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Hey there, it's Shemita. Before we get to today's show, a quick announcement. Today marks 10 years since the Apple News app debuted on your devices to bring you reliable journalism from the world's best journalists covering local, national and international news. To celebrate this milestone, the Apple News editors have collected 100 standout stories from the last decade. From compelling investigations to illuminating perspectives to some of the reporting that you loved the most. There's, there's a lot to explore and we'll include a link to the collection in our show notes. Now onto the show. Good morning. It's Tuesday, September 16th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, how counterterrorism laws are being used to pursue immigration goals. What happened after one state introduced 5050 custody rules and the surgeons who put a man's tooth in his eye and saved his vision? But first, the president has ended federal control of D.C. police, at least for now. As soon as today, though, Congress is expected to vote on a raft of bills that the Washington Post says represent the most significant change to the city's criminal justice system in 30 years. Megan Flynn is a reporter for the Post who covers D.C. government and politics.
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The city for decades has had a really challenging relationship with the federal government, given it's not necessarily new for the GOP or for a presidential administration that has different political values than D.C. to want to impose their policy imprint on the city. What is new is the pace at which they are doing this.
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Violent crime in Washington has been at a 30 year low in 2025, but the administration has focused its critic on juvenile crime. In particular, teenagers under 18 made up more than half of arrests for robberies and more than half of carjacking arrests so far this year. The bills being considered this week, which moved quickly through the committee process, reflect the administration's appetite for quick action on how the nation's capital treats juvenile suspects. Flynn explained that one bill would allow for 14 year olds to be tried as adults. Policy on this varies from state to state. Some have no minimum age at all, but in D.C. it's generally 16, Flynn told us. Janine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C. has been lobbying for this change, citing incidents like the attempted carjacking of a former Doge employee allegedly carried out by two 15 year olds.
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She's long been arguing for the last several months or so that in these cases she should just be automatically able to pull them up into the adult justice system. Advocates are arguing that if intent is to make D.C. safer that these types of actions won't necessarily do that, pointing to research that suggests the services available in the juvenile justice system are more appropriate for youth as opposed to the adult justice system, and that it could just increase recidivism or the odds that they'll reoffend.
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Being tried as an adult can have long lasting impacts for a teen, unlike some states that allow for a child to petition a judge to reverse their decision if mitigating evidence emerges later. DC's system doesn't let that happen if the teen was charged as an adult. Other bills the House is set to vote on include one that would cap the age at which young offenders are eligible for more lenient sentencing to 18 instead of 24. Another would roll back restrictions on police vehicle pursuits, and another would abolish the city's Judicial Nomination Commission.
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The way that judges are appointed in D.C. are actually they're nominated by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. The city provides candidates to the president for consideration through the Judicial Nomination Commission. This would just eliminate that, so the city wouldn't have any input into who the local judges are serving on the.
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DC Superior Court bench, Flynn told us. DC's top elected officials have said they are opposed to these bills, but they're powerless to stop Congress because of the relationship between the federal government and dc. The House is expected to pass all the bills, but the path forward in the Senate might get complicated by the filibuster. A House committee is also expected to question the city's mayor, attorney general and council chairman in a hearing about crime later this week. Now to an immigration court case that legal experts are watching as a bellwether of the Trump administration's ability to merge immigration enforcement and counter terrorism terrorism. 51 year old Ayman Solomon is a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio. He fled Egypt in 2014 and was granted asylum in the US during Trump's first administration. At the end of the Biden administration, immigration authorities moved to revoke that status based on claims of fraud and that he'd provided aid to a terrorist group. Now he faces an immigration court trial on September 25 after he was detained while attending a routine ICE appointment earlier this summer. Soliman vehemently denies that he's been affiliated with any terrorism group, and his friends in Ohio say he's terrified by the idea of being returned to Egypt, where he had been jailed for documenting protests. As a journalist today, Soliman is one of a record 61,000 people in ICE detention. ProPublica's Hannah Alam told us about how counterterrorism laws used in the aftermath of 911 have had lasting repercussions.
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It's these sweeping laws that remain on the books from the war on terror years that are now being picked up by the Trump administration. And in the words of legal scholars, weaponized to enhance or to boost the immigration and deportation effort.
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Families who've grown close to Soliman through his work in the hospital are among the voices calling for his release. Elam spoke to Heather Barrow, whose five month old daughter Maya died in the NICU in 2024. Soliman made the family's funeral arrangements, attended Maya's celebr of life, and just before he was detained, joined the family for a butterfly release on what would have been Maya's first birthday.
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The family is just absolutely distraught and saying, how could this guy who just attended a butterfly release for our daughter, how could he be in an ICE cell facing terrorism allegations that just, it doesn't add up to them. And they're, they've added their voices as well to his defense.
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Soliman worked with an Islamic charity in Egypt more than 10 years ago. DHS alleges that the charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group. Neither the charity nor the Muslim Brotherhood are designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. the DHS also initially accused Soliman of murder and terrorism in Iraq, a country that he's never visited. But after his lawyers questioned that claim, the Cincinnati Inquirer quoted ICE attorneys calling it a mistake, saying it was due to a, quote, inadvertent footnote. Immigrant rights groups are concerned that using counterterrorism laws to speed up immigration enforcement efforts will leave fewer legal guardrails. And they claim it's already leading to removals based on evidence that hasn't been fully vetted. They're worried that material support claims like the allegations against Soliman could be used to tie other immigrants to militant groups or cartels.
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The examples I was given was, does that mean that someone here who's an asylum recipient and the government comes back and says, you know what, you paid a ransom to a cartel to free a loved one or you paid a bribe at a checkpoint to a cartel to get out safely? That means you provided material support to a terrorist group, you're no longer eligible for asylum and you've got to go. That's the fear with these laws.
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A warning. This next story has some details about domestic abuse, including child abuse. The Wall Street Journal takes us to Kentucky and the impacts of its first in nation policy. That makes 5050 custody the default in separations. Typically when a couple gets divorced in the U.S. judges consider the best interest of the child when determining custody arrangements around 80% of the time, according to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, mothers are the custodial parent.
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Dads thought that that was unfair.
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That's reporter Rachel Wolf.
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And they said that the way to fix it was to have a default to 50 50, where before considering anything else, judges would have to maximize time with both of a child's parents.
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In 2018, Kentucky became the first state to enact that policy. It was the result of a campaign spearheaded by divorced fathers and the National Parents Organization, which has its roots in the father's rights movement. Advocates say the law has helped fathers play a bigger role in their children's lives, lessens childcare burdens for mothers, and reduces kids feelings of being abandoned by a parent. Wolf says Rob Holdsworth, one of the dads who advocated for this law, is a prime example of how it's working.
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He's a great dad. You see it all over his house. Like there are just like it's a shrine to his kids. And you know, in a situation like that, you can really see the argument. You can see how 50, 50 makes a lot of sense.
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And advocates say it's one reason for why Kentucky's divorce rate has dropped faster in recent years than the national average. According to one analysis from Bowling Green State university, it fell 25% between 2016 and 2023, compared with a nationwide decline of 18%. That trend, Wolf says, is one reason why four other states have passed similar legislation and around 20 more are considering bills that would establish equal custody as the default. But those statistics might not tell the whole story.
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A lot of people are saying, look, couples are staying together. And the experts I spoke to said it wasn't that simple. That part of the story is parents staying married to people who either they just would prefer to not be married to or are afraid of leaving their kids with in order to protect them.
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Wolf spoke with Darlene Thomas, the leader of one of Kentucky's largest domestic violence programs. Before 2018, Thomas primarily focused on helping clients figure out how to safely separate from abusive partners. These days, she's often working with them to figure out how to stay.
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They're willing to stay to protect their kids, even if it means taking some beatings. They don't want to leave their kids with somebody who they know has a history of violence 50% of the time.
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Thomas told Wolf about some of the disturbing cases she's encountered with women who did divorce their partners. One mother said her son came home from time with his dad and had a dislocated shoulder. The boy told his mom that he didn't feel safe with his dad. Another mother told Thomas that her children came home from their dads covered in fingerprint sized bruises on their ears. Kentucky's law stipulates that if a parent is subject to a domestic violence order, the 5050 arrangement should be automatically overturned. But in at least one case Wolf documented, a woman's recordings of her husband's abuse were not enough to convince a judge to change the arrangement. Many of the women Wolf spoke to told her they feel like Kentucky's system has failed them. But a Kentucky Family Court judge stressed that the legal system does not follow this order blindly. It treats the law as a starting point as they rule on individual cases. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're Following Vice President J.D. vance said the White House would go after left wing organizations he accused of promoting violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing last week as he guest hosted Kirk's show on Monday. During the live stream appearance, Vance brought on a number of administration officials, including Press Secretary Caroline Levitt and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Afterwards, administration officials briefed the Washington Post that they were compiling a list of organizations it would target and had not yet decided what specific action it wanted to take. Investigators have not yet identified a motive as to why the suspect allegedly shot Kirk. He's expected to be formally charged today. President Trump says the US Military carried out another strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean. The strike killed three individuals described by Trump as narco terrorists from Venezuela. Earlier this month, US forces blew up a boat with 11 people on board it also claimed was trafficking drugs. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro responded on Monday, calling Secretary of State Marco Rubio the, quote, lord of death and war. Maduro was responding to Rubio's rhetoric on cartels in Latin America. The Washington Post notes the administration hasn't disclosed many details about what led to the previous strike or its legal authority to carry it out. Both attacks happened in international waters and represent a significant escalation in US Strategy against cartels. The White House contends it is consistent with laws regarding armed conflict and finally to a truly bizarre sounding but effective medical procedure, CNN reports. When a man named Ben Chapman lost one eye and most of his vision in the other after an adverse reaction to a drug, he went through dozens of surgeries to try and maintain some of his vision. But it wasn't until he had what's known as tooth in eye surgery this year, which as it sounds, involves implanting a piece of his own tooth into his eye that he was able to regain some of his sight. Doctors note this is generally a last resort for patients, and it's a very involved and complicated procedure that can solve this particular eye issue by building a structure using tissue that the body recognizes as its own. As for Chapman, after around 20 years, he now has 2030 vision. He told CNN the first thing he saw after the surgery was the skyline outside of his doctor's office. He called it indescribable. 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 narrated article coming up next. Rolling Stone has the story of Elon Musk, neurotechnology company Neuralink, the questions around it and what the broader research says about putting chips into human brains. If you're listening in the podcasts app, follow Apple News plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.