week, where you have been, you put together this really lovely story about how the world changed that day and that it really just brings you back there. Yeah, thanks. Danny Hajek, a producer at Morning Edition, and I worked on this for a while. And, you know, the thing that really jumped out to us as we started to report it, the thing we remember about it is how the day ended. That's not how the day started for so many people. Americans were still commuting to work and school. Nobody was wearing masks. Most people didn't fully grasp at all just how much this virus was already spreading

people were still doing things like packing into basketball arenas like that game a year ago on march 11th in the chesapeake energy arena in oklahoma city where the oklahoma city thunder were about to play the utah jazz nice crowd here tonight folks glad you joined us as well moments before tip off everyone on the court, the players, the coaches, the refs, everyone looked confused. It was seconds, like maybe 10 seconds before the game was going to tip off. And everything just stalled. Sarah Todd covers the Jazz for the Deseret News.

She was in the press box that night trying to figure out what was going on. The players are being taken off the court, going back to the locker room. There was so much confusion. The fans here in the arena don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going on. There were moments where nothing was happening on the court, and then all of a sudden people would be shooting off T-shirt cannons and the mascots dancing.

And then when the PA announcer comes over and he says, But fans, due to unforeseen circumstances, the game tonight has been postponed. The game has been postponed. That night, Todd reported that a player on the Utah Jazz named Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. You are all safe. You wrote that night, nobody feels safe

when you hear somebody say you're safe. Yeah, 100%. Good night, fans. In fact, the NBA immediately suspended its entire season. Nothing like that had ever happened before. On March 11, 2020, a new reality was quickly setting in. People we knew were getting sick. Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks and his wife, actress Rita Wilson, have tested positive for the coronavirus.

His wife, also 63, had chills and a slight fever. And earlier that day in Geneva, international health officials elevated the crisis. Good afternoon, everybody. That same day, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, made it official. COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. We have rang the alarm bell loud and clear. This week marks one year since the pandemic was declared. The coronavirus outbreak is now officially a pandemic. More than a thousand cases are now confirmed in the United States and more than 30 people have died. The governors of Michigan and Massachusetts have declared states of emergency. I am declaring a

state of emergency in Washington, D.C. We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. My fellow Americans. That same day, a few hours after the NBA game, President Donald Trump, who repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus, introduced a controversial travel ban. To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days. President Trump suspended all travel from Europe for the next 30 days. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is at one of Europe's busiest airline hubs, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and she joins us now. Hi.

Bonjour, ladies. Bonjour. What is happening at the airport this morning? Is there confusion? Is it busy? The Americans are here to fly home, and I spoke to 20-year-old Emma Shaw from Ithaca, New York. Here's what she told me. You're like living by the hour, by the minute. We'd get email updates, and I think the airport's the worst place you could be right now. When Americans realized just how bad things were, they kind of panicked. Scarce protective equipment was snapped up. Empty grocery shelves became an early symbol of the pandemic.

And for a lot of people, thinking about March 11th and what came next brings back memories. Yeah, it was crazy at the beginning. We had to prepare ourselves. When it started in March, there would be lines outside. This is Ruby Sanchez. She's a grocery store clerk in Los Angeles and a member of the California Labor Union UFCW 770. We didn't have no pasta. We didn't have rice. We didn't have beans. We didn't have toilet paper. We never had fights, but people did take other people's stuff. We would have customers tell us, you know, I put my toilet paper in the basket and this person just took it

out of my basket and left. And that was very stressful. I tried to maintain my distance with customers, but yet they don't respect that. It's like they, if they have something to say, they want to get in your face. Sanchez says customers would blame employees if items weren't in stock. But employees couldn't find those goods either. Yes, everything was empty. And it lasted like that for like three months. And then people started getting sick.

One of my co-workers got sick. And then I started to feel body aches. I couldn't smell, chills. And in an all-too-familiar story in this pandemic, Sanchez, an essential worker, tested positive for COVID-19. I got my father-in-law sick, and I got my husband sick. All while she cared for her three kids. She says she missed two weeks pay while

she recovered at home. Her family's okay now, but across the U.S., Latino and Black communities have been hit especially hard in this pandemic. In L.A. County, Latinos make up nearly 50 percent of cases. It's very stressful working in a grocery store with this pandemic because you feel pressured. Sometimes, you know, you come home and you start crying. It was very stressful and it's still stressful at this moment. I would even have like panic attacks. There was moments where I couldn't even breathe because I felt like I was going to get sick and I was going to get my family sick again. The amount of tragedy and death that we saw,

nothing in my training really prepared me for it. This is Angela Chen, another frontline worker on the other side of the country. She's an emergency medicine doctor at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She diagnosed the city's very first confirmed COVID-19 case, more than a week before the outbreak was called a pandemic. By March 11th, Chen and her colleagues were already overwhelmed. That particular day doesn't really stand out in my mind because all of March has really become this haze of just dealing with this new disease that we didn't really know that much about. What were you hearing? What were you seeing in the hospital? What do you

think about a year later looking back on that March, April, May period? So for me, really just the sound of a ventilator alarm beeping kind of really brings me back to that space. A lot of these patients, as their lungs grew more fibrotic and unable to expand with the breathing machines, you would hear these machines kind of go off. This constant beep, beep, beep of just... They're trying to push air in, but it's not working. It's one of my strongest memories from last March.

Like so many other frontline workers that spring, Chen was worried about the risk of bringing the virus home. So she sent her son, just a year old, to live with her parents in New Jersey. They were apart for four months while she worked in the hospital. You know, four months in a one-year-old's life is almost half of the time he's been alive, and so we weren't able to be around for his first steps. We missed the first time he talked, and it's just something that sadly we'll never be able to get back. Have you had any conversations yet or spent time thinking about the way that you'll describe this period to him when he's older?

A little bit. It's interesting. We'd set up a Gmail account for him when he was first born, because we wanted him to not have an email without a series of numbers after it. And so kind of since he was born, we'll occasionally send him emails so he can read them when he's old enough to. And it actually gone back and read a couple of emails from when it during that time. And it's just describing, you know, the immense tragedy. And I think kind of hoping that he understands that his parents just were doing the best they could with with our understanding of the world during this incredibly tumultuous time. Yeah. As you reflect back on the past year, I'm wondering, is there any patient or moment with a patient that sticks in your mind? One in particular has really stayed with me.

We had a patient who was very, very ill. We kind of recognized that she probably wouldn't survive it. And she had been estranged from her family for many, many years. They lived in another country. There was some kind of fallout, but eventually we were able to connect with her family. And we set up a FaceTime and they brought their phones to her favorite childhood beach. And they were able to say goodbye to her. They were able to kind of recount the memories from when they were together. And she kind of took her last breaths to the waves crashing onto the sand for, I think, what was really peaceful and a place where she was content. And that really, that memory has stuck with me for so vividly for the entire year. And those moments, I think, of humanity are the ones that I have the most clarity on in this otherwise phase of my life.

I think I've almost tried to repress. Angela Chen is an emergency medicine doctor at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. On March 11, 2020, NPR reported that over 30 people died of COVID-19 in the United States. Today, the death toll now exceeds a half million. Scott, thank you for that reporting. As you reminded us there at the end, there have been so many lives lost after what has been a really traumatic year. One thing we do want to turn to now is that we do have some hope lately in the form of vaccinations. Now, Domenico, we've done some polling on this. And one thing we found is that, yeah, people were hesitant just a few months ago to take the vaccine, but that hesitancy is shrinking. Tell us more about that. Yeah, that's right. And clearly, you know, the pandemic has affected and reached people very widely. I mean, also in this poll, we found that three quarters of people said that they

personally knew someone who was sick from the coronavirus had gotten sick from it. And almost four in 10 said that they knew someone who had died from it. So, you know, that's a lot, a lot of Americans. As far as the hope goes and the light at the end of the tunnel here with vaccines, we have seen a decreasing number of people saying they won't get the shot. So, you know, back in September, 44% of Americans said that they were not going to get it if one came available. Now that's down to 30% in our NPR PBS NewsHour Marist survey. You know, almost two-thirds of Americans now say that they have either gotten the shot already or that they plan to. All right, well, we're going to leave it there for now. Scott, thank you so much for joining us

after a week of early mornings. Go enjoy your weekend. Yeah. After hanging out with Morning Edition and Up First for a week, I'm going to go take a nap. Do it. Like a 12-hour nap. Yes. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And then when we get back, a look at Biden's immigration policy. On NPR's Consider This podcast, we help you make sense of one big story in the news every day, like how to combat disinformation and conspiracy theories, which pose a real threat to democracy, and what life looks like after you're vaccinated.

The next phase of do's and don'ts. All that in 15 minutes every weekday. Listen now to Consider This from NPR. And we are back. And now we have Franco Ordonez joining us. Welcome, Franco. Hello. So we are going to talk about a string of really great reporting you have done on immigration. There is a strain on resources at the U.S.-Mexico border right now as the government struggles to deal with the number of people seeking refuge and opportunity in the U.S. And after four years where the Trump administration made tightening immigration a major goal, Joe Biden is instituting his own

policies to deal with that strain. So, Franco, let's start with the super basics before we get to Biden's policies, since I think some of this kind of gets lost in the discussion. Who is trying to come to the U.S. and why right now? And also, how do those numbers right now compare to other recent years? Yeah, right now it is largely Central American migrants. They are fleeing a number of things, from poverty to violence. But also there's been some recent hurricanes that have really driven some of this migration. And also, you know, there's been a change in government and administration. They're, you know, seeing a president who is talking about a more humane policy. And I think smugglers are

also using that kind of information to kind of market their businesses to bring more people here. Many of them are unaccompanied children. Thousands and thousands are actually unaccompanied children. And these are, this kind of wave is kind of a phenomenon that's been kind of cyclical over the last few years. There was a wave of unaccompanied minors who are arriving in 2014 during the Obama administration. And there was another wave during the Trump administration in 2018 and 2019. And we're starting to get to those levels. And we are at those levels in terms of, you know, people in detention centers and facilities like that. Well, and speaking of those children, you've done some reporting with our colleague John Burnett here at NPR

on what's happening with some of those children as they cross the border. Tell us more about the conditions that those kids are in and what's being done about it. Yeah, it's in Border Patrol facilities. And these are facilities that are set up for adults. The Biden administration is working to move these kids out of these Border Patrol facilities into more appropriate shelters run by Health and Human Services. Those are facilities that have like bunk beds and video games and ball fields and even medical facilities. But those shelters are actually at 94% capacity. So there is a backlog and kids can't necessarily get to the facilities. So they're stuck at the facilities at the border that were

built for adults. Franco, I want to turn to the foreign policy side they're stuck at the facilities at the border that were built for adults. Franco, I want to turn to the foreign policy side of this. There was someone you had quoted in one of your pieces who talked about, I think the words she used were the push and the pull that relate to immigration policy. And the Biden administration is not only trying to deal with this influx of people, but also trying to strengthen the economies of the places they are fleeing to maybe make it make there less of a need for those people to flee. Tell us more about what they're doing there.

What they're trying to do is they're trying to kind of flood some money and resources to the areas where these families are coming from. As we kind of noted before, why they're coming from, they're fleeing poverty, they're fleeing violence and corruption. So what the Biden administration announced this week is their plans to, you know, with Congress approval, send $4 billion to Central America, to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to try to really attack those issues and kind of address those push factors. Because, you know, that official, former official that I spoke to, Teresa Cardinal Brown, what she told me is that the very first decision that a family makes is, I have to leave. It's after that decision is they decide when. What policies are in shape? Can I make it? Is it going to be easier

with Biden in office than Trump? But the first decision is, do I leave? Why do I leave? And that is what the Biden administration at least is trying to attack with this money. But it's going to take a lot of time. I want to turn from the policy, which we've talked a lot about here, to the politics. Now, Domenico, there are a few more clarifying things in American politics than looking at how Republicans and Democrats talk about the topic of immigration and particularly people seeking aid at the border. What have you seen and how immigration rhetoric has shifted, not just between Trump and Biden,

but it's also changed quite a bit over the longer term, hasn't it? Well, I mean, yeah, and you have to look specifically at the Republican Party on this, because in 2012, after Mitt Romney lost the presidential election to Barack Obama, there was a huge amount of soul searching within the Republican Party. They said that they really have to take a look at hard-line approach to immigration policy that has really now severed what was a potential compromise issue, where now you have Republicans all on a hard-line stance on this pretty much. And back in 2013, you might remember that 68 senators voted for comprehensive immigration legislation. It went nowhere in the House because of the different kinds of Republicans that were in the House that had just kind of cropped up with the Tea Party and some of the anti-immigration stances there.

But 14 Republicans had crossed the aisle in 2013. And by the way, only four of those Republicans remain in the Senate now. Wow. Well, so speaking of Congress and the ability or lack thereof to compromise, Franco, Biden has laid out his idea of a comprehensive immigration overhaul. Now, what, eight years after that last one? How hard is the Biden administration willing to push for that? How much are they willing to prioritize that? I mean, they say they're willing to prioritize it a lot. I mean, I think we will find out, you know, starting next week and in the coming weeks, how much leverage they will put behind it. I mean, I've been covering this issue in and out of Washington

for about 15 years, and there are few more difficult ones than this one. I mean, just as Dominica was saying, I mean, there's just such emotion around this. It's about families. It's about children. It's about the social fabric of the country. And the views on the left and the right on this issue are so stark. It's just hard for me to imagine the two sides coming together. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, it is time for Can't Let It Go. Hearing loss is a fact of life for many humans, but not for fish, reptiles or birds.

People noticed in chickens that they could take them to, say, heavy metal concert, blast the ears really to oblivion. And then within days, new hair cells would begin to sprout. The science of sound. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. And we are back and it is time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about politics or otherwise. And I'm just declaring that I'm going first this week, guys, because I am going to be talking about the huge news of the week. Of course, that is the Oprah Harry Meghan interview. Now, what I can't let go.

Look, the substance of that interview has been hashed over a million times. I'm not going to get into it. What I'm going to get into is how the Brits reacted to watching this, and more specifically, how they reacted to watching our commercials. Because it's on American TV, folks from the UK tuned in and saw the ads that we have. And someone on Twitter, her name is Ayesha Siddiqui, put together a thread of people reacting in particular to pharmaceutical ads. I completely missed this, but this is going to be pretty good. I had never considered this, that they have the NHS, they have a nationalized health system, whereas we very much do not. And sort of related to that, they do not have pharmaceutical ads because of their regulations. And so there are all of these wonderful responses where one person said, now, how are the side effects of the medicine in American ads more lethal than the thing they're treating?

There was someone else who said, essentially, and I'm going to paraphrase because there are some unsavory words in here. But she was saying, wait, why are American ads telling you to ask your doctor about medicine? Your doctor's the professional here. Your doctor is the one who prescribes it. This just killed me. I loved every bit of this. Well, you know, for as weird as they think our pharmaceutical ads are, I think a lot of Americans think the monarchy is pretty weird too. Didn't we break away from that for a reason? Okay, fair point. I mean, man, now I'm going to think all day about what's worse, having a monarchy or if I have to know the side effects to Lipitor. Well, anyway, all right, let's move on. DeFetico, you tell us, what can't you let go this week? So Jimmy Kimmel was doing a rehash of what happened a year ago as the pandemic was starting.

And he did this in a very sepia-toned way. And one of the things that popped up that caught my eye, and I kind of had one eye on it, and I just sort of looked up and was like, what? Is that real? And it was Sarah Palin rapping Baby Got Back wearing a costume bear outfit apparently from the masked singer. I'm down with that!

I'm thinking about sticking to the Game Ball Dates of the magazine! Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember, because I remember it took place around the time of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson saying they had COVID. Yes. And the NBA shutting down. And I remember it was like three horsemen of the apocalypse. I saw the Sarah Palin thing and just thought, oh, my God, the simulation really is breaking.

What's even happening? She knew all the words. It was just. I words. It was just... I know. It was kind of impressive. It really was. I'm lost again. I need to turn my TV on more.

Go to YouTube. Okay, Franco, let's finish this off. What can't you let go of? So what I can't let go of, and I'm actually particularly interested in Domenico's thoughts about this as a New Yorker he is. I want to talk about the bagel wars.

Oh, no. Now, New Yorkers are so mad. Hey, Danielle's got plenty of thoughts on bagels. She's quite the bagel chef, I understand. I can make a bagel. Okay. But, okay, keep going. I want to hear this.

Okay, okay, let's see. So folks, New Yorkers and people who claim that they can make bagels are so mad about a recent article in the New York Times of all places saying that California was actually king of bagels. They wrote specifically that the best bagels can be found not in Manhattan, not in the Bronx, not in Brooklyn, not in Queens, but in the Bay Area. And I was just stunned by this. Well, I, you know, I mean, it's just, you know, the thing is, like, anybody can make good food, you know? So it's like, where is it the best? Is it New York? Is it not? It's like, you know, if you're good at it and the water is good and your ingredients are good, I'm sure it can be made well anywhere. I mean, maybe that's, you know, sacrilege coming from a New Yorker, but I would say in mass quantities, you can find probably more and better bagels generally in New York per square mile, you know, than you probably

can in California, you know, than you probably can in California, you know, but I wouldn't rule out that you could find one bagel shop that could do it. Apparently, this one's in Berkeley, California. New York wins quantity over quality, it sounds like. I wouldn't say that. That's more of a Midwestern type thing, quantity over quality, isn't it? New Yorkers are very much into quality. I would say you have more quality bagels per square mile in New York than anywhere else. All right. We could clearly talk about this for a few more hours, but for now, we're just going to call this a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Shirley Henry. Our editors are Mathoni Maturi and Eric McDaniel.

Our producers are Barton Girdwood and Chloe Weiner. Thanks to Lexi Schapittle and Brandon Carter. Our intern is Claire Obie. And I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I firmly believe that you cannot schmear the good name of New York bagels. Had to get the last word. All right. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.