Trump administration moves to fire remaining USAID staff | The Excerpt
On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Over the next three months, the State Department is set to assume USAID’s remaining "life-saving and strategic aid programming," according to an internal memo. At least 1,000 people have been killed after an earthquake in Myanmar. Paste BN Consumer Travel Reporter Kathleen Wong discusses some American travelers' increased fears about border crossings. A federal court in New Jersey could determine whether the United States can deport Mahmoud Khalil. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security question using tattoos to accurately ID Venezuelan criminal gangs. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise asks what the deal is with those purple streetlights.
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Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Saturday, March 29th, 2025. This is The Excerpt.
Today, the latest at USAID, plus a major earthquake slams Asia, and some American travelers are fearing border crossings.
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Personnel at the US Agency for International Development were told yesterday that all positions there not required by law would be eliminated. That's after the State Department notified Congress it would discontinue USAID functions that do not align with Trump administration priorities. USAID staffers were informed of the decision by an internal memo from a member of the Department of Government Efficiency. Over the next three months, the State Department would assume USAID's remaining life-saving and strategic aid programming according to the memo.
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The death toll is rapidly rising after a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Southeast Asia. The death toll in Myanmar rose past a thousand earlier this morning, while at least nine people were killed in neighboring Thailand, where massive buildings were destroyed. In Myanmar, the US Geological Services predictive modeling estimated the death toll could exceed 10,000 and that losses could exceed the country's annual economic output. The US has said it will provide some assistance, though it has sanctioned officials with the Myanmar military previously.
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Some American travelers are fearing US border crossings under recently increased vetting. I spoke with Paste BN Consumer Travel Reporter Kathleen Wong for more.
Hello, Kathleen. Thanks for hopping on the show today.
Kathleen Wong:
Hi, thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
Why don't you just start by telling us about Ginny Williams and her experience here?
Kathleen Wong:
Ginny is from the United States, but is living in the UK for quite a few years, and she is married to someone from the UK, so she has dual citizenship between the US and the UK. She's planning to come to the States to visit her elderly parents in September, but feels a lot of nerves just with everything she's hearing about deportations and detainments, higher scrutiny at the borders, and just everything seems to be changing very quickly, and that's kind of making her very anxious about what could happen between crossing the border to come back home. And we're kind of hearing that across the board. We're hearing more border control checks. We're hearing more random stops, even to US citizens, so not just visa holders and green card holders.
Taylor Wilson:
How does her either anxiety or experience reflect an increased anxiety from a lot of Americans and folks in the country about crossing borders in this moment?
Kathleen Wong:
We're seeing a lot of high-profile cases of detainments and deportation and just higher security across the borders. And a lot those cases have to do with people who exercised their freedom of speech, maybe being outspoken against certain things, and they're getting in trouble for that. And so a lot of people are kind of scared that maybe they could also get in trouble or be seen as doing something wrong. And so no one really knows what is safe right now, and that's just causing a lot of concern for Americans.
Taylor Wilson:
Are legal residents actually facing detention or deportation in some of these border crossing situations?
Kathleen Wong:
What we're seeing are mostly green card holders and visa holders, so student or work visas. They're lawfully allowed to live here, are being targeted by ICE for, like I mentioned, being outspoken, being considered a threat to public safety or terrorist sympathizers. That's kind of under the administration's increased, I guess you could say, targeting for national security.
Taylor Wilson:
In terms of those increases, Kathleen, what specifically has this administration really instructed immigration officials to do in this moment?
Kathleen Wong:
An immigration attorney put it this way, to basically not leave any stone unturned. So they're going to be doing enhanced vetting. They're given a broad level of discretion. So really just able to interrogate you. Border control has always been able to search your devices, but that wasn't very frequent, and now we're going to see that a lot more. Maybe legal residents who didn't have issues crossing borders may be questioned more. So across the board we're just going to see a lot more scrutiny.
Taylor Wilson:
And is there anything you're hearing about, Kathleen, in terms of what folks are doing to prepare? Say they have a border crossing coming up, things they're thinking about. Is it about maybe deleting pictures or apps from a phone, thinking differently about how they pack or what they wear? What are some of the considerations that folks maybe previously weren't thinking about that they are now in this moment?
Kathleen Wong:
People are nervous about what they have could be taken the wrong way. And so they're cleaning up their social media, maybe putting it to private. That's what I'm hearing a lot. Cleaning up their phones from photos or videos that could also be taken the wrong way. And I think just trying to appear cleaned up at the border, you could say. It's tricky to really prepare, but the best advice I heard from immigration attorneys is to be really truthful about the purpose of your trip. Make sure all of your documents are up to date and they can support your claims on what you're doing and who you are. And you can also consult an immigration lawyer if you are nervous about anything.
Taylor Wilson:
This is a great piece. Kathleen Wong covers consumer travel for Paste BN. Thank you, Kathleen.
Kathleen Wong:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
A federal court in New Jersey could determine whether the US can deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student involved in pro-Palestinian protests. Experts say it could be a landmark case on the civil rights of non-citizens. But first, Khalil will have to fend off a challenge to try and get his case moved out of the US District Court for New Jersey. The Department of Homeland Security argued in court yesterday that the case should be sent to Louisiana where Khalil is being held and where any appeals are likely to end up in a more conservative-leaning court. Khalil is one of a growing number of legal residents in the US who are being targeted for deportations over pro-Palestinian speech or activity. Trump administration officials say they can deport non-citizens they deem hostile to the country or its foreign policy. Civil rights advocates warn that the government's actions pose sweeping threats to free speech and the right to protest.
Federal agents swept up hundreds of Venezuelan migrants and sent them to a prison in El Salvador, based in part on tattoos depicting stopwatches, sports logos, and other ink art they claim marks an allegiance to the Tren de Aragua street gang. But internal Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by Paste BN reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of the gang. The internal documents provided exclusively to Paste BN by the open government advocacy group Property of the People come as pressure mounts on the Trump administration for refusing to provide information about the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans they claim are TdA members. The group requested the documents under open record laws. Attorneys for the detained migrants have said their clients have been swept up without due process and have been labeled gang members with flimsy evidence. In response to Paste BN's request for comment, a White House official said Homeland Security's assessments go beyond tattoos, but that they cannot get into intelligence matters that can compromise their operations.
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Purple streetlights cast a mysterious eerie glow across the country, and they're a photographer's dream. I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Elizabeth Weise to find out what's behind them. Howdy, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Hey, how's it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. Thanks for hopping on. So, another fun piece from you. What are you hearing from photographers in their quest to find purple streetlights? What's happening here?
Elizabeth Weise:
Back in 2021, streetlights in some cities across the US, at least 30 states are involved, started to suddenly stop being white and start being purple, which kind of freaked people out, but photographers love it. And it turns out there's all these photographers who are kind of chasing around after this mysterious purple glow because they love the kinds of images they get when they photograph under it. And as cities are working to change out the lights, the photographers are kind of in a race against time to get the shots before this really cool light goes away. So it's kind of funny.
Taylor Wilson:
I know we're talking right now on an audio platform, Beth, and folks should go check out some photos of this, but why are photographers so interested in this type of lighting? Is it just cool looking? Is there anything more to it than that?
Elizabeth Weise:
It is pretty cool looking. Yeah, we have a nice photo gallery in the story, and also I've got links to some of the photographers' work. It's just... It's cool. So it's not the purple like a black light. They really are just this kind of strong violet color, which is pretty cool looking, though it's in fact not what the Department of Transportation wants or allows. Streetlights are supposed to be white, so they are busy replacing the bulbs.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so what's the science on why this is happening though?
Elizabeth Weise:
Yeah, so this is kind of fascinating. If you go back to the mid-2000s, remember we had all these sodium vapor streetlights that were kind of weirdly yellow, and those had been put in partly as an energy saving method. They were a somewhat newer technology, and a lot of people really hated that yellow. And then in the mid-2000s, LEDs got cheap enough that we could have them in streetlights. And LEDs are great because they save energy, they save money, they last a really long time, so they save even more money because you don't have to replace them very often. So that was all beautiful. But LEDs don't emit white light. What you do is you get LEDs of different colors together, and when they mix, they emit white light. Which is pretty much what the sun does. The sun's light is actually a mixture of all colors. It's not white, but that's how our eyes perceive it.
So if you want to make an LED light that is white, the way that it's usually done in these streetlights is you have a royal blue LED, and you top it with this silicon phosphor layer that is yellow. And then some of the light from the LED gets through and is blue, but some of it is filtered through the phosphor silicon layer and is yellow, and together those two things we perceive as white light. Some of the batches that were made, and they've clearly been widely distributed because these have shown up not just in more than 30 states, but also in Canada and in Ireland, that silicon phosphor layer started to crack and eventually fall off. And so instead of... It's kind of like you put a filter in front of a light and it's suddenly a different color, that filter went away and suddenly they're just emitting purple light.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Good explainer. So amid this phenomenon, is there any risk to the public with these funky, faulty bulbs, Beth?
Elizabeth Weise:
Nobody has attributed any massive pileups or anything to them, if that's what you're wondering. The lighting experts have said that one thing is drivers really rely on color as a way to identify objects that are either next to the roadway or in the roadway. So if the purple light makes things take on a different color, it might be harder, especially if you're driving quickly, to identify them fast and to react to them. Also, there's concerns that these lights, they're kind of surprising and they can be a little glary, and so it might distract drivers and create some issues. So that's why they're being replaced. Though in some places, people are saying, "No, we really like these," and the cities are like, "Yeah, no, we really kind of need to go back to white."
Taylor Wilson:
Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
As always, a pleasure.
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Taylor Wilson:
Tax season is in full swing, but there are questions about how cuts by DOGE in the Trump administration will affect filers this year.
Daniel de Visé:
The IRS, unlike some other agencies of government, actually brings in money, right? And if you cut all of the people who audit wealthy people and corporations, if those people lose their jobs, then a lot of money that might be recovered in audits would be lost.
Taylor Wilson:
Paste BN personal finance reporters Medora Lee and Daniel de Visé joined my colleague Dana Taylor to hash out all the changes you could expect when filing your taxes this year. Listen to that episode of The Excerpt tomorrow morning, beginning at 5:00 A.M. Eastern Time.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back Monday with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.