Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA

0:01Who is the United States sending to Guantanamo? We have some idea now that the U.S. has sent migrants to that base and back out. Our correspondent tells us what court filings reveal about some migrants removed from this country. I'm Michelle Martin with Steve Inskeep and this is Up First from NPR News.

0:21Israeli authorities received four bodies yesterday from Hamas. Israel says they do not know the identity of one of the bodies. They also did not receive the body of a mother who was supposed to be delivered with her children. How might Israel respond? Here in the United States, the Trump administration laid off some FEMA workers and people involved in the emergency management agency tell NPR it's backing off work on building codes to make buildings more resilient. What's changing and why? Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

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2:16naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States recently sent a group of migrants to the base. Now they've been sent away on the way to their eventual destination, their home country of Venezuela. And we've learned some information about them along the way. So let's go to NPR immigration correspondent Sergio Martinez Beltran. Sergio, good morning. Good morning, Steve. What do you know about this flight? Well, the Trump administration announced yesterday that 177 Venezuelans who had been in Guantanamo for a couple of weeks were removed to Honduras. That's all but one of the migrants who'd been detained there.

2:47Honduras was sort of a layover for them. The Venezuelan government met them later and flew them back home, and the migrants landed in Venezuela last night around 10 p.m. local time. Okay, so United States, Guantanamo, Honduras, Venezuela, zigzagging around the Caribbean and surrounding areas. So I want to figure out what we've learned here. What do you know about who these people are or were? So the administration had said, Steve, everyone sent to Guantanamo were hardened criminals and that many were members of Trenda Agua, the Venezuelan gang. But now we know that's not true. In court documents released because of a lawsuit by the ACLU, the Trump administration admitted that nearly 30 % of the detainees were considered, quote, low-threat illegal aliens.

3:30Many of the mothers of the detainees had been pushing back against that narrative. One of them is Johanna Roldan. Her son, Joyner Purroy Roldan, had been accused of being a member of Telendaragua.

3:45I know my son has not committed a crime, she says, and he doesn't deserve to go through all of this just for trying to have a better future. And I should say, Steve, NPR didn't find any criminal record for Puroirolan, and it appears at least a third of the people with him in Guantanamo had not committed crimes. Okay, so I guess some of them were accused of crimes. Some of them were not accused of crimes, other than entering the United States illegally, and they went to Guantanamo. Here's my next question. If they sent people to Guantanamo briefly, only to send them onward to other places, it's a way station.

4:17It's a transfer point. What's the point? That's a good question. The administration knows that sending migrants to Guantanamo is very costly and very complicated logistically, but it's clear many of these migrants were used as part of a public relations operation by the White House. Most, if not all, of the people they sent to Guantanamo had already been in detention during the Biden administration, so these were not new RSTs. And when they were put on a plane, there were cameras, and those visuals were published across the world. It also tells us that Guantanamo will likely be a temporary detention facility that will be used to house migrants from countries where deportations might be more challenging.

4:53Okay, so they're sending a signal either to the U.S. public or to future migrants about what they want to do to people who come to the United States. Another question now, Sergio, what was the lawsuit that you mentioned earlier? Yeah, that lawsuit was filed by the ACLU because for a few weeks, no one knew where these migrants were. The family members had stopped hearing from their loved ones, and they assumed they had been transferred to Guantanamo, but the government never told them. And so the ACLU was alleging that the migrants did not have access to telephones to call attorneys or family members.

5:22But despite this new development of removing people from Guantanamo, the ACLU says the lawsuit continues. Last night I talked with the lead ACLU attorney in this case. He told me the removal of all detainees won't stop the lawsuit unless the Trump administration tells the court they will not transfer anyone else to Guantanamo. And Pierre Sergio Martinez Beltran, thanks for your reporting. Really appreciate it. You're welcome.

5:52In Israel, authorities say a body returned by Hamas, a hostage, is not who the militants claimed it to be. Among the four bodies handed over yesterday were supposed to be those of two young boys and their mother. But after forensic testing, Israeli officials said the mother's remains were not among the bodies of the returned hostages. NPR's Adil Al-Shelchi has been following events. Adil, good morning. Good morning. I just have to ask, what happened? Yeah. Well, we know that Hamas was supposed to return the bodies of Shiri Bibas. She was 32 when she was kidnapped. Her two young sons, Ariel, who was four at the time, and Kfir, who was just nine months old.

6:30Hamas also said they returned Oded Lifshitz, who was 83. And then later in the day, Israeli officials said that forensic testing positively identified the bodies of Lifshitz and the two young boys. But the body that was supposed to be the kid's mother was what they said, quote, an anonymous, unidentified body. The Israeli military said that that body didn't even belong to any known hostage. And then in a statement today, Hamas acknowledged there could have been an error and the remains thought to be Shira Bibas' could have been mixed with the remains of a Palestinian who was staying in the location where the hostages were being kept.

7:05Hamas is asking Israel to return the remains of that Palestinian. Now, you have to understand the Bibas family really became the symbol of Israeli pain after the attacks of October 7th, you know, the plight of the hostages. The boys were just so young. So the news did come as a shock to the country. And then another thing, Hamas has also been saying since the beginning of the war that the Bibas family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023. But then Israeli officials said that the forensic testing showed that the family was actually killed by Hamas, but didn't say exactly how. Each of these hostage returns, whether the people are living or dead, has been horrifying in one way or another and dismaying to people in Israel.

7:46So what does all this mean for the next steps, another hostage exchange in the next phase of the peace talks? Yeah, so that next hostage exchange is supposed to happen tomorrow. And I have to say, you know, like the whole ceasefire has been so precarious. Just last week, there was a chance the deal was going to just fall all apart when Hamas alleged Israel committed violations. Israel denied them. But it also looks like both sides want to get this done, especially now with pressure from the United States. So NPR talked to an Israeli official who's familiar with the matter, but they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

8:20And we were told that Israel is actually inclined to move ahead with Saturday's prisoner exchange. They said Israel just doesn't want to jeopardize the release of the Israeli hostages this weekend. But then the official also said Israel is going to take advantage that Shiri Bebas's body wasn't returned as a point of negotiation to ask for more hostage releases going forward. Hadil, what is this news of explosions in Tel Aviv in Israel that has come out in the same 24-hour period as the hostage exchange of the bodies returned? That's right. So three buses exploded in a suburb called Batyam. It's just south of Tel Aviv.

8:55Luckily, no injuries were reported. The police said the buses were empty. They had just finished their routes. They were parked in lots around the city. Israeli police said it found explosives on two other buses, which didn't detonate. The bombs were the same type as those that had exploded, and bomb squads were able to defuse them. No group claimed responsibility, but right away, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office ordered the military to step up its incursions in the occupied West Bank. The military has escalated as airstrikes and raids there since the beginning of the ceasefire, especially around the city of Jenin.

9:31Thousands of Palestinians have been displaced from their homes because of these attacks, and Israel says the operations are trying to root out militants. NPR-CD Lal Shalchi, thanks for your reporting. Really appreciate it as always. You're welcome, Steve.

9:50In this country, President Trump's administration has brought its firings to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the people who help local authorities in disasters. In addition to the firings, people involved tell NPR that FEMA is cutting back on its work to make homes and buildings safer before a disaster. This is also one of the agencies the president has talked of eliminating. Lauren Sommer with NPR's Climate Desk is covering this story. Lauren, good morning. Good morning. How many people were fired? So it's more than 200 employees. That's what the Department of Homeland Security told me, and they oversee FEMA.

10:22These were workers on probationary status, which basically means they were within one year of taking the job. But, you know, I spoke to people that had been at the agency more than a decade, and they were only on probationary status because they accepted a promotion for a new job. You know, one told me the firings were like doing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. Okay, so 200 firings, but it is an agency with thousands. So how would this affect their response in a disaster? Right, yeah. So when disasters happen, it's really all hands on deck at FEMA. They put hundreds of people on the ground to connect disaster victims and, you know, enroll them for financial assistance.

10:59You know, that's for things like renting a place to live or rebuilding long term. Those FEMA staff come from every part of FEMA. And I talked to Michael Cohn, who was FEMA's chief of staff under the Biden administration, and he says the agency was already understaffed. We've been behind at FEMA as far as our recruiting goals. And now to let go a whole year's worth of people who have been hired is only going to put the agency in jeopardy. Last year, during Hurricane Helene, FEMA had to use employees from other federal agencies to fill the gap because the need was so great from disaster survivors.

11:37Although, didn't the president suggest that FEMA wasn't necessary when he was talking during the Los Angeles fires? Yeah, he said disaster recovery is better left of the states, and he's actually creating a council that will review and potentially overhaul FEMA. You know, local and state governments actually already run disaster recovery, and they request that FEMA come in. But aspects of FEMA's work are already changing because, you know, one thing the agency does is help develop building codes. These are the construction standards that help homes survive floods and hurricane winds. FEMA experts had already written recommendations about how to strengthen those codes.

12:17They were submitted to the International Code Council, which is an association that updates the codes every three years, and then local and state governments adopt them. But FEMA has asked for its name to be taken off those recommendations. According to people who are involved with that work and spoke with me, they want to remain anonymous over concerns about retribution from the Trump administration. And FEMA did not respond to our questions about why they made this request. This is really interesting reporting you have here, and I want to talk about this. there is a wider debate over building requirements.

12:50There are even liberals and progressives as well as conservatives who think we've made it too hard to build stuff and that it's bad for society. But I assume you're talking here about relatively narrow recommendations about how to make your house or your building survive a disaster. Yeah, yeah. These are recommendations that come out of actual disasters, you know, seeing what hasn't worked. It's things like maybe raising up a house a little bit so floodwaters don't come in. And research really shows they add about one to two percent of the construction costs, but they've saved billions of dollars in damage that would have happened otherwise.

13:23NPR's Lauren Sommer from our Climate Desk. Thanks so much. Thank you.

13:30And that's up first for this Friday, February 21st. I'm Steve Inskeep. And I'm Michelle Martin. Join up first on Saturday. And then on Sunday in this same feed, our Sunday story goes deep. A journalist tries to understand his own father's belief in conspiracies. When all these things happen, then you will realize that I'm not as big a crackpot as you think I am. And that these are not conspiracy theories. These are reality. Listen to the Sunday story on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Eric Westervelt, Deedee Skanky, Neela Banerjee, Rina Advani, and Jenea Williams.

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