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- [00:05]
Shemitah Basu
Good morning. It's Friday, July 25th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, what it's like to witness an execution in modern day America. As summer heats up, so has Europe's political and cultural debate over air conditioning and how sharks could help us detect hurricanes. But first, to immigration and tracking President Trump's push to deport 1 million people in his first year. We're about at the halfway point, and thanks to some recent Guardian reporting and academic work, for the first time, we have a by the numbers picture of where things stand. ICE does not publish detailed data on arrests, detentions or deportations. But through the Freedom of Information Act, a group of lawyers and academics have been tracking the agency agency's actions in what they call the Deportation Data Project. Here's Will Kraft, data editor for the Guardian, who's been studying the findings.
- [01:09]
Will Kraft
To get really granular, to really understand what is happening on the street in people's communities, you need data that the government doesn't want to release.
- [01:19]
Shemitah Basu
According to the tracking project, immigration related arrests initially surged after Trump's inauguration. And there was another big spike after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered ICE officials in late May to make 3,000 arrests every day. ICE is still far short of that goal. Arrests peaked at 1,000 a day in early June. But compared to last year, arrests are way up overall and across the country. Kraft also told us what the data showed about the people being arrested.
- [01:53]
Will Kraft
I think the biggest finding from the data is that over the last six months, the administration has consistently said that they are prioritizing the worst of the worst. But when you actually look in the data, you can see that, that people without criminal records are being arrested in greater numbers. And for essentially the first time in years, it was the largest group of people that they arrested.
- [02:18]
Shemitah Basu
And he said the rise has happened all over the country.
- [02:20]
Will Kraft
Without exception, there is no state where the number of arrests have decreased. And in many states, they've doubled and sometimes even tripled. A lot of that's happening in California, Texas, Florida. But even in smaller states like South Dakota, you're seeing a big increase in the number of arrests.
- [02:41]
Shemitah Basu
But that surge in arrests and detentions has not led to a big leap in deportations figures that you might think would correlate. In total, the Guardian reports more than 127,000 people have been deported during Trump's second term. That puts the average deportation rate close to what we saw just before the pandemic started. There's two factors at play here. For one, the Trump administration has closed the southern border to thousands of people waiting to cross legally and apply for asylum. That was where most of the Biden era expulsions took place. This administration is focusing on detaining people within the United States. Many have been living here for years and have legitimate claims to fight deportation.
- [03:22]
Will Kraft
And so you come to the very end step before the government tries to put them on a plane and send them out of the country. They have a much stronger claim and a lot of people follow through and they have legal rights that they are exercising to try to stop deportations.
- [03:39]
Shemitah Basu
The disconnect between arrests and deportations has stretched the detention system beyond its capacity. As of late June, around 55,000 people were being held in ICE facilities, but the Guardian points out Congress had at that point only allocated funding for about 41,500 beds. The tax and spending bill passed earlier this month allocates $45 billion for ICE to expand its detention capac capacity. The Guardian describes it as being able to roughly double the agency's capacity to detain people over the next several years. But the current shortage has contributed to stark reports of deteriorating conditions. Human Rights Watch, for example, documented centers in Florida where facilities, quote, flagrantly violate international human rights standards. It reported detained people in Florida shackled in buses for hours without access to food or water, and dozens crammed into tight cells with unsanitary cond. Lawmakers in California reported witnessing filthy, inhumane conditions. And people in a facility in Alaska had been pepper sprayed during a conflict over access to belongings. Just this week, a video recorded by a migrant in a Manhattan cell showed more than a dozen men sprawled across the floor.
- [04:55]
Will Kraft
It certainly looks, according to the data, like they are adding more people faster than they can add more beds. But both represent a historic expansion of immigration enforcement in this.
- [05:08]
Shemitah Basu
Foreign let's turn to another trend from the first six months of Trump being back in office rising execution rates. In January, Trump signed an executive order encouraging federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty as much as possible. So far this year, 26 people sentenced to death row have been executed and 11 more are scheduled. It's the highest rate of executions in 10 years and a significant reversal from the direction the United States has been trending in over the last couple of decades.
- [05:46]
Elizabeth Bruinig
What's going on right now is a spike in the other direction.
- [05:51]
Shemitah Basu
That's Elizabeth Bruinig, a staff writer for the Atlantic and my guest this week on Apple News. In conversation, she says this trend has A lot to do with Trump's personal politics and his decision back in his first term to resume federal executions after a 17 year pause.
- [06:07]
Elizabeth Bruinig
So under Trump, states seem to have been provoked to ramp up their executions as well. That's just something that this administration views as a priority. So Texas, Oklahoma, you know, the usual suspects have been executing people at a much higher rate lately than they have in the past decades.
- [06:29]
Shemitah Basu
Brunig has been reporting on capital punishment for years. She's attended several executions firsthand as a media witness. And she told me that getting to know people on death death row has changed the way she thinks about the death penalty, justice and redemption.
- [06:44]
Elizabeth Bruinig
My initial stance had been even if someone is the worst person in the world, it's wrong to execute them. But what I found was these people are not necessarily the worst people in the world. They're people who've done terrible things. But in many, many cases, these are people who have radically changed over the years that they have been incarcerated.
- [07:07]
Shemitah Basu
Brunig has been present at five executions. Two of those were failed attempts, including Kenneth Smith, convicted for his role in a murder for hire killing, who the state of Alabama initially failed to execute by lethal injection in 2022. In 2024, he became the first person in the United States to be executed with nitrogen hypoxia, a gas that's now been used five more times. The idea for this particular method, I was surprised to learn, came from a screenwriter named Stuart Cre that people sometimes suffocated from nitrogen in industrial accidents, seemingly painlessly. So he thought it could be a more humane execution method. But it is highly controversial. Smith suffocated for over 20 minutes. Brunig says it seemed far from painless. And UN experts have called to ban nitrogen hypoxia, saying that it amounts to torture.
- [08:02]
Elizabeth Bruinig
We've been through lots of different methods. Hanging was the longest standing method, firing squad in the military. There was the electric chair, there was the gas chamber, and now there's lethal injection and nitrogen hypoxia. And the reason that we have moved from method to method to method is this. This drive to find a humane method that no one will complain about. And it just turns out there's no good way to kill somebody.
- [08:29]
Shemitah Basu
To hear the rest of our conversation about the ethics of America's capital punishment system, stick around after today's show. If you're listening in the Apple News app, it'll play for you next. Mild summers were once a feature of life in many parts of Europe, but that's changing quickly. According to the world Meteorological organization. For over 40 years now, Europe has been getting hotter faster than any other continent. Double the global average. Temperatures last month across Western Europe broke records. And Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Dalton told us the rising heat is forcing Europeans to question if they're equipped to handle it.
- [09:16]
Matthew Dalton
Europe has much less air conditioning than the U.S. some countries have as few as 5% of households that have air conditioning.
- [09:25]
Shemitah Basu
Experts say adopting AC across Europe is necessary to prevent thousands of people from dying in heat waves. And conservative political parties across the continent, from France to the UK to Spain, have pointed to this summer's extreme heat to make the case for widespread AC installation and deregulation. In London, for example, Conservatives are urging the labor mayor, Sadiq Khan, to eliminate rules that restrict how air conditioning can be used in new housing. The current regulations require developers to prioritize all other cooling design features before adding AC to new buildings.
- [10:01]
Matthew Dalton
Things like design features that allow or encourage ventilation in the building, shutters that block out sunlight, maybe painting the building a particular color to keep it cool. And then after all that, then they can think about air conditioning.
- [10:14]
Shemitah Basu
The mayor's office says that policy encourages developers to embrace passive ways of cooling a building and helps lower energy costs for households. And energy costs are one of several reasons why, despite rising temperatures, a lot of Europeans don't want to make the switch to acquisition.
- [10:31]
Matthew Dalton
Energy of all kinds is more expensive in Europe. It's more heavily taxed. Electricity is more expensive. So Europeans are much more conscious about using energy. I think they do tend to be more concerned about in particular, climate change, greenhouse gases. So they're more wary of using electricity for something that for a lot of people can seem like an issue of comfort, not of necessity.
- [10:54]
Shemitah Basu
Widespread installation of AC would require huge government investments and a balancing act against the net zero targets for greenhouse gas emissions may many European governments have set. There are questions of whether the energy grid can handle higher demand. And in France, some authorities have argued AC could actually make heat worse.
- [11:14]
Matthew Dalton
One argument that they've made is that when you have a lot of air conditioning, it exhausts heat from the buildings into the street and that actually heats up cities, makes the problem worse. So they suggested, well, we want to pursue systems that do more with geothermal cooling and heating. And what geothermal is, is it takes the heat from an interior and kind transfers it underground. And that process can be reversed in the winter for heating.
- [11:40]
Shemitah Basu
That process is much more efficient than air conditioning and it avoids sending heat into the air. But it too comes with a high upfront investment. And Dalton points out it may not be possible to incorporate in the very old buildings that dot Europe, but time will tell.
- [11:55]
Matthew Dalton
We'll see how determined they are to try and institute such systems.
- [11:59]
Shemitah Basu
Dalton says many Europeans have decided they don't want to endure another heat wave without acquisitions. But air conditioning is a culturally fraught topic still seen by some as a luxury or an extravagance. And it's clear the continent is still quite far from reaching any type of consensus. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. Mass starvation is looming in Gaza under Israel's restrictions on aid. The Gaza Ministry of Health has reported more than 40 hunger related deaths this month, including 16 children. The world Food Program says a third of the population has not been able to eat for multiple days in a row. And humanitarian organizations have warned that doctors, aid workers and journalists are going dangerously hungry, too. Amid this catastrophe, French President Emmanuel Macron said France will recognize Palestine as a state, and he called for an end to the war and the humanitarian crisis. Over 140 countries recognize Palestine, but France is the only member of the G7 to do so. It's home to Europe's largest Jewish population and the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. The decision will be formalized in September when the UN General assembly meets. The Trump administration has decided to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives that were supposed to help people from poorer nations prevent unwanted pregnancies. This is a result of the White House's decision to freeze foreign aid earlier this year, and the State Department estimates it will cost over $160,000 to destroy. Lawmakers introduced legislation in Congress earlier this month to prevent the destruction of these supplies. But aid groups told Reuters that they might not be passed. And Reuters reports that the administration rejected offers from the United nations and family planning organizations to purchase the items and distribute them. And finally, to a plan that sounds like it was conceived by a James Bond villain, putting sensors on sharks to track and predict hurricanes in the Atlantic. Now don't worry, sharks are not coming for the jobs of human meteorologists. But researchers told the Washington Post, sharks are better equipped than humans to collect certain types of data more efficiently, like temperature read readings at various depths of the ocean, which can help researchers understand how a hurricane might intensify. There are two sharks now piloting these sensors, and they join a long lineage of animal ocean monitors. Seals have been used in the Antarctic, while narwhals help to patrol the Arctic. 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. Stick around for the rest of my conversation with Atlantic staff writer Elizabeth Bruinig about capital punishment in America. Enjoy your weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.