Up First from NPR - Hearing For Wrongly Deported Man, Prescription Drug Prices, Harvard Battle Continues

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

A federal judge in Maryland questioned the Trump administration about its continued refusal to retrieve a mistakenly deported man from an El Salvador prison, President Trump signed an executive action that aims to lower drug prices for Americans, and the President threatened to remove Harvard's tax exempt status.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Anna Yukananov, Scott Hensley, Steven Drummond, Janaya Williams and Mohamad ElBardicy. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent. And our technical director is David Greenburg.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I need one of those Starbucks carry trees. Couldn't bring in my notes and my coffee and my water and my phone. Those things last a long time. You should just grab one the next time you're in there. I should, no, you know, I've got them stacked up at home, but I just don't remember. They're never where I need them to be when I need one.

It's the problem. Good morning, eh? Hey. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] The Trump administration says it can't force El Salvador to return a man they admit was deported there by mistake. But when attorneys for the Justice Department appeared in court, a judge said they hadn't shown they tried to facilitate the man's return at all.

I'm E. Ortiz, that's Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News. The president signed an executive action that aims to lower drug prices. I think it comes as no surprise that Trump is taking another swing at policies to lower prescription drug costs because it does really resonate with people. But executive orders can only do so much, will it work? And President Trump escalated threats against Harvard University after cutting billions in federal funds to the school yesterday. He floated the idea of revoking its non-profit status. Stay with us,

we've got the news you need to start your day. Judge Paula Zinies ordered the Trump administration to provide more information on whether it has done anything to facilitate the return of a Maryland man deported to El Salvador by mistake. Gilmar Abrigo Garcia was detained and deported last month. His family sued the government to bring him back. The case has become one of the highest profile lawsuits against President Trump's efforts to increase deportations.

And Piaz Jimena Bustillo has been following this and she's here with me in our studios in Washington. Good morning, Jimena. Good morning, Michelle. Could you just remind us of where we are in this case and what exactly the Judge Zinni ordered the government to do? The judge originally ordered for two items. First, for the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return from Secod. This is the mega prison in El Salvador. The White

House has said that his deportation was an administrative error. Second, to ensure that if he is brought back to the US, his immigration case receives due process within immigration courts. During Tuesday's hearing, Judge Zinies said that she had received, quote, information of little value on what had been done to fulfill any of this. So she granted a request from Abrego Garcia's lawyers

for the government team to undergo a process called expedited discovery. This means that government officials from Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and State will be deposed under oath. She gave both sides two weeks to complete the discovery process. Did the just say why she's granting this expedited discovery process? She said that this would be done specifically to determine whether the government is abiding by her original court order, whether they intend to abide by it, and if not, whether that's in good or bad faith.

How did the government respond? The administration has so far continued to argue that it cannot force another government to extradite someone that they're holding back to the U.S. On Tuesday, Drew Ensign, the lawyer for the Justice Department, also brought up two documents. One was a status report on where the DOJ stands on bringing Abrego Garcia back to the US. In this, a DHS official said that Abrego Garcia could be let in through a legal port of entry, but that if he did arrive, DHS would either move to deport him to a third country or back to El Salvador anyways. Now Zinni said that this was already

getting too far ahead since the government hasn't shown that it has facilitated his return at all and Zinni then pointed to the Oval Office press conference transcript from Monday during which Trump met with Salvadoran President Naib Bukele. Both leaders said that they didn't have the power to return him. But to that, Zini said that those answers that Enzine is pointing to during this press conference would not be considered responsive in a court of law.

So let's talk a bit about the stakes of this case. I mean, for example, what have we learned about the relationship between the president and the courts? The takeaway from Tuesday's hearing is that this is another judge growing frustrated with the administration's answers on what it's doing in response to court orders. But the administration has in a way set up for many of these policy debates to take place

in the courts and even make their way up to the Supreme Court as we've seen in this case. But not every decision is going to go the administration's way. So we have continued to see that there's also a growing tension between the courts and the administration. And on Monday, in front of El Salvador's leader, Trump criticized the quote, liberal judges that are blocking his agenda. This is of course not new as he's previously criticized those who have issued orders against his immigration directives, especially those related to the flights to El Salvador. That is NPR's Jimena Bustia. Jimena, thank you. Thank you. President Trump signed executive action yesterday that aims to lower drug prices for Americans.

It would build on Medicare's new ability to negotiate drug prices, but there's a lot more to it. NPR's pharmaceuticals correspondent, Sydney Lupkin is here to tell us all about it. So Sydney, how would this proposal help consumers? Yeah, the administration says it can do a better job at negotiating the prices Medicare pays for drugs. It's not clear from the action exactly how that would be the case.

And I have to say that a lot of the savings on drug prices are kind of baked into the Biden administration law that gave Medicare negotiating power in the first place. It allowed 10 drugs to be negotiated last year and 15 more this year. Next year, another 15 should be up for negotiation. So over time, the savings should add up. But the executive action asks the health secretary in Congress to fix what the administration sees as a flaw in the law. It treats prescription pills like some cancer drugs differently from more complex biotech drugs like the

blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug, Humira. The pills are eligible for Medicare negotiation sooner, seven years after FDA approval, compared with 11 years for drugs like Humira. The proposal would level the playing field, but it would require a change in the law. Does the executive order go beyond Medicare? Yeah, it does. There's a lot in the executive action. It has 14 different sections. It takes aim at middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers, which handle drug coverage

for health insurance. The order tells officials to look for ways to increase transparency into how they're compensated. The companies have been criticized for not passing on savings to consumers. It also instructs the FDA to streamline its generic drug approvals process and to better facilitate state programs to import lower cost drugs from Canada. The drug importation push actually started under the first Trump administration and it just hasn't gotten much traction. Oh, so how much of this executive order is building off of that first try? Yeah, quite a bit in this

executive order is familiar. The first Trump administration made several attempts to lower drug prices and that included importing drugs from Canada and speeding generic approvals. It also proposed pegging drug prices in the U.S. to lower prices paid in other countries, but that didn't happen. So when it came to drug prices as a campaign issue last year, Trump didn't say much. This is really the first time in a while we're hearing about drug prices. Here's Juliette Kubansky, a Medicare drug pricing expert at the nonpartisan research group KFF.

I think it comes as no surprise that Trump is taking another swing at policies to lower prescription drug costs because it does really resonate with people. High drug prices are a big deal to voters, whether they're Democrats or Republicans. Sure, I can understand that. So will this executive action then lower the price of prescription drugs? You know, that's unclear. Executive orders can only do so much. In this case, the action is telling the FDA to take certain steps, instructing his HHS secretary to work with Congress, instructing officials to come up with

regulatory solutions. So a lot will depend on all these different players working together on, for example, drug importation. States have to submit very specific plans for each drug they want to import, even after the FDA approves their general approach. The FDA approved Florida's drug importation program last January, but by November it still wasn't bringing in drugs from Canada. So this presidential order could build on efforts to lower drug prices, but only if Congress and other officials find a way to solve some of these challenges.

MPR pharmaceuticals correspondent Sydney Lepkin thanks a lot. You bet. The battle between the Trump administration and Harvard University has moved to another front. Yeah, the president threatened yesterday to revoke the school's tax-exempt status a day after cutting over $2 billion in federal funding and grants. Harvard's president had refused to implement the government's demands, which include overseeing academic departments and limiting student and faculty power.

NPR's Alyssa Nadwani is with us now to tell us more. Good morning, Alyssa. Good morning. So, you know, this isn't the first university that Trump administration has attacked, but I understand that the president took to social media to complain about Harvard specifically. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the latest move in this standoff, which has about nine billion dollars in federal grants for Harvard hanging in the balance, it happened on Trump's Truth Social platform, with the president writing, quote, perhaps Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status and be taxed as a political entity if it keeps pushing political ideological and terrorist inspired slash supporting sickness and the background is of course on Friday the administration sent Harvard a list of demands then on Monday

Harvard's president responded rejecting them saying they were illegal in an attempt to dictate, quote, what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. Danielle Pletka I understand that there are already legal challenges to this. Danielle Pletka Yes. A lawsuit filed late last week by Harvard's faculty, along with the American Association of University Professors, is challenging these administration demands tied with withholding funding.

Danielle Pletka So, let's...can you just say more about President Trump's threats to remove Harvard's tax exempt status? What are the administrators saying about this? Well, in my conversations with college leaders, many have said they were deeply worried about the administration moving beyond cutting research grants.

And Trump's comments confirm those fears. Here's Ted Mitchell, President of the American Council on Education, which represents hundreds of colleges. The catalog of horrors is a thick one, and there are plenty of things that the administration can seek to do that would throw institutions off kilter. And tax-exempt status is certainly one of them. Nearly all colleges and universities are tax-exempt organizations.

They're given nonprofit status, along with charities, religious institutions, and some political organizations. And that's allowed some elite institutions to amass huge endowments. Harvard is the largest at more than $50 billion. So I was wondering though if President Trump actually has the authority to take away that status. Well, Republicans have long sought to curb those tax exemptions. And while Trump doesn't necessarily have the total authority to revoke a college's tax

status, he can use the Internal Revenue Service to do it in rare circumstances. There's also a bill in Congress that would give the president and the Treasury Secretary greater control over this. Is there a precedent for what the administration is trying to do here? So one example is Bob Jones University which had an interracial dating and marriage ban and the IRS ruled that those discriminatory policies were not charitable. That went all the way to the Supreme Court in the early 1980s. The college eventually dropped the ban and regained their tax status about two decades later.

And say more about why the Trump administration is doing this? It's a great question. The White House has continued to maintain that they are rooting out anti-Semitism on campus. But going after colleges, which the administration deems left-leaning or too liberal, has long been a goal of Trump. Here is Trump speaking at an event in Florida in 2023. After 50 years of leftist domination of the universities, I will take bold action to reclaim our colleges from the communist left. And Michelle, in the last month, the administration has canceled about $11 billion in federal grants at a handful of elite colleges.

And President Trump doesn't appear to be backing down anytime soon. That is NPR's Alyssa Nadverny. Alyssa, thank you. Thank you. And before you go, we have an update on the story we brought you yesterday about NPR's Alyssa Nadwani. Alyssa, thank you. Thank you. And before you go, we have an update on the story we brought you yesterday about NPR's special report revealing that engineers from DOGE accessed sensitive data at the National Labor Relations Board. Virginia Democratic Congressman Jerry Connolly

called it quote technological malfeasance and wants an investigation. He's asking inspectors general what access did Doge operatives have, what sensitive data could have been taken, and why were the agency's security systems turned off. The concerns go beyond data breaches. White House advisor Elon Musk, who leads the Doge effort, runs companies that are facing investigations by the NLRB and the Labor Department. Connolly says that creates an inherent conflict of interest for Musk to direct work at either agency. We'll be following this story as it develops. Listen on your local NPR station or at npr.org. And that's a first for Wednesday, April 16th. I'm Amartinez.

And I'm Michelle Martin. You can listen to this podcast sponsor free while financially supporting public media with up first plus Learn more at plus dot NPR dot org. That's plus dot NPR dot org today's episode of up first was edited by Anna Yukon enough Scott Hensley Steven Drummond Mohammed El-Bardisi and Junao Williams It was produced by Zia butch near Dumas and Christopher Thomas We get engineering support from Arthur Lerent, and our technical director is David Greenberg. Join us again tomorrow.

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