Up First from NPR - Justice Department Firings, Humanitarian Parole Ends, China And AI

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

At least a dozen Justice Department employees involved in prosecuting President Trump received dismissal notices, humanitarian parole programs are ending for 1.4 legal immigrants to the US and a Chinese company has developed a free competitor to ChatGPT.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 Eric Westervelt, Anna Yukhananov, Kevin Drew, Janaya Williams and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Claire Murashima. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent and our technical director is Zac Coleman.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Among Trump's latest moves, the Justice Department says it's fired over a dozen officials. I have never seen this sort of effort to just sweep out experienced people. All of them were involved in prosecuting President Trump. I'm E. Martinez, that's Leila Fadl, and this is Up First from NPR News. Also the Trump administration is ending programs that granted legal status to nearly one and a half million immigrants in the U.S. These things were originally designed to allow people to have temporary protection and instead they just become backdoor immigration programs.

They were granted asylum after fleeing violence and disasters in their home country. So what happens to them now? And a Chinese AI chatbot is free and getting more popular than chat GPT. It's caught the attention of the tech world and Wall Street. Stay with us, we'll give you the news you need to start your day. Hey it's Robin Hilton from NPR music. Many years ago I helped start the Tiny Desk concert series and right now NPR is looking for the next great undiscovered musician to perform behind the famous desk. Think you've got what it takes? Submit a video of you playing an original song to the Tiny Desk Contest by February 10th. Find out more and see the official rules at npr.org

slash tiny desk contest. President Trump and his administration continue to flood the zone with executive actions and department changes. Just yesterday, dozens of senior officials in the U.S. aid and development agency were put on leave. The White House budget office paused grants, loans, and other federal assistance. Trump also signed four executive orders that include a move that would push openly transgender folks out of the military and another Ordering the Pentagon to build a missile defense system, right?

And there's one more the acting Attorney General purged Department of Justice officials involved in investigating Trump We're gonna hone in on that purge and what it means with NPR Justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Good morning Carrie Good morning, Laila. So what do we know about these firings? Good morning, Carrie. Good morning, Laila. So what do we know about these firings? At least a dozen people who work with special counsel Jack Smith got dismissal notices. That's according to two DOJ officials. Acting Attorney General James McHenry wrote the letters.

He said he did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president. Remember Jack Smith brought two criminal cases against Donald Trump over January 6th. In overclassified documents at Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors moved to dismiss both cases after Trump won the election. And this purge is a big deal. One longtime lawyer told me he couldn't think of a time in modern DOJ history where a whole slew of prosecutors who worked on a particular case were dismissed. Of course, Donald Trump had promised to fire Jack Smith too, but Smith

resigned before the inauguration. Okay, on the campaign trail, Trump did talk about retribution and getting back at the people who investigated him. Is this Trump fulfilling that promise? Well, you know, federal judges approved search warrants and other actions DOJ took in its two cases against Trump. Grand juries signed off on them. So prosecutors say it's not as if these lawyers were acting without checks and balances but clearly President Trump does not see it that way. He signed an executive order last week designed to root out what he calls weaponization of the government and the Supreme Court last year made clear that

presidents have a lot of control over federal law enforcement. Now Donald Trump is using it. So what happens now to these prosecutors who worked with Jack Smith? Many of them are career civil servants who have job protection so they could protest and eventually sue to challenge their firings, get back pay, get their jobs back. But that could take a long time and could be very expensive for taxpayers who would wind up footing the bill

if these fired officials win in court. That's exactly what happened with Andy McCabe, the Deputy FBI Director, Trump's administration fired in his first term in office. And you've got some more news about changes inside the Justice Department. What else is happening? I'm hearing some of the most senior civil servants

have been reassigned in recent days to work on a sanctuary city task force. The thinking is that's designed to get those people to quit. Yesterday, one of them did, the man who ran the Public Integrity Unit. Lawyers who handle the environment, civil rights, national security,

they've all been reassigned too. Mary McCord worked in the Justice Department for nearly 25 years. She teaches at Georgetown University now. I have never seen this sort of effort to just sweep out all of the experienced people, the people who have the institutional memory, they have expertise built up over decades,

they have all of the necessary connections with law enforcement, the intelligence community, other federal agencies. McCord says, it seems like these people are being fired or reassigned because of fear they will not be loyal to Trump. She says that makes it easier for a president to misuse the Justice Department for his own retribution.

NPR's Carrie Johnson. Thank you for this reporting, Carrie. My pleasure. The future is unclear for more than 1.4 million immigrants in the US legally under several Biden era programs. Yeah, many had to flee their homes due to violence and conflict. And because it was too dangerous for migrants to go back, they were granted temporary legal status in the US. President Trump has now ended the

programs and empowered immigration officials to quickly deport these asylum seekers. For more, NPR's Sergio Martinez Beltran joins me. Good morning. Good morning, Lea. So one of the programs is called humanitarian parole. Tell us how it worked and who is in this country because of it. Yeah, so this one program is known as the CHNV parole. And it was specifically for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

People from those countries were allowed to come into the US as long as they had a sponsor and passed a background check. Now, most, if not all, of these people are fleeing violence. Like Reginald Daniel and his son Tristan. They left Haiti about a year ago after gang violence became unbearable. Back then I got shot. You know, I got shot in my forehead and tried to kidnap my sons before. Daniel's sister is sponsoring them.

She tells me the parole was a saving grace sent by God for her family and says she's praying for the program to continue. But President Trump has canceled all parole programs. Right, like the CBP One app, which we've heard about before on this program, another way people could claim asylum and enter the country legally. Tell us about that. Yeah, the CBP One app allowed asylum seekers to schedule an appointment at a port of entry along the US-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security says more than 936,000 people were legally allowed in the country this way since 2023. Now, some in the Trump administration say that these Biden-era parole programs were being abused. I talked to Dan Stein, he's the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and supports Trump's changes. These things were originally designed to allow people to have protection, temporary protection, to work maybe for positive political change back home until it was safe to go back. And instead they just become backdoor immigration programs. I mean, what happens though to these people now? Will they all get deported? You know, Leila, there's a lot of uncertainty and fear.

Trump has empowered immigration officers to quickly remove those who came via the parole programs. He's expanded what is known as expedited removal, which was originally only applied to migrants who had recently crossed the border, but the Trump administration has already moved to expand it dramatically, allowing immigration authorities to bypass parts of regular immigration law and speed up deportations. But you know, it's one thing to issue an order. It's a lot more complicated to actually deport people. And it's unclear how that will happen. So Trump has issued several other immigration actions that aren't related to asylum. What are they? And you've probably seen on social media, TV or or, you know, have heard here on NPR that

Trump has increased the number of immigration roundups across the country. According to Homeland Security, yesterday there were more than 1100 arrests. The federal government has said they're going after migrants who are in the country illegally and have a criminal record. But there have been reports of arrests of immigrants who have not committed a crime. We've also heard of people who are either citizens or legal residents and have been caught up in these raids. They were released but that has caused concerns. Trump, Lila, has also moved to end birthright citizenship but a court has blocked it from going into effect and this is just one of

multiple lawsuits challenging Trump's immigration actions. That's NPR's Sergio Martinez Beltrán. Thank you, Sergio. You're welcome. Tech stocks have plummeted around the world over the past day as Investors Digest reports that a Chinese company developed a competitive AI model on the cheap. The company is called DeepSeek and it even caught President Trump's eye. The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win.

And here's John Rue, which is on the line now from China to help make sense of how big a deal this actually is. Hey, John. Hi there. So first of all, tell us about this company that many people, including me, just heard of now. Yeah. Deepseek is a spinoff from a Chinese hedge fund.

It was established just two years ago in 2023, and it's based in the eastern city of Hangzhou, which is sort of a tech hub here in China. And in a nutshell, what they did was hire a bunch of top-notch engineers and develop new algorithms, basically more efficient ways of training and running artificial intelligence with less computational power. And what's the significance of that? Well, the product is said to rival tools from competitors like OpenAI and Google in terms of what it can do, things like analyzing data and solving complex problems. It's impressed a lot of people, it rattled markets and what rattled the markets is the narrative which comes with some

caveats that DeepSeek basically did it all cheaper quicker and with less powerful microprocessors than its big competitors. Okay so tell us more about those caveats. Sure the first one is around cost. DeepSeek says that it spent under six million dollars to make this thing. That's tiny relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars that others are investing, even billions. But analysts say that that low figure is easy to misinterpret because it doesn't include, for instance, the cost of developing various versions

from which this latest version was distilled. So we really don't, we don't know what the total development cost was, how inexpensive it was. The second caveat, uh, has to do with the hardware has to do with the chips that are critical to developing AI. Okay. Tell us more about that. The Biden administration banned the best AI microprocessors from being sold to

China. Were they able to get around it? Uh, it's tricky. You know, the chips that really matter for AI are made by Nvidia, which by the way, took a massive tumble on the stock market after the DeepSeek news. Back in 2022, Nvidia were told they couldn't sell their best product to China. Of course, some of those were already those chips were already there. Some may have leaked in, but they made a slightly downgraded version at the time that they could sell to China legally. That's what DeepSeek says it used to train its latest model. The Biden administration subsequently decided that those chips were actually too powerful.

They banned those ones from being sold to China too. That was in 2023, a year had passed. The horse was sort of out of the barn. Here's Gregory Allen, the director of the Wadwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. We are currently living through the era of the lagging impact of the Biden administration's

misfire in that first batch of AI export controls. So Allen says that era will end. Chinese companies like DeepSeek will run out of those near cutting edge chips pretty soon or sooner or later. They can't buy new ones because of the export ban. China doesn't have the capability to make anything like them. So yes, they did something path breaking here. But China faces a potential worsening computation constraint on the horizon. That's NPR's John Rewich in China. Thank you, John. You bet.

And that's a first for Tuesday, January 28th. I'm Leila Faldon. And I'm Ami Martinez. Remember, you can listen to this podcast sponsor free while supporting public media with Up First Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org. That's PLUS.npr.org. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Eric Westervelt, Anna Yukononov, Kevin Drew, Jenae Williams and Alice Wolfley.

It was produced by Ziad Butch, Nia Dumas and Claire Marashima. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent and our technical director is Zach Coleman. See you tomorrow. They're not going to see me. Listen to us tomorrow. Wow. That's some like a Martinez level cynicism right there. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org.

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