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- [00:05]
Gideon Resnick
Good morning. Trump faces growing rebellion from within his own ranks on the Hill over a controversial compensation fund. It sends a signal, hey, go breach the Capitol. Destroy the building. Assault police officers. You may even get compensated someday. The Associated Press explains how it derailed an important Senate vote. Also, a new report suggests family separations are more common than previously thought. And if you're packing the car for Memorial Day weekend, USA Today has some advice for keeping your gas bill. It's Friday, May 22nd. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Republicans vented rare frustration at the White House this week over the new $1.8 billion taxpayer fund for people who feel wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. I will tell you, my first reaction was this doesn't pass the smell test. I am completely objecting to this, and I'm gonna do everything I can to fight it. I think it's stupid on stilts. Several senators have balked at the fund, which could lead to big payouts for people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and put the lives of those same lawmakers at risk. Yesterday, Republicans sent a strong signal of opposition to that by leaving town without passing a bill that would have provided tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement. Tensions over the payout fund were so high that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was dispatched to the Hill on Thursday and to try and assuage some concerns,
- [01:32]
Mary Claire Jelanik
it did not go well. It was a very tense meeting.
- [01:36]
Gideon Resnick
Mary Claire Jelanik is a congressional reporter with the Associated Press who recently authored an oral history. On January 6th.
- [01:42]
Mary Claire Jelanik
He wasn't able to answer the questions that they had. And it was pretty much immediately after that meeting that they said, okay, we're not even gonna vote at all this week.
- [01:51]
Gideon Resnick
This bill actually had nothing to do with this new fund. But after the fund was announced, some Republicans were worried enough about it that they wanted to add parameters around who could receive the payouts as part of this bigger legislation.
- [02:03]
Mary Claire Jelanik
This reconciliation package. The base package, which is ICE and Border Patrol funding, has unanimous support among Republicans, and they only need Republican support for the bill in the way that they are trying to pass it. So that was not the problem, but it was all these sort of unrelated issues that kept interfering with the bill.
- [02:23]
Gideon Resnick
The other issue was Trump's ballroom and security upgrades for the White House.
- [02:27]
Mary Claire Jelanik
Democrats are really hammering them, saying, you know, people can't afford their groceries right now. Why are you all providing money for Trump's ballroom? So that issue sort of also threatened to derail the bill, and they eventually decided not to add it at all.
- [02:41]
Gideon Resnick
In the background of all of this is Trump's recent moves to turn on incumbent senators in primaries, upsetting many of their colleagues.
- [02:49]
Mary Claire Jelanik
They not only were frustrated that Trump went against one of their own, but also they think it could endanger their chances of keeping their majority. So when that happened, it really did sort of set off these tensions that they really weren't able to get through by the end of the week.
- [03:04]
Gideon Resnick
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that they would pick up the work on the bill when they return in June. But getting to a resolution might be a harder path. The number of children separated from their parents by President Trump's immigration crackdown is much larger than previously understood. A heads up. This next story talks about violence towards children. More than 200,000 kids are estimated to have had a parent detained since the mass deportation campaign started last year. That's according to a new report released this week by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank. And roughly three out of four of those children are US Citizens. This puts the estimated total of family separations during Trump's second term much higher than his first, in which about 5,000 children were separated from their families. Over 1,000 kids are still unaccounted for today. For its part, the Department of Homeland Security has said that it does not separate families and that parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or placed with the person the parent designates. To estimate the scope of family separations in Trump's second term, Brookings used census data to guess how many children people detained by the administration have. That's because the Trump administration doesn't track how many children have been separated from their parents, which Washington Post reporter Maria Sacchetti told us was not always the case.
- [04:28]
Maria Sacchetti
ICE used to issue an annual report telling the public how many people they deported, how many families they deported, how many unaccompanied minors they deported. Since Trump took office, we have been living in a black hole as far as data. We don't have any of that information.
- [04:43]
Gideon Resnick
Sacchetti told us about a toddler named Orlean living in Florida, a US Citizen who was separated from his mother, Wendy Hernandez Reyes, when she was arrested by local police, who turned her over to ICE and eventually deported her to Honduras. Hernandez Reyes had no criminal record. According to her lawyer, she told Sichetti that ICE had ignored her requests to take her son with her.
- [05:03]
Maria Sacchetti
Wendy thought it would be safer for Orlean to be with his cousins than with a stranger in foster care.
- [05:10]
Gideon Resnick
Orlean ultimately moved in with the cousins and into the care of his uncle, who drank heavily and abused the children. During that time. Orlean died from multiple blunt force traumas and his uncle has been charged with murder.
- [05:22]
Maria Sacchetti
ICE has said from the beginning they want parents to go home with their children. And so the question is, why didn't you facilitate that? Why didn't you make sure this child had an American passport so that he could get on the plane? Why didn't you let his mother take him? And another big question is, how many other people has this happened to?
- [05:41]
Gideon Resnick
ICE did not respond to Sacchetti's questions about how officers handled Orlean's case or if they checked on him after he was separated from his mom. Zicheti reports that nothing in federal law requires ICE or other agencies to check in with a child's caregiver after detaining parents. Agency policy is to follow parents wishes, including removing them together. But lawyers told her that is often ignored. The acting ICE director, Todd Lyons, said Hernandez Reyes had abandoned Orlean and blamed her for his death. She told Sacchetti she wants ICE to be held accountable and that she hopes to return to the US to bury her son. Roughly 39 million Americans will be packing up their cars and hitting the road this Memorial Day weekend and many will be preparing themselves for a pricier journey.
- [06:32]
Keith Lang
The national average gas price today is about 455. It's been there for the last couple of weeks. You don't even have to go back a full year to see how much they've jumped.
- [06:43]
Gideon Resnick
Keith Lang is an automotive reporter for USA Today.
- [06:46]
Keith Lang
Cars I checked on February 28, the average price of gas was 298. And for most of last year the average price was close to $3.
- [06:56]
Gideon Resnick
Prices are now approaching the all time highs of 2022. And some analysts warned the summer could set a new record if the strait of Hormuz remains shut. Consumer confidence is now at record lows and supermarkets like Walmart are warning that sales will soon drop as gas eats up more of a household budget. But despite that, people don't seem to be canceling trips. Instead, they're making adjustments.
- [07:19]
Keith Lang
Some of that is people are taking shorter trips and on your shorter trip driving is going to be more efficient, more economical than flying. But there's not been a cutback in the amount of demand or the vehicle miles that are traveled yet. But I think people are assuming that this is temporary and if it goes longer than people anticipate, then you might see some of those behavioral changes.
- [07:42]
Gideon Resnick
The price increases are not evenly spread, so some parts of the country will be feeling it more than others. In California, the average price per gallon is now more than $6. In Texas, it's just above 4. Lang told us there's a lot of reasons why the costs differ so much.
- [07:57]
Keith Lang
There's the federal gas tax, which is about 18 cents a gallon, and each state usually taxes on their own gas tax. And then there's the cost that they have to transport the gas. Gas typically costs more in states that are further from ports where the oil comes in. So there's a lot of factors that go into the number that you see on the gas station sign to ease
- [08:16]
Gideon Resnick
the financial pain and the political pain for that matter, the federal government has flirted with the idea of suspending the federal gas tax, and some states have already paused their own to provide relief. Lang also had some ideas for how you could personally save at the pump. Things like skipping premium grade fuel when you're filling up and paying cash when stations offer a discounted price for not using your credit card.
- [08:38]
Keith Lang
If you can run a couple of errands in the same trip that are in the same direction so you're not making multiple trips, that's a way you could save. There were suggestions about getting gas on certain days of the week when it's usually cheaper, or using grocery points or apps like GasBuddy to comparison shop without having to drive around like you kind of figure out where the cheapest station around you are without driving by and looking at the signs and wasting more gas.
- [09:04]
Gideon Resnick
Ultimately, though, he said there was only one way to get prices back to where they were.
- [09:08]
Keith Lang
Most experts say that the Strait of Hormuz is going to have to be open and have the same type of unfettered access that the oil companies had before this military situation started. And that's going to have to be the case for a while before you start seeing the prices come down because there's so much uncertainty and until it's just open and they can plan for it, you probably won't see prices come down.
- [09:40]
Gideon Resnick
Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. U.S. officials diverted an inbound plane traveling from Paris for violating new entry restrictions regarding the Ebola virus. Anyone who's traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda or South Sudan in the last three weeks is not permitted on US Soil without an American passport. That order is in effect for the next month. Officials say the passenger who is from Congo got on the Air France flight in error and should never have been allowed on board, so they rerouted the flight to Canada, where the passenger was checked by health officials who found no symptoms of Ebola. So the passenger flew back to Paris. Health officials say the disease can only be transmitted by people with symptoms. So far, at least 160 suspected deaths and close to 700 cases are tied to the outbreak. In Washington, the Democratic National Committee released a long awaited report that tries to make sense of how the party lost the 2024 election. The delay in publishing it had drawn criticism for months, and yesterday the party chairman, Ken Martin, found himself in the awkward position of saying it did not meet his standards. The report described a number of political and tactical errors. It suggested the campaign failed to make a, quote, affirmative case for Harris, questioned the effectiveness of its voter organizing efforts and pointed fingers at the White House for not preparing Harris to be Biden's successor. Notably, the report made no mention of Biden's age or Gaza, two issues that animated many voters and finally, as the prestigious Cannes Film Festival wraps up this weekend, one movie stood out from the field. It had a $500,000 budget, 400,000 of which went to AI computing costs. The action adventure movie called Hellgrind became the first fully AI generated film to debut at the festival, the Wall Street Journal reports. It took two weeks to make, with AI creating every character, set and prop. Every prompt fed to the AI models produced 15 seconds of film, meaning the creators had to get extremely detailed to make a 95 minute movie that looked cohesive. So if you think your Rambling questions to ChatGPT are too long, just know the makers of Hellgrind were regularly writing six pages worth of instructions on average to get the outcomes they wanted. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening to the news app right now, stick around for this week's episode of Apple News in Conversation. It's one from the archives, where Shamita spoke with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about how the gap between America's poor and the ultra wealthy got so big, you know, back in 1965. It's easy to forget this now, but the CEO of a typical large public company would make on average about 20 times what the frontline workers at those companies made then. It grew steadily over time to the point that today the media and CEO of a large public company makes about 350 times what a frontline worker makes. If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News in Conversation to find that episode. Enjoy the holiday weekend. Our team will be off on Monday for Memorial day, but we'll be back with the news on Tuesday.