ICE Arrests Surge at Airports, and Fauci’s Private Diary Faces Scrutiny

**Dani Blum** (0:00)
I'm Dani Blum. I'm a health reporter at The New York Times. We're bombarded with claims about how to live better and feel better. It's really hard to separate fact from fiction.
I am scouring the science, speaking with leading experts, making sure that everything I write is rigorously researched, reported, and that I can back it up. When the science isn't clear, sometimes that is the story. That's a level of nuance and depth you're not going to get just floating around the internet. And it's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times.

**Tracy Mumford** (0:33)
From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Here's what we're covering.
At airports across the US in the past few weeks.
ICE has been carrying out a surge of immigration arrests as it opens a new front in its aggressive effort to deport immigrants. ICE officers had already been arresting some people with deportation orders at airports using personal information provided by airlines. But documents obtained by The Times show that federal agents are now arresting people with expired US visas, too. That is a much larger group, potentially hundreds of thousands of people, who largely weren't prioritized for deportation under past administrations. Many of them have permission to work in the US and are waiting for visa extensions or green cards. A broad range of people are being caught up in the new crackdown, including newlyweds who've just married US citizens, a former au pair from Ecuador, and an Indian engineer waiting for a new work visa. They've been whisked away from check encounters and arrival gates by immigration agents in plain clothes. Immigration lawyers told The Times that these kinds of arrests are unprecedented and that they are now rethinking the advice they give to immigrants whose legal status is in a gray area, warning them not to travel. In response to questions from The Times, the Department of Homeland Security did not confirm the expanded airport arrests effort, but it comes as ICE is under pressure to hit a White House target of 2,000 arrests a day. A DHS spokesperson said in a statement that it's working to ensure that, quote, aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.
Today in the Senate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's former top infectious disease expert, is set to testify involuntarily. He's been subpoenaed by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, who has, for years, accused Fauci of funding research that triggered the Covid pandemic and lying about it. Accusations that lack evidence.

**Anthony Fauci** (3:11)
And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.

**Tracy Mumford** (3:15)
Fauci has forcefully denied the allegations before. As Paul has pushed the so-called lab leak theory, he's claimed that under Fauci's leadership, a US health agency funded dangerous research on viruses in China that spun out of control.

**Anthony Fauci** (3:30)
They're animal viruses that became more transmissible and human, and you funded it. And you admit the truth.

**Tracy Mumford** (3:37)
What's new this time is that the Senator is coming in with more than 1,100 pages of Fauci's private diary, where he typed daily notes during the pandemic. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared the pages with the Senator, saying they were written on a government computer, and now they could, quote, see the light of day.
My colleagues have gone through the diary, and they say there's no smoking gun in there. The diary shows Fauci wrestling with the crisis of the pandemic in real time, as scientists' views on what was happening and why were rapidly evolving. What the pages do show, though, is Fauci musing about his own importance and fame, and writing about celebrities he crossed paths with, like Julia Roberts and Barbara Streisand. Times health reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg has been part of the team going through Fauci's writings ahead of his testimony today.

**Sheryl Gay Stolberg** (4:29)
There's a scientific element to them and a political element. On the science, they don't really add anything new to the question of where Covid-19 originated. They really confirm what we already knew, that Fauci was handling a fast moving situation in which some scientists suspected a lab leak, but in the end concluded that wasn't the case.
But on the political front, they inflame the debate about the lab leak and about Fauci himself.

**Tracy Mumford** (5:03)
Now two quick updates on the Trump administration. Federal health officials have announced they plan to end a program that has helped keep down the cost of monthly premiums for Americans on Medicare. Under the program, which went into place two years ago under President Biden, the government has given insurance companies billions of dollars in subsidies to lower health care costs for millions of seniors, specifically when it comes to their prescription drug plans. In defending the move, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the Biden administration's approach had been a quote, unacceptable giveaway to insurance companies. Oz claimed that once the subsidies are eliminated, premiums for most Medicare recipients will out by less than $10.