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Good morning. How the latest ICE deportation campaign led to the fatal shootings of two immigrants.
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They've been arresting double the number of immigrants that they were doing just a few months ago. And as part of that, they've been doing a lot more vehicle stops, New
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York's novel approach to data centers, and a major lawsuit against the Paramount merger. It's Wednesday, July 15th. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shimita Basu. This is Apple News.
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Today,
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After the second fatal shooting by immigration agents within a week, the Department of Homeland Security has announced a significant policy shift. Temporarily, ICE officers will be halting most vehicle stops.
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That has been their go to tactic now for many months as part of this ongoing mass deportation campaign.
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Nick Miroff is a staff writer with the Atlantic who spoke to me about the significance of the announcement. It came after Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins said that she urged DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen to pursue a change. Miroff said that the traffic stops have increased in part because targeted immigrants are often not opening the doors of their homes, knowing that in those cases, officers can't enter without a search warrant from a judge.
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And so officers have increasingly looked to try to get the people thereafter by waiting for them to come out, get in their cars, go to work, that kind of thing.
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It's unclear how long this change will last, but it comes amid a nationwide increase of arrests, up to a reported 2,000 per day. That's nearly double what it was in the spring. In both of these shootings, one in Texas last week and the other Monday morning in Maine, the men who were killed were not the actual targets of a deportation operation. Miroff said that both cases demonstrated a gap in agency procedure.
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A lot of big police departments have what's called a vehicle pursuit policy kind of setting some guidelines to officers about when they can use force and when they should just back off in case of a suspect attempting to flee. ICE doesn't have a policy like that, and it's become, you know, kind of a free for all.
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Miroff spoke to some officials who had that view because there is no pursuit policy and an influx of new recruits. The other problem that's emerged in both of these cases is an apparent lack of body cameras. Earlier this year, Congress gave DHS $20 million for body cameras, but in some local jurisdictions, they have not been fully implemented.
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From my experiences talking to ICE officials, there isn't like an institutional resistance to having them, but they've been very slow to roll them out. And as we know, it's not like a foolproof thing. A lot of times officers end up having them turned off, but in both of these incidents, they're saying there weren't even any body cameras available.
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In the Texas shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, eyewitness accounts differed from DHS claims that he had rammed into an ICE vehicle. And in Maine, DHS said an officer shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero after he attempted to flee in a vehicle. Security footage from a nearby store obtained by the Portland Press Herald did not capture the shooting. Miroff said that officers are trained to view vehicles as deadly weapons, but that driving away is typically not seen as justification for lethal force.
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Officers are supposed to only fire if they can reasonably determine that their life is in danger or there's an imminent public safety threat. You can't just shoot somebody because they're not listening to you or they're driving away or they're trying to flee.
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The internal affairs division of the FBI and DHS are reportedly investigating the shootings, and the leaders of both Colombia, where Guerrero is from, and Mexico, Salgado Araujo's country of origin, have condemned the killings. New York is saying no to the construction of massive data centers for now at least, it's the first state to take sweeping action against America's AI boom. Democratic governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order yesterday pausing large data center projects for a year while the state develops regulations to assess consumer and environmental impacts.
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The businesses that build technology capable of changing civilization with AI are also capable of working with us to protect our
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power grid, to protect our water supplies and our communities.
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New York already has close to 150 data centers, with several more planned. Hochul's order will not delay projects that have already acquired permits, but it will pause projects that are still seeking approval. Data center development is largely handled at the state and local level, but some projects need input from the federal government if they want to use federally protected land. Politico reporter Miranda Wilson says it's been getting easier for those projects to speed through the permitting process in recent years.
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Normally, these permits require companies usually to try to minimize any harms to those water resources, to try to avoid them as much as possible, and also to invest in some kind of mitigation measures to make up for the loss or damages to wetlands, given that they do provide a lot of important environmental and ecosystem functions.
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Most projects that impact federally protected land have needed a federal permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The process is designed to give communities and state officials time to review a plan and weigh in. But in 2023, the Supreme Court significantly reduced the number of streams and wetlands covered by the clean water, the law that has regulated water pollutants for over half a century. So now fewer data center projects are going through what is typically a time consuming permitting process. Dozens of data centers are popping up in states like Texas, Utah and West Virginia. And by Wilson's count, at least 27 projects that previously would have been restricted by the Clean Water act were able to skip the federal permitting process.
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Now that a lot of waters and wetlands are no longer covered by the Clean Water act, it's kind of up to the states to decide if they want to regulate those in some way or not, or require permits for any kind of damages to those waters.
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Many states have their own guidelines, like Virginia, which has the highest concentration of data centers worldwide.
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In Virginia, for example, starting next year, data centers are going to have to report how much water they use, and so that information is going to be public.
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Meanwhile, roughly half of states model their policies off of the federal government. Nationwide, data centers are unpopular. Recent polling by Gallup shows over 70% of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, oppose data centers in their communities because they guzzle water and drive utility bills higher.
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I think the industry is trying to address those concerns, but there's still a lot of people who have questions and also feel like projects are being approved very quickly.
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Not all Democrats have taken the same tack as Hochul did yesterday. In Maine, Democratic Governor Janet Mills vetoed what would have been the first statewide moratorium on data center construction. And other Democratic governors have largely sided with Big Tech, primarily pointing to economic opportunities these companies could bring to their states. A dozen states, led by California, are suing to block Paramount from taking over its rival Warner Brothers Discovery. They argue that consolidating the companies, which own major movie studios, streaming services and news organizations, would violate antitrust law and primarily hurt two groups of people.
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There's the consumers hit in the pocketbook that could drive up the cost, for example, of monthly streaming services or of cable channels.
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NPR's David Folkenflick has been reporting on the lawsuit.
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It could also hurt the people who make movies or TV shows or other entertainment. There'll be fewer employers to pitch their scripts to or to audition for or to offer to produce for. And constricting that market with fewer players can force pay and compensation downward.
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Paramount argues the states are misinterpreting antitrust law. It says this merger is all about competing in an evolving media landscape.
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They say we live in a new world. We're not just competing against Warner Brothers. We're not just competing against the other classic Hollywood players like Disney. We're competing in a world where you have new players that are huge, like Netflix, Amazon and Apple, some of the world's largest companies.
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Paramount CEO David Ellison has said there will be no asset sales or cuts to content spending and has promised 30 theatrical releases a year. But Folkenflick told us the debt Paramount would be taking on in the deal would likely lead to job cuts. Ellison and his father, tech magnate Larry Ellison, launched this hostile takeover last year. They're one of the wealthiest families on earth and have developed a massive media portfolio in recent years.
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Two and a half years ago, the Ellisons didn't own much of Hollywood at all. They had Skydance, they were doing business with Tom Cruise and they were producing some hit films, but they didn't own a network. Now they're trying to own 50 plus cable networks and CNN and CBS News and these major two historic studios that have been going at each other hammer and tongs for more than a century.
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The DOJ has already approved the deal and the FCC has not made a decision yet, though Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has been vocally supportive.
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Disney swallowed up most of Fox's entertainment assets back in 2019 during President Trump's first term with his blessing. They did that sort of looking at Netflix, Amazon and Apple as well. Fox, of course, it's worth pointing out, was owned by President Trump's ally, Rupert Murdoch. And all Trump cared about was that Murdoch would hold on to Fox News, which he did.
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The Ellison family also has close ties to the president. In October last year, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss as the new editor in chief of cbs. She has criticized the mainstream media for being too critical of Trump. And Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter and advisor. The president recently gave his company Oracle, a controlling stake in TikTok's new US based entity.
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There's just an extraordinary political overtones to all of this. California's Attorney General Rob Bonta said America has no kings in government or economy. He talked about the notion of antitrust law being a check on oligarchs and a check on a president just sort of picking winners and losers in the economy.
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Folkenflick says the litigation could take a long time to play out, which could potentially upend the deal or force some concessions. And delays would be expensive for Paramount. If the acquisition is still up in the air by October, Paramount has to pay Warner Brothers shareholders roughly $650 million every three months. And if there's no deal by June of next year, Paramount would owe Warner Brothers $7 billion. Here are a few other stories we're following today. Two Supreme Court justices made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan went before members of Congress to raise the alarm on a recent sharp rise in threats against them and their fellow justices. They're pushing for a 10% increase in the Supreme Court's security budget to roughly $230 million. Justice Barrett said her family has received several threats.
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I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.
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She went on to recount an incident at her house six weeks ago where local police responded to a so called swatting attack as false reports of gunshots brought a huge police presence to her door. According to the Supreme Court, police threats to the justices rose by 25% last year. And according to data from the U.S. marshals Service, hundreds of judges across the country faced threats last year and this year. Also in D.C. the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make Daylight Savings time permanent, meaning no switching clocks twice a year. The Trump backed bill, known as the Sunshine Protection act, has a lot of bipartisan support, but there are some differences depending on where lawmakers are from. Many from southern and coastal regions are for it, arguing the change would allow for more afternoon and evening activities in the winter, while their Midwestern colleagues worry about it pushing sunrises past 9am in the middle of winter. Congress passed a similar bill in the early 1970s. It quickly became unpopular, particularly among parents who worried about kids waiting for the bus in the morning in the dark, and was repealed in about a year. Before this bill gets to Trump's desk, it would need to pass the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. And finally, a major upset in the first World cup semifinal.
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Spain, for the second time in their
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history, will play in the FIFA World cup final.
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They defeated France 20 to return to a final for the first time since 2010. France had been going for a three peat of consecutive final appearances and were considered a favorite to do so. Yet even with striker Kylian Mbappe leading the French team's feared offensive attack, it was Spain's defense that won the day. Spain will now face the winner of the other semi today between Argentina and England. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple news app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a recent In Conversation episode coming up next. New York magazine features writer Reeves Wideman sat down with Shamita in January to talk about his deep dive into the life of Paramount CEO David Ellison and the personal reasons behind his bid for Warner Bros. Studios. If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News in conversation to find that episode. And we'll be back with the news tomorrow.
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It.