Trump Considers Insurrection Act, and Flights Slow During Government Shutdown

0:13From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Well, I'd do it if it was necessary. So far, it hasn't been necessary. In the Oval Office yesterday, President Trump said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act to send active duty troops to U.S. cities. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I'd do that. He said it could be a way of getting around recent court rulings that have blocked his efforts to deploy the National Guard. I don't care if it's the National Guard, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force. I don't care who comes in as long as we're safe.

0:51And that's the way most of the public feels. The White House has battled with the courts and local leaders in recent weeks as it continues its crackdown on heavily Democratic cities. Enfloating the Insurrection Act was a notable escalation. It would give the president emergency powers and the authority to use the military to curb widespread unrest and directly support law enforcement. The law was last invoked more than 30 years ago to help quell the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. But according to local officials, the cities that Trump has been targeting now, including Portland and Chicago, are not seeing widespread lawlessness.

1:28Still, even as Trump considers a broader deployment of troops, 200 members of the Texas National Guard are set to arrive in the streets of Chicago as soon as tomorrow. The troops are expected to protect federal immigration facilities amid an aggressive wave of arrests that's put the city on edge. It was about a month ago that the Trump administration announced that it was doing an operation. It was calling Operation Midway Blitz, which would be an escalated immigration enforcement. And some of the things that ICE and the Border Patrol began doing really started causing a lot of alarm and fear.

2:10Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times. They were making some very public arrests on streets. They shot and killed one man during an arrest. Federal agents stormed an apartment building on the south side and arrested people that they said were members of a Venezuelan gang. But according to neighbors, they were also zip-tying residents of the building for hours and separating people and not telling them what was going on. And then throughout all of these actions, federal agents have deployed tear gas and pepper balls on members of the public and journalists.

2:56They've also pushed journalists and pushed members of the public down to the ground when they were protesting. Julie says that as the immigration crackdown has continued, with at least 800 arrests in the past few weeks, local communities have responded in their own ways. Parents stand guard outside elementary schools watching for ICE agents. Neighbors warn each other about raids in text threads and on social media. One immigrant advocate said it's been a month of rising tensions and outright fear in Chicago as the operation has ensnared both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants. He told the Times, quote, Every single person who looks brown is scared.

3:41Now, three other quick updates on the Trump administration. The Times has learned that President Trump has called off efforts that were underway to reach a diplomatic agreement with Venezuela, ratcheting up the possibility of a military escalation. For months, U.S. officials have been turning up the pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, claiming he's personally directing drug cartels, an accusation he denies. Now, Trump has said that all talks with the Venezuelan government are over, and American officials have told The Times that the White House has drawn up multiple military plans, including some that could be designed to force Maduro out of office.

4:20In recent months, thousands of U.S. troops aboard multiple warships have been moved into the Caribbean, and the military has already launched at least four deadly attacks on boats, it said were smuggling drugs from Venezuela. Also, new data shows a steep drop-off in the number of international students arriving in the U.S. as the administration has put in place travel bans, delayed visa processing, and threatened to deport students for pro-Palestinian speech. As of August, there was a nearly 20 % dip in how many students arrived from abroad, the largest decline on record outside of the pandemic.

4:57Though there were some regional differences. For example, while the number of students from Europe stayed largely the same, students from India, who make up about a third of international students in the U.S., dropped by more than 40%. The plunging numbers could have a wide impact. Many big public universities rely financially on international students who pay out-of-state tuition, and a lot of small colleges have particularly high rates of foreign students. And the administration is doubling down on its plans to issue a$1 coin featuring an image of President Trump. Last week, the head of the Treasury Department posted drafts of the coin that would have Trump's profile on one side and an image of him pumping his fist under the words, fight, fight, fight, on the other.

5:45That plan appeared to clash with a law from 1866 that says only deceased people can be featured on U.S. currency to avoid the appearance that the U.S. is a monarchy. But the Treasury Secretary said yesterday that the coin would be authorized under a more recent law, allowing special coins to mark the 250th anniversary of the country's founding. If the plan moves forward, the question of whether or not the coin can be minted will likely end up in the courts.

6:20There are issues that arise throughout America that impact our everyday lives, that can impact our safety when you shut the government down. With the government shutdown now entering its seventh day, the transportation secretary is warning that air travel across the country is starting to be disrupted. I want to be clear. Do I think they're more stressed right now in our towers? Yes. Is our airspace unsafe? No. But again, it's creating a ripple effect for our controllers. On Monday, flights into New York, Denver, and the Los Angeles area were delayed because of shortages of air traffic controllers.

6:55At one point last night, the Hollywood Burbank Airport was seeing average delays of two and a half hours because it had no staff working in its control tower, and incoming flights had to be handled by other controllers at a busy regional facility. Air traffic controllers are required to work through the shutdown and will only get paid retroactively. As of yesterday, Transportation Department officials say that they've started to see a slight uptick in the number of controllers calling in sick. Back in 2019, during the last shutdown, air traffic controllers at some crucial facilities also started calling out, causing widespread delays, which then turned up the pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal and reopen the government.

7:39Meanwhile, in a vote on Capitol Hill yesterday, the Senate failed for the fifth time to end the shutdown. And in a sign of how dug in both Republicans and Democrats are, no senators changed their positions from previous votes.

7:59Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the criminal conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, marking an end to the efforts to overturn her conviction. Maxwell, a longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for playing a central role in his widespread sexual abuse. As she tried to appeal the case, Maxwell argued that she should never have been charged at all. She pointed to a deal that prosecutors in Florida reached with Epstein back in 2008 that included an agreement to bring no more charges against him or any co-conspirators. But government lawyers argued that the charges Maxwell later faced in New York did not violate that agreement.

8:40Now, her only chance of early release is likely clemency from President Trump, who socialized with her and Epstein for years.

8:57And finally, every month across the country, billions of robocalls ring on Americans' phones. And if it's felt like you've been getting more and more and more spammy calls, you are probably right. The rise of AI has made it easier than ever for scammers to impersonate credit card companies, delivery services, or other people claiming to have an urgent message. For so long, it's been a cat and a mouse game. You know, the tech industry would come up with solutions. The scammers would come up with different ways to continue calling us. But I think for right now, the tech industry is finally caught up.

9:32My colleague Brian Chen has been reporting on a new generation of technology that's been rolled out on smartphones from Apple and Google that he says is actually starting to work at screening out the fake calls. Now there's this tool in Apple's new operating system for the iPhone, a tool called call screening, which basically uses a virtual assistant Siri to screen the calls for you. Hi, if you record your name and reason for calling, I'll see if this person is available. And instead of ringing your phone and bothering you, you would see a little notification at the top of the screen and it would say like, OK, this is what this person said.

10:11Hi, this is Betty. I'm from Amazon customer service and we have seen a recent. This person says they're Betty from Amazon. And from there you can decide, like, do I want to pick up this call or do I want to ask more questions? Thanks, Betty. Please stay on the line. You can type something like, is this a scammer? They said, are you a scammer? And oftentimes those people are just not going to respond after you say something like that. So I was using this call screening tool for a couple of months and I was pleasantly surprised. It allowed people who were trying to call me, like a preschool I was touring or a doctor who was trying to reach me, allowed them to get through because I just hit yes when they identified themselves.

10:58But for the robocallers, most of them just gave up. It's not perfect because some people do get annoyed when they have to talk to a robot and they're being screened. But I would say overall, this tool was 99 % effective for me. Even if imperfect, I think it's going to go a long way for a lot of people. You can read Brian's full review of the new tools and get specific instructions for how to turn on call screening for iPhones and some Androids at nytimes.com. Those are the headlines. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.