Up First from NPR - Dozens Dead in L.A. Fires, Middle East Ceasefire Talks, Homeland Security Chief

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

At least two dozen deaths are attributed to the L.A. Wildfires, as more extreme fire weather is in the forecast. Ceasefire negotiations have resumed in Qatar with Israel and Hamas appearing to close in on a deal. As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas prepares to leave office, he says the incoming Trump administration will face hard choices on immigration.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Thousands of firefighters have come to Los Angeles to help slow the spread of the two biggest wildfires. As the wind is expected to pick up again, officials are asking residents to work with them. Follow all evacuation warnings and orders without delay. I'm Steve Inskeep with A Martinez and this is Up First from NPR News. Negotiations are underway to end the war in Gaza before President-elect Trump takes office next week.

I think there's a certain fear of the unknown in terms of what the new administration will do and will say. What are the odds of success? And we spoke with President Biden's Homeland Security Secretary as he prepares to leave office. I don't think we prevailed in communicating to the American people successfully the challenges of migration.

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pull it off. from NPR. California's governor is looking to rebuild the parts of Metro Los Angeles swept away by wildfire. Gavin Newsom says he wants to restore neighborhoods as quickly as possible and for people restoring their homes, he will use his power to wave California's famously challenging environmental reviews. First, though, the fires have to burn out and they have killed an estimated 24 people,

so far as we know. We're joined now by NPR's Adrian Florido in Los Angeles. Adrian, firefighters made some progress containing these fires over the weekend. How are things looking now? Well, things are looking better. Firefighters are gradually containing the Eaton Fire in Northeast LA and the

Palisades Fire on the west side. Each of those fires destroyed thousands of homes as you said. They are now burning mostly in the unpopulated hills but they are still spreading. There were new evacuation orders over the weekend in neighborhoods that the fires were approaching. The big concern now is that winds are, as you said, about to pick up again. There could be gusts as high as 70 miles per hour in some areas. This is LA County Fire Chief Anthony Morrone. These winds, combined with low humidities and low fuel moistures, will keep the fire

threat in all of Los Angeles County very high. LA City Fire Chief Kristen Crowley pleaded with residents to stay alert and to stay informed. Follow all evacuation warnings and orders and the key here is without delay. The National Weather Service has warned that critical fire weather conditions will last through Wednesday. Okay now you know last week we heard a lot about how there aren't enough firefighters or other resources to get these fires under control. So do officials now have what they need?

Well, they're now saying that they are staffed and equipped to handle this. Thousands of firefighters have come in from other states, from Mexico and from Canada, and are working the fire lines. The governor of California called up a thousand more National Guard troops to help. Dozens of planes and choppers have been dropping water and flame retardant pretty much around the clock. Of course, as we saw last week, a wind and the embers that it carries are what really bring a lot of uncertainty. As far as the communities that have been hit the hardest, that specific palisades in Altadena, what's going on there? Well, people there are just starting to take stock of all that they've lost and what comes next for them. For the most part,

these communities are still off limits, even to residents, because investigators are going through with cadaver dogs to search for possible victims. LA County is also saying that before debris cleanup can start in these communities, either by county crews or homeowners themselves, that hazmat teams are going to have to go through parcel by parcel to remove toxic waste. At a community meeting yesterday in Altadena, LA's Public Works Director Mark Pastrella said county officials are already hearing from people asking when they can get in and start rebuilding, but he said it's way too soon. He did promise

that officials are working to streamline the cleanup process and also the construction permitting process that's going to be ahead for a lot of people. We intend to make this as fast as possible to rebuild your homes. In the meantime, people are scrambling to find temporary housing and also to figure out whether they're covered by their insurance policies. Now, Adrian, my son and granddaughters had to evacuate to my house, even though they're not from an area that has burned, and they're not going back anytime soon, I don't'd imagined but have any people have been allowed to return? Well a lot of people in

the areas that were under mandatory evacuation orders have not gone back and the county fire chief said that the conversation about when they will be allowed to return won't start before Thursday. Officials want to be sure that those evacuated communities are no longer at risk of catching fire because these fires are still burning not too far away. Those Santa Ana winds are still blowing also and Los Angeles is still in an active emergency. All right that's NPR's Adrian Florida. Thanks a lot. Thank you. This is a crucial week in negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Diplomats and officials from the U.S., Israel, and Hamas are all in Qatar, not all sitting

in the same room, but close by. After 15 months of war, they're trying to be creative in getting some kind of agreement. The goal is to end the fighting and secure the release of Israeli hostages before President-elect Trump takes office on January 20th. NPR's Daniel Estrin is on the line from Tel Aviv. So Daniel, we mentioned people are trying to get creative here. How so? Well, both the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration are working together on this, which is unusual. And they both want the same thing. They want some kind of agreement before President Biden leaves office. Yesterday, Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu there is an immediate need for a deal.

And we've heard Trump many times say if the hostages are not released by his inauguration, there will be, quote, hell to pay. Biden's outgoing ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, told me that Trump is driving the momentum here. I think there's a certain fear of the unknown in terms of what the new administration will do and will say. And there's no daylight between the incoming administration and the outgoing administration

in terms of wanting a hostage deal now and pressing all parties to make the concessions that are appropriate to reach that. I spoke with an official with knowledge of the ongoing talks, who's not authorized to speak publicly, but who said Trump's team has told Israel that by the inauguration, they want either a deal or a declaration of principles, which would be some kind of document that would,

you know, lock the sides into a commitment toward a deal. What would those principles be? We do know the basic framework of the deal. A Hamas would release around 33 Israeli hostages. A Palestinian official tells NPR this morning that Israel is discussing the release of more than a thousand Palestinian detainees, including 22 people serving life sentences in connection with deadly attacks on Israelis, and those prisoners would be presumably exiled to Turkey, Qatar, or Egypt. And during all of this, there would be a six-week pause in fighting, there would be a surge of aid to Gaza, and more talks about the other hostages and trying to end the war.

Daniel, there have been talks before, so what are the chances of this one actually succeeding? There is a lot of pressure on all the parties now to move forward. Qatar and Egypt, the two Arab mediators, want good relations with Trump, and so they're putting a lot of pressure on Hamas. A Hamas official not authorized to speak to the media told us that Hamas is trying to show flexibility

and that it's proposed several different ways to try to resolve the points of contention. As for Israel, there is a key ally of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the finance minister, who is staunchly opposed to the deal as it's coming out now. But Israel does have motivation to cooperate with Trump on this. Israel wants his help with a couple of big things. It wants Trump's help to pursue diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. And it also wants Trump to potentially support an attack on Iran's nuclear program.

So you do see that the talks have reached a crucial phase now. Israel's top security chiefs have traveled to Qatar this weekend to participate, and the president of the Red Cross has come to the region. The Red Cross was the group that facilitated the last hostage prisoner exchange. That's NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv. Daniel, thank you. You're welcome. President Biden's Homeland Security Secretary is reflecting on four contentious years in

office. Yeah, Alejandro Mayorkas oversaw border security and immigration, big issues in President-elect Trump's victory in November. I don't think we prevailed in communicating to the American people successfully. The challenges of migration at an historic level since World War II. Majorca said that here in Studio 31 during an exit interview. And you spoke to him, Steve. So how did he defend his work on the southern border? Well, they argued the administration's record is stronger than they managed to get across

before the election. And it is true that a key number that the Border Patrol uses as way down encounters with people at the border, which is a way to try to get an idea of whether things are going up or down. It's way down. There was, of course, though, a huge surge in asylum seekers back in 2023. So it's down from that high level. Mayorkas says the US is also sending away asylum seekers who do not have a strong claim to stay here. How many people have you deported, say, in the last year? I believe the number is well over 250,000, a very significant number. Is that higher than it would have been a few years ago?

Yes, it is. And we have built that capacity and we've built those processes. It's worth noting here that while Republicans criticized the administration for not doing anything, immigrant rights groups sometimes said the administration was being too harsh. And Mayorkas is a former prosecutor. He's effectively saying here the Biden administration ultimately has delivered the border security that Republicans ran on. And now a Republican administration is about to take over. How is he viewing them? Well, he knows that Republicans plan to pass a border security bill, which they refused to do last year. He knows that Republicans plan a lot more than border security. They plan mass

deportations. Although let's talk about where we are now. He says the US already deported a quarter million people in the past year. He says if you expand that number, you're going to need a lot more resources and you may also face some moral questions. And what are those moral questions? Well, there are a lot of painful scenarios, uh, in sending people away and some of them involve mixed status families, us citizens in a household with

people here illegally, like parents who had children in the United States, for example. Now I do remember president elect Trump talked about them before. Yeah, he did the other day on NBC. He said he doesn't want to break up the family, so he wants to send them all back to whatever country. Mayorkas talked us through the brutal realities of that law. Biden, he says, tried to keep mixed status families together inside the United States. Republicans sued. Courts threw that out. So if you're going to keep the family together, the remaining option is to make everybody leave, even US citizens. Let's listen.

They would be accompanying deported relatives, sometimes the very relatives upon whom they rely to live. Would they have any legal defense against that situation? They would not, presumably, the removal, the deportation of the individuals would be pursuant to law. That's a very difficult choice. And some would posit in some ways an inhumane choice to compel. He says it's not something the Biden administration wanted to do, but that a new president has said he is determined to try.

And I find it useful at this moment, A, just to kind of get a baseline on where we start here, because the Biden administration did ramp up deportations, did ramp up border security at the very end. And so that's the point at which the Trump administration begins promising massive changes. I wonder if he felt like he's accomplished everything he wanted to do.

He did not say that he did. I think that he sees this as a continuing process and he did everything that he could. All right, Steve, thanks. Glad to do it. And that's a first for Monday, January 13th. I'm Ian Martinez. And I'm Steve Inskeep. You know, we at Up First give you three big stories of the day, like we just did. Our colleagues at Consider This take a different approach diving into a single story and what

it means to you also in just 12 to 15 minutes. Listen now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Gigi Duban, Jerome Sokolowski, Adriana Gallardo, Lisa Thompson, and Alice Wolflings produced by Zia Huch, Nia Dumas, and Iman Mahani. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent, and our technical director, Isaac Holman, joins us again tomorrow.

Okay.