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Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education
00:27:50
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has put the American university system on notice. It has pressed for changes, opened investigations — and in some cases withheld critical funds. Alan Blinder, who covers education in America, explains how schools are responding to the pressure and what it might mean for the future of higher education.
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Rachel Abrams
The new York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is THE Daily in recent weeks, the Trump administration has put the American university system on notice. It's pressed for changes, launched investigations, and in some cases it's even withheld critical funds. Today, my colleague Ellen Blinder on how schools are responding to all of this pressure and what it might mean for the future of higher education. It's Monday, March 24th. Ellen, thank you so much for being with us. I am not surprised, given the news cycle recently and how much we've been hearing about universities that you're working on Sunday.
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Ellen Blinder
My pleasure.
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Rachel Abrams
It really feels like we cannot go more than a few days without hearing about this escalating conflict between the Trump administration and the country's colleges and universities. And you, Alan, have been covering higher education for a really long time. So we thought you'd be the right person to sit down with so that you could kind of break all of this down for us. But I think the first thing I want to do is just get a sense from you of whether you've ever seen anything like this showdown that we are currently seeing between the higher education in this country and the White House.
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Ellen Blinder
I haven't seen anything like it. But more to the point, a lot of the sources I talk to a lot of presidents and chancellors and provosts, people who have been in and around higher education for decades haven't seen anything like it either. They're almost shell shocked about what's happening. It's been this wave of campaigns against higher education. It's been this wave of complicating factors that may or may not have to do with universities themselves. And in the end, you've got this real mess for higher education at this point that has left a lot of the country's most elite universities, but also schools that are less prominent on defense.
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Rachel Abrams
And within all of that, it feels like your reporting has really focused on Columbia University for good reason. Columbia has been a poster child for a lot of this conflict and a little bit of a case study, right?
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Ellen Blinder
Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, look, it's been a very long year and a half or so for a lot of higher education, but you will not find many universities in this country that have had a longer year and a half than Columbia. It has absolutely morphed into being a poster child for crackdowns and protests and really bitter disputes about what a university can and should be. And that's really been coming home to roost these last couple weeks.
- [03:30]
Rachel Abrams
Let's dive into Colombia a little bit more. Can you just walk us through what's been happening there?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, Colombia has really been one of the biggest hubs of campus protest since the war in Gaza erupted and since the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 23. Colombia had one of the most prolific encampments last spring. Its university president at the time went to Capitol Hill, had a pretty roundly criticized appearance there. And what was interesting about Columbia is that a lot of people thought the university was getting it wrong. It wasn't just one side of the that thought the university was blowing it. And so as time has gone on, Columbia has really been, you know, a synonym for college chaos, essentially over the last year and a half.
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Rachel Abrams
Right. And that chaos has caused a lot of people on all sides to say that the university, as you put it, is blowing it. Can you just describe a little bit? What do they mean by blowing it exactly?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, the left felt that Colombia was essentially becoming a police state and that it was being far too aggressive in tamping down on protests, on looking to restrict academic freedom. They essentially saw a university that was crumpling under pressure from the right wing. The right had plenty of complaints of its own. The right was mostly concerned that Columbia had descended into becoming this hot house of antisemitism, that it had allowed campus protests to just run amok and make one of the country's most prominent universities. This kind of lawless environment. And that has been a drum that Republicans have been beating at this point for many, many months. And this one, President Trump and his allies were happy to jump on during the campaign. And then as soon as they returned to power in January.
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Rachel Abrams
And when they returned to power, what were they saying about universities?
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Ellen Blinder
It's very clear from the get go that rooting out anti Semitism on campuses is now going to go from being a campaign talking point to a real focus of the federal government. So we start see seeing executive orders and decisions that really start to shape how this is all going to play out. One of the most important things we saw was this idea that The Department of Justice would start investigating and visiting 10 universities that they saw as really having a lot of problems with anti Semitism. In their view, Columbia was on the list.
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Rachel Abrams
And what are these investigations? Tell us about those.
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Ellen Blinder
Well, they got a whole range of investigations. There's this Department of Justice investigation that looks at whether Columbia and other schools were essentially allowing antisemitism to take hold, and it was unlawful discrimination. You've got an investigation from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights that's looking at the same types of things. You've got, you know, investigators from, like, the Department of Health and Human Services talking about universities.
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Rachel Abrams
That's coming from everywhere.
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Ellen Blinder
Yeah, I mean, they are covering the waterfront on just about everything you can imagine. And Colombia was an easy target. So these investigations tend to take a very long time. But it becomes very clear very quickly that the federal government's going to be moving at really warp speed when it comes to these universities. And on March 7, the government tells Columbia that it's going to withhold about $400 million in grants and contracts to the university.
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Rachel Abrams
$400 million sounds like a ton of money, but how much does that actually matter for Columbia, which is obviously an enormous institution?
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Ellen Blinder
So a $400 million cut would be a lot at any college or university in this country. But Columbia, to put it in perspective, has like, $6.6 billion in annual revenues, and government grants and contracts make up about 20% of its revenue. So when the word came down from Washington about this $400 million cut, Columbia's interim president, she's a doctor named Katrina Armstrong, she said a cut of the size would be felt pretty much all over the campus. It wouldn't just be in one lab or one academic department or the hospital. It was the kind of cut that was just going to shake the campus, really, to its core.
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Rachel Abrams
So what's Colombia supposed to do about this, then? What can it even do?
- [07:52]
Ellen Blinder
Well, that's an interesting question, but they got something of an answer a few days later when the federal government sent another letter to Columbia. And this letter essentially was a ransom note, as some people have put it. It was a letter that spelled out a list of demands for Columbia to meet if it wanted to start a conversation with the federal government about restoring that $400 million in funding.
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Rachel Abrams
And what were those demands?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, the demands kind of ran the gamut. They were everything from having the university adopt a formal definition of anti Semitism. There was a push to ban mask on campus because a lot of protesters on campuses have been Covering their faces. There was a call to really review the admissions process, to overhaul the disciplinary system, to empower campus security officers with arrest powers. And then there was this idea that they should put Colombia's Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under what the government described as academic receivership.
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Rachel Abrams
Okay, so some of the things that you outline sound very extreme, and some maybe less so, based on my limited knowledge of how universities operate. How do we interpret some of these demands?
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Ellen Blinder
Some of them were, as you said, kind of mainstream, if you will. I mean, like, the mask ban proposal was pretty well in line with what the University of California system has done. So that wasn't seen as this totally off the wall demand. The idea that you would have security officers with arrest powers. A lot of campus police departments around the country have arrest powers. It's a somewhat loaded question at a school like Columbia, which has a long history of campus protest and a complicated history with the police. But the one that really got the biggest attention was this idea of academic receivership that really set off alarm bells all over the campus and all over academia.
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Rachel Abrams
Why is that?
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Ellen Blinder
The reason is because historically, universities, especially private ones, have near absolute control over what they're teaching and how they're running their academic departments. So the idea that the federal government would directly or indirectly dictate to a university what its curriculum and teaching should look like, that was a red flag. And one thing to remember, though, is that this letter to Colombia did not arrive in a vacuum. This has been months and months of scrutiny on Colombia that's been building. And then these last few weeks, you've even had Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on campus. You've had a green card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, detained because of his protest activities. There's been this threat and this implied threat of deporting students and pulling visas, and it's really created this challenging environment where Colombia has felt besieged really in every way you could imagine.
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Rachel Abrams
Okay. So obviously, Colombia is under a ton of pressure, and I would imagine that there was also a lot of pressure from people who did not want the school to cave to the administration's demands.
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Ellen Blinder
Oh, there was so much pressure. Even among people who were frustrated by Colombia. Over the last year, year and a half, there was fear that Colombia was going to cave to these demands. The idea that Trump administration could effectively bully a university into doing something was really alarming to people. And there was this really swelling fear and frustration as Colombia deliberated over what to do. And on Friday afternoon, we got our answer. When Columbia's interim president released A letter, and it basically said the university was bowing to the government's demands.
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Rachel Abrams
Wow. So what do you make of the fact that they just kind of caved everything?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, Columbia never, in its announcement, really talked about the 400 million in funding. They never made this explicit connection. But I think the administration at Columbia felt like it had very little choice in the matter. You know, they could have litigated this. There were people who were saying, you should go to court, challenge the administration, make them prove their case, and Colombia made the calculation that it would agree. Now, some of these things were ideas that Columbia had already been kicking around before the administration sent the letter. But the optics were really bad here. I mean, they were essentially saying, we're going to do it in response to a letter from the federal government.
- [12:24]
Rachel Abrams
Right. It seems like, number one, the administration had Colombia over a barrel from the way that you're describing it. And number two, that they just decided, like, it is not worth fighting the government.
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Ellen Blinder
There was a calculation that was made that they either could not win this fight, would not win this fight, or it would get worse if they did try to fight it. And they came down on the side of seeking to settle. But here's the kicker of all this. This is the rubber. By agreeing to all these concessions, Colombia did not automatically reopen the spigot of $400 million. That $400 million does not just automatically return. These concessions that Colombia made were essentially their effort to get the government to come to the negotiating table to talk about restoring that 400 million.
- [13:11]
Rachel Abrams
It wasn't even like, do all of this and you'll get your money back. It was, do all of this, and maybe we'll talk to you about getting your money back.
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Ellen Blinder
That's exactly right. So if Columbia gets the money back, there's likely to be a bigger cost than what's already been announced. Right.
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Rachel Abrams
And that bigger cost, I mean, we've been focusing a lot on Columbia, but there are other schools that the administration has said that it's targeting. Right. Like, it feels like we should be prepared to see these hardball tactics elsewhere soon.
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Ellen Blinder
You should absolutely be prepared to see those hardball tactics. I mean, you've got dozens of universities in the first two months of the Trump administration that have been told they are facing an investigation by at least one agency of the federal government. And they're not even all, like, Harvard and Columbia. Ohio State University is on the list. The University of Hawaii is on the list. It's fair to say that the administration seems to be embarking on a coast to coast campaign against higher education.
- [14:20]
Rachel Abrams
We'll be right back.
- [14:26]
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- [15:23]
Rachel Abrams
Before the break, you told us about some of the fear that these threats and these demands are instilling at not just Columbia, but more broadly, at universities around the country. So can you just tell us a little bit more about what you're hearing about that?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, remember, it's not just a matter of will the administration come after my particular university that's driving college presidents nuts. Right now, the administration is looking at all kinds of budget cuts that could broadly affect higher education. So one of the things we've been seeing the last few weeks is more hiring freezes. We've seen layoffs. We've seen schools shutting down laboratories because they're starting to lose grant funding or they're fearing what's coming next. Columbia is among the most powerful universities in the United States, one of the oldest, one of the richest. And one of the biggest fears has been that if Columbia University cannot stand up to the federal government for whatever reason, what are other universities supposed to do?
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Rachel Abrams
But just to play devil's advocate for a second here, I think a lot of people listening to this are going to think to themselves, well, why should universities get so much money from the federal government, especially the universities that are pretty rich to begin with. So can you just explain to us, like, why are these two institutions, the federal government and higher education, why are they so intertwined to begin with?
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Ellen Blinder
So this country has had higher education since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but it wasn't until the late 19th century when Johns Hopkins University was founded as the nation's first research university when you started to see a much more explicit focus on research. That took a little while to take root. But around World War II is when the universities and the federal government really got to work with each other. The country had a lot of wartime needs. They needed big ideas, innovation, they needed interpreters and translators for these kind of esoteric languages. And those were the kind of people you could find at universities. And it created this relationship. The idea was that the universities would get this research funding. It would fuel their labs, it would fuel the scientists, and then that research would flow into corporate America, it would flow into other parts of the government, other parts of academia. And the result was the country got new pharmaceutical drugs, new technology. Nobel prize winners come out of university labs, in a lot of cases, doing federally funded research. Now it's tens of billions of dollars a year that flow from the federal government down to the universities.
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Rachel Abrams
And just to be clear, when we're talking about federal money, we're not just talking about Columbia and the Ivy Leagues. Right? Can you just give us a sense? How dependent are universities across the board on federal money?
- [18:20]
Ellen Blinder
Oh, I mean, you have billions and billions of dollars that flow to campuses all over the country. You know, you've got the University of Georgia, which, for example, was getting federal funding for a lab that focused on Peanut Illinois. They get money for insulin research. You've had all this money flowing to public universities, private universities, red states, blue states, you know, large, small. Just about every college or university in this country has some kind of financial tie to the federal government. Some of them have much larger financial ties than others. But when you start talking about cutting research funding, the trickle down effect is enormous. It's not just cutting off Harvard and Yale and the like, is cutting off potentially state universities near you.
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Rachel Abrams
That makes sense. But since you mentioned Harvard and Yale, those schools, along with Columbia and Penn and other places, are schools that have literally billions of dollars in endowments. And so it feels reasonable to say, okay, for those schools that are sitting on top of these giant piles of money, they should be able to use their big endowments to pay for their day to day operations. They should not need to rely on the federal government.
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Ellen Blinder
Absolutely. But one thing to know about endowments is they tend to have a lot of what are called restricted funds, which really limit what the money can be used for. So for example, you, Rachel Abrams, might have donated money to a university for a specific topic, a specific job, a specific research project, whatever it might be. That money cannot just be used for another project because they suddenly need the money. Right.
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Rachel Abrams
You can't just go to the bank and say, I have something I want to research. Give me $100 million, please.
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Ellen Blinder
Yeah. I mean, it's not just like going to the atm. And not only are university officials really handcuffed on what they can do with their endowments, there's actually a push among some Republicans in Washington to tax the biggest endowments at even higher levels. So that happens, there will be even less money for them to be able to spend on things like research and the like. So when you put all this together, the punitive threats to withhold funding, the broader budget cuts that we're seeing in the name of government efficiency, possible changes to the tax structure for endowments, what we're seeing is potentially a really dramatic realignment of the relationship between the federal government and universities in this country.
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Rachel Abrams
And what does that new realignment look like and what is driving it?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, look, there have been frustrations building with higher education for years and actually decades in this country. There's been this idea that they're for the elite. They build the elite. They're too expensive. What is even the point of a college degree? And you've had this emerging tension between what universities think they should be and what other people in this country think they should be.
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Rachel Abrams
You're basically saying that there are two competing visions. And I'm kind of wondering what the divide is here, because you had mentioned at one point that some of this tension is ideological. So is there, for example, a vision that is coming from the left?
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Ellen Blinder
Well, I don't think it's just the left. I think universities, especially the big research schools, have really assertive visions for their role in a modern society. They want to be places where they're really, you know, training the great thinkers of the day, talking about the big debates. They're doing research that changes the world. There is independence. They're extending their missions well beyond their campuses. That's their vision. Now, there's another school of thought, Some of it is politically motivated, that these schools should not be what they are. They should be places where teaching is the focus, where workforce development is the goal, where you should come out of college with a degree that prepares you for the, quote, unquote, real world. This school of thought is very stringent on the idea that they don't want universities and colleges to be, you know, ideology factories. If you think through the list of complaints, it's that there's been affirmative action on campuses over the years, it's that the people up in academia just sneer at the rest of the world. They don't really want as many, I guess, abstract outcomes. They want concrete things, you know, where you can take a degree and go do x, Y or z. Now, this is not a new argument, but the reality is that universities have done a generally terrible job of making the case for themselves.
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Rachel Abrams
And why is that exactly?
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Ellen Blinder
You can probably blame it on a lot of different things. Sometimes when they're talking about their research, they go so deep in the weeds, no one understands what the research is about or what it's going to do. They've done a pretty terrible job of explaining how tuition costs work and how financial aid works. I mean, I don't know if the last time you looked at like a financial aid application or a scholarship listing, it's this muck, it's gobbledygook. Yeah, I mean, look, there's a whole body of research out there that says if you're a college graduate, you are likely to have higher lifetime incomes, less likely to be in poverty. The outcomes tend to be pretty good. But what they haven't done a good job of is explaining that for whatever reason, they cannot muster much of a coherent defense.
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Rachel Abrams
I do wonder if one of the reasons that universities are struggling to make a case for themselves is that they do need to be reformed. Like any major institution with a multi billion dollar budget probably does have some bloat and inefficiencies here and there. But conversation does feel connected to wider conversations we've been having recently on the show about government efficiency, like cutting federal agencies, for example. Like, sure, these places could probably be run better, but is it necessary to just gut them wholesale?
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Ellen Blinder
Yeah, I mean, look, I would be hard pressed to name a college president who does not think there need to be changes somewhere in the system. But I think they are worried about the proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Here they will acknowledge for all the flaws of universities, and they will often admit there are flaws, that the system is too much the envy of the world to just trash.
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Rachel Abrams
You know, it really feels like we are in a moment where the kind of existential fear that you described, it's allowing the Trump administration to wring some pretty stunning concessions from institutions that traditionally have prided themselves on their independence. And I wonder how the people that you are talking to within academia are viewing what's happening to them within this broader context.
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Ellen Blinder
Well, there's a long history in the world of authoritarian regimes trying to pressure universities and transform them. And there are some people in academia who feel these last few months have been at least steps toward that kind of reality. They see these steps as out of a strongman playbook. You know, there was a book a couple years ago by the president of Johns Hopkins called what Universities Owe Democracy. And he talked about in that book how the fate of universities and liberal democracies are entwined with one another. So there are people in academia who are giving voice to these types of things. There was a statement last week from a center at Georgetown University that talked about kind of an encroaching authoritarianism by the administration, throwing out words like McCarthyism. We keep hearing that word thrown around a lot. That kind of speech suppressing speech, chilling atmosphere is what people are starting to compare this moment to. On Saturday, I was talking with Mary Sue Coleman, who is a former president of the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa, and I was asking her, you know, what do you make of this decision by Columbia to concede what the administration wanted? And her answer was pretty revealing. And she said, I was alarmed by it because of what the ultimate consequences might be for higher education. But I don't want to say if I were sitting in their shoes that I would have made a different decision.
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Rachel Abrams
Because these universities might have just calculated that it's just not worth fighting. They don't stand a chance.
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Ellen Blinder
I think some universities may very well decide it's an act of survival. And I think one of the biggest questions that's still out there is what will the surviving university look like? Will it be these places where research has flourished and there's been a lot of debate, or will it be something different? And I think whatever the answer is, it's going to shape this country for a very long time.
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Rachel Abrams
Ellen, thank you so much.
- [27:19]
Ellen Blinder
My pleasure.
- [27:31]
Rachel Abrams
We'll be right back.
- [27:37]
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Rachel Abrams
A blazing, fast, enterprise grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps and all of your AI workloads. Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31. See if you qualify@oracle.com NYT oracle.com NYT here's what else you need to know today On Sunday, Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney called for a national election to take place next month on April 28. His Liberal Party is facing a strong challenge from the country's conservatives. And all of this comes at a turbulent time, as the Trump administration has imposed punishing tariffs and threatened the sovereignty of Canada, its neighbor and longtime allies ally. And after weeks of pressure, Venezuela said it would resume accepting deportation flights from the United States. This comes after the Trump administration invoked an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelans accused of gang affiliations to El Salvador with little or no due process. In a statement this weekend, a Venezuelan official said the country would not rest until we, quote, rest rescue our brothers kidnapped in El Salvador. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Mooch Zaidie and Sydney Harper. It was edited by Patricia Willans with help from Ben Calhoun and MJ Davis Lynn. It contains original music by Marianne Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan niemisto and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
- [30:25]
Ellen Blinder
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