Up First from NPR - President Trump Visits Texas, Immigration Raids Ruling, New Antidepressants Study

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

President Trump visits Texas a week after the devastating floods. Questions are now being raised whether cuts to FEMA hampered the rescue response. Also, a federal judge orders a stop to indiscriminate immigration raids in Los Angeles. Plus, a new study on antidepressants sheds light on the severity of withdrawal when people come off the medications.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

President Trump in Texas a week after devastating floods in the state. I've seen a lot of bad ones. I've gone to a lot of hurricanes, a lot of tornadoes. I've never seen anything like this. I'm Scott Simon. I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is Up First from NPR News. Questions are now being raised about whether cuts to FEMA hampered its response. We'll have the latest. Also, the Trump administration faces yet another legal challenge to its immigration policies.

A California judge orders a temporary halt to immigration sweeps in Los Angeles and beyond. And a new study on antidepressants sheds new light on the severity of withdrawal when people come off those medications. Stay with us. We'll have the news you need to start your weekend. After devastating floods, a painstaking process of searching for loved ones and coming together, we are on the ground in Texas. And a growing challenge for public health, rising skepticism in vaccines, and Trump administration changes to vaccine policy.

How do pediatricians talk to parents? Listen to Consider This on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Ian from How To Do Everything. On our show, we attempt to answer your how-to questions. We don't know how to do anything, so we call experts. Last season, both Tom Hanks and Martha Stewart stopped by to help. Our next season is launching in just a few months, so get us your questions now by emailing howto at npr.org or calling 1-800-424-2935.

It's been just over a week since devastating flood struck Texas. At least 120 people were killed in the disaster and more than 170 are still missing. President Trump visited Kerrville yesterday to see the aftermath. Steve Futterman is in the city and joins us now. Steve, thanks for being with us. Good morning, Scott. What did the president see yesterday? Well, the president yesterday spent around four hours here.

He and First Lady Melania Trump saw some of the damage and destruction both on the ground and from the air as they helicoptered into Kerrville on Marine One. They also met with people who are grieving. Afterwards, there were some heartfelt words from Trump. Dozens and dozens of precious children taken from us with such... I looked at the pictures of almost all of them, and it's terrible. And the First Lady spoke as well. To the community, to everybody who lost a loved one, We are grieving with you. Our nation is grieving

with you. Now at the end of the day, Trump got a bit irritated by a question from a reporter who said that she had spoken with some families who were upset that flood warnings had not gone out earlier and felt that if they had, some people might have been saved. The president clearly did not like that question. Only a bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you. I don't know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that. I think this has been heroism.

This has been incredible, really. The job you've all done, it's easy to sit back and say, oh, what could have happened here or there? Maybe we could have done something differently. This was a thing that has never happened before. Now, throughout this week, we have seen officials defensive, a bit thin skinned when asked questions about what may have gone wrong. And while this was a once in a century event, over the years, safety concerns have been

raised at various times. But a bit later, the president actually did say there does need to be a better system in place. And remember how Trump has been so critical in the past of FEMA, even suggesting that it might be dismantled? Well, now that criticism may be softening a bit. Yesterday, he said, we have some good people running FEMA. Steve, how many people do we know to be still missing and how's the search going? Well there are more than 170 people missing Scott. The search is going on with no immediate end in sight.

The search area has an enormous footprint covering miles and miles and the numbers have not moved much in the past few days. The crews simply are not finding many additional bodies. It is possible that some of those missing may never be found I think that reality is beginning to set in here last night a vigil took place at a makeshift memorial that's been set up I spoke with curvil resident cage Greer how is this area dealing with it I mean no one deals with stuff like this well it's it's just a silent it's silent around town for the last week. It's just you're going

to the store and there's just no, you just lost the words, you know, you just don't know what to say. I mean, but we're dealing with the good. We're coming as a community and we're coming together and we're being as strong as we can, helping each other out. And Steve, for those who have lost loved ones, the funerals are beginning to take place, aren't they? Yeah, this ordeal is not probably ever going to be over for them. Yesterday there was one funeral in the Dallas area for eight-year-old Hadley Hannah. She attended Camp Mystic. Today several additional funerals are taking place, including one here in Kerrville for another Camp Mystic camper who is just nine years old.

Steve Utterman in Kerrville. Steve, thank you so very much. Thank you, Scott. For more than a month, federal immigration agents have been roaming around Southern California, rounding up thousands of people. As part of President Trump's mass deportation campaign. But yesterday, a federal judge in Los Angeles said there was a mountain of evidence that people are being targeted solely based on their race.

She ordered a temporary stop to those immigration raids. We're joined now by NPR's Adrian Florido in Los Angeles. Adrian, thanks for being with us. Good morning, Scott. Thank you. Give us more detail, please, about this ruling and the lawsuit that led to it. Well, the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU Public Council and other legal advocacy groups, and they alleged that ICE and border patrol agents patrolling the streets have been detaining

and arresting people here in Southern California based on the color of their skin, their accents, or just because they're doing work that immigrants commonly do. And what this federal judge, Mame Ewuisi Mensah Frimpong said in her order last night was that the evidence the lawyer submitted to support this claim of widespread racial profiling is very strong.

And she ruled that agents are arresting people illegally, likely violating constitutional rights, and she ordered them to stop. The evidence that you mentioned, what does it show immigration agents have been doing in Los Angeles? Well, a lot of it comes from bystander videos and news reports. Agents often armed, wearing plain clothes and masks are showing up at places where Latino workers are known to gather. Places like car washes, Home Depot, parking lots, corners where street vendors sell food, and they're just rounding people up. And Mohammed Tajzar of the ACLU spoke outside the federal courthouse in LA on Thursday

after a hearing in this case. What's happening out here in these streets is if you're brown and you happen to come into contact with these ICE agents and these border patrol agents, they will come for you. Adrian, what does US law say about when immigration agents can stop or arrest someone they just happen to come across in public? Well, they can arrest someone without a warrant in public, but they have to have what's called

reasonable suspicion that they're in the country illegally and a person's appearance on its own is not enough. In this case, lawyers submitted sworn declarations from five plaintiffs, Latino men, who were suddenly approached for no apparent reason and detained or arrested. Three were waiting at a bus stop, one was working at a car wash,

another was fixing his car at a private tow yard. Two of these men are US citizens, and all five said that they think agents stop them just because they look Latino. I do not imagine that's something that the government would admit to. No, the government says that its immigration agents don't pick people up based on race. In court this week, a Justice Department lawyer said that agents are trained to consider a lot of different factors when deciding whether to detain or arrest someone who might be an immigrant without legal status.

For example, if a person gets nervous or tries to flee when they see an agent, an agent might consider that suspicious. The government lawyer told the judge in this case that immigration agents follow the law. And after the judge's ruling last night, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said in a statement that the judge is, quote, undermining the will of the American people. Edwin, what does the ruling mean for the government? Well, the judge issued two temporary restraining orders that apply only in LA and nearby counties. One of these TROs requires the government to stop conducting suspicionless arrests, and the other requires it to give people arrested access to lawyers. Mark Rosenbaum is with public counsel.

He's one of the lawyers in this case. They're going to have to completely change the sort of tactics that they're using. No more racial profiling, no more using the color of an individual's skin as a basis to take them in, no more denying them access to lawyers if they're gonna bring proceedings against them. It really means a 180 degree switch. A big question is how quickly, if at all, we will notice a change in the government's

immigration enforcement operations out in the streets here in Southern California. It's something that a lot of people are going to be paying attention to. And here's Adrian Florido in Los Angeles. Adrian, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Scott. There's a good chance you'll know someone taking antidepressants.

Around 11% of adults in the U.S. take the medication. And in recent years, more patients have come forward to talk about how they have struggled with symptoms of withdrawal after they stopped taking the medication. A new study released last week renewed debate about the scale of the problem. NPR's Will Stone has been covering the issue and joins me now. Hi Will. Hey there. Let's start with this new research.

Why did this study get a lot of attention? Well it's wading into a very controversial topic in psychiatry, especially in the UK. There's increasing concern about how often people struggle with symptoms when they stop antidepressants, most commonly prescribed being SSRIs. So this study was just published in a top medical journal, JAMA Psychiatry. It analyzed existing data from about 50 clinical trials that amounts to more than 17,000 patients and found a person who goes off these medications experiences on average one more symptom compared to those who stop a placebo or continue with

the treatment within the first week. Basically, the authors conclude it's below the threshold for what's considered clinically significant. Dr. Samir Johar led the study and is a psychiatrist at Imperial College London. It's finding that there are clinical symptoms of withdrawal that you don't see with placebo, namely nausea, vertigo, dizziness that maps on to the pharmacological basis for the drugs and that these exist. They're just not very common. One thing to note is this work was not really designed to quantify overall just how often these symptoms happen.

So do we have an answer to that question? How often do people have withdrawal symptoms? Well the short answer is not really. There's not good data here. There was another analysis of the existing evidence last year that found 15% of patients had withdrawal symptoms when you factored in placebo, and most of these were not severe. Now, the fundamental problem here is there really aren't high-quality trials that have specifically focused on measuring withdrawal symptoms.

And the data out there tends to be from people who were on the drugs for a short period of time. And what's the matter with focusing on people on it for a short period of time. And what's the matter with focusing on people on it for a short period of time? Well, the main critique from researchers and patients is that the biggest problems come in when people are on these drugs for years. One prominent voice in this debate is John Reed.

He's a clinical psychologist at the University of East London. He's very critical of this new study and its conclusions. They're saying it is not a clinically significant phenomenon. And that's not something you can compromise on. That is completely inaccurate, outrageous, and misleading to the public.

Now, the backstory here is Reed worked on another review study back in 2019. They found about half of people have withdrawal symptoms and that many were severe. They did not just include high quality, randomized controlled trials though, they factored in patient surveys. And the pushback there from Dr. Johar and others

is this led to an overinflated and alarmist picture. It really sounds like there's a lot of uncertainty here. How are others in psychiatry reacting? Yeah, without some new trials, this isn't going to be resolved in any definitive way. I spoke to Aves Afthab about this. He's a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in any of these studies. He thinks the methodology in the JAMA study was solid, but he worries the authors underplayed the extent of the problem. The danger there is that

the profession and the public can take the wrong message from looking at this paper and say, oh, withdrawal is not a big issue, it's not a big deal. That would absolutely be the wrong conclusion. The study opens more questions than it answers. Uftab says this has become incredibly polarized. On the one hand, psychiatrists are legitimately worried this could discourage people from taking antidepressants, which can be life-saving. But on the other, and NPR just reported on this, there is a movement of patients who describe debilitating symptoms after stopping these medications. That's NPR's Will Stone.

Thank you so much for talking with us today. Thank you. And that's up first for the 12th of July 2025. I'm Aisha Rasca. And I'm Scott Simon. Today's podcast was produced by Lena Turek with help from Gabe O'Connor and Gabriel Dunaton. Our editors are Dee Parvez, Martha Ann Overland, Diane Weber, Jacob Finston, and Martin Patience. David Greenberg is our technical director with engineering support from Zoe Van Genhoven and Nisha Hines.

Our director is Michael Radcliffe. Shannon Rhodes is our acting senior supervising editor. Our executive producer is Evie Stone. Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. Tomorrow on the Sunday story, President Trump wants to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But what happens when one multinational firm tries to set up shop in small town USA? We'll bring you the story of how a battery factory triggered a political firestorm in a local community. And for more news, interviews,

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