Huang’s Downfall Could Shake the Economy, and Detainees Have Disappeared From an ICE Database

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford, today's Friday, November 13. Here's what we're covering. So everything that's going on with NVIDIA, and especially with Jensen Wong's resignation, has just raised a lot of questions about what's going to happen with the company, with the AI industry, and even beyond that. I spoke to an expert on Thursday who asked, "Can one CEO's sex life take down the economy?" Then Castleman is the time's chief economics correspondent. And look, the literal answer here is obviously no. But NVIDIA really does play a unique role, and that isn't just because it makes something like 90% of the advanced chips that go into all of these AI models. It's because they play this role of almost being a central bank for the AI industry. They have played this really fundamental role in financing and providing loan guarantees to their customers and suppliers to the companies that run the data centers, to the companies that are designing these models, and every time that there starts to be sort of a wobble in the AI story, every time the market sort of starts to freak out a little bit, or often than not, it's NVIDIA and it's Jensen Wong that kind of have stepped in to steady the ship. They provide a financial backstop, or Wong himself just comes out and sort of reassures everybody that the AI boom is still on track. And if they stop playing that role, if they pull back in some way, that could really have profound implications for the entire AI boom. So while I don't think it's literally true that one sex scandal is going to bring down the US economy, financial markets are built on confidence to a significant degree. And you never know what is going to be the precipitating incident that kind of brings everything down. I wouldn't predict that that's what's going to happen here, but it does really point to the degree to which these sort of interconnected financial pieces and their reliance on AI have become a real vulnerability for the US economy. Meanwhile, a Senate committee has summoned Jensen Wong to testify over national security concerns related to his affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. The committee has also summoned Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. In his role, Lutnik has control over government restrictions on technology sales, like limits on the transfer of Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China. While many top Trump administration officials have pushed for tighter restrictions to try and keep China from gaining an economic or military edge, they have frequently clashed with Lutnik, whose repeatedly delayed or deferred technology controls, according to people familiar with the discussions. Commerce Department officials told the Times that within the agency, Nvidia was treated differently than other companies. Nvidia's general counsel was given direct access to shape new rules that affect the company, with department staff describing seeing comments from Nvidia's top lawyer in drafts of government policies. A spokesman for the Commerce Department said that it was routine for the government to consult with companies as it finalizes rules. Still, there are also concerns about possible conflicts of interest when it comes to Lutnik and Nvidia. The investment firm he steered for decades, and which is now run by his sons, has a wide range of business interests that rely on Nvidia chips, including some related to data centers in Southeast Asia. In response to questions from the Times, Nvidia declined to comment. The Commerce Department said Lutnik had fully divested from the investment firm, and has not had any interactions with the firm about Nvidia. Back in September, a professor at a nursing program in California was at home in her pajamas when a group of federal agents showed up to arrest her. The woman, who is originally from Nigeria, was able to call her family that day from ICE custody to say what had happened, but then she went dark. Her siblings tried to look up her name in a public database of immigration detainees, but they couldn't find her. Her lawyer tried to, and couldn't find her either. Her family said it felt like she had fallen, quote, "into an abyss." Then, days later, she called her brother from a detention center in Louisiana, halfway across the country. Now, the Times has learned that her disappearance from the database was not an accident, but rather part of a new Trump administration policy, with the Department of Homeland Security no longer publicly listing most migrants who have final deportation orders. The DHS database had been a key tool for families and lawyers to track detainees as they were shuffled around a network of hundreds of ICE facilities nationwide, and knowing exactly what jurisdiction a detainee is in can be essential for filing paperwork to fight their deportation. Now, with many people's names wiped out of the public records, lawyers say it's created chaos and made it much harder to provide migrants with legal aid. In a lawsuit filed last month, the National Immigration Law Center and other groups said that more than 20,000 people had been removed from the database, or around 30 percent of all detainees. In response to questions from the Times, DHS said in a statement that detainees have several ways of communicating with family and lawyers, and that "the appropriate process for someone with final deportation orders is removal, plain, and simple." This audio clip might sound like gibberish, but it's actually part of a scientific study that is analyzing speech to try to predict people's risk of developing dementia. Pam Bellick is a health and science reporter at the Times. She says more than six million Americans, roughly 10 percent of people 65 and older, currently have dementia, including Alzheimer's, the most common type of the condition. In light of that, scientists have been looking for ways to get ahead of new cases, including the cutting-edge research Pam's been covering, where they use AI algorithms along with sensors attached to people's lips and faces to track subtle changes in people's speech. Speech contains a gold mine of information because there's so many aspects of what our brains are doing to create speech. So scientists are analyzing things like how fast people talk, how often they pause during a sentence, the richness and complexity of the vocabulary that they use, the pitch and the cadence of their speech. In preliminary results, this team found that their speech analysis could identify people who were at high risk for developing Alzheimer's 77 percent of the time, compared to 47 percent of the time for a regular cognitive testing. Pam says researchers even see a future where there could be an app where people record samples of their speech to help predict their dementia risk, the goal being to arm patients and doctors, with as much information as possible as early as possible, to combat these disorders. And finally, last night, the Mexican singer Biber Cantana took the stage at the Latin Grammys, where she was nominated for Song of the Year. She built her career and became known throughout Latin America in part by giving old ballads new heroines. Paritos, traditional Mexican folk ballads, are usually sung by men about men, telling the stories of revolutionaries, outlaws, folk heroes, and more recently drug traffickers. Cantana though wanted to tell a different story about the violence faced by women in Mexico. Mexican activists have estimated that every day, ten women there are killed because of their gender. For Cantana, it was personal. She told the Times that after a close friend was murdered by a man she'd said was harassing her at work, she became obsessed with the idea of self-defense. Cantana spent a decade visiting prisons across Mexico and interviewing women who'd ended up in jail after they fought back against their attackers. Eventually, she released a whole album of Corritos, telling the true stories of those women. The president of the record label Universal Music Mexico told the Times that Cantana, has found a way to saying, quote, not only about love, heartbreak, life, but also the social reality of this country that many of us recognize, but few dare to talk about. Those are the headlines. If you'd like to play the Friday news quiz, stick around. It's just after these credits. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Margaret Kadeva, Jake Lucas, Yon Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford, original theme by Dan Powell. Thanks to Isabella Anderson, Sam Dolnick, Miles McKinley, Zoe Murphy, and Chris Wood. Now time for the quiz. Every week we ask you a few questions about stories the time has been covering. Can you get them all? First up. It'll be the most beautiful arc in the world. More beautiful than the arc to try out. In Washington, President Trump's controversial plan for a giant new arch is currently in limbo. We see what this is all about. This is a tribute to Donald Trump. He has told us that specifically. Despite a lot of criticism and pushback from lawmakers, a federal planning commission recently said construction on the monument could go forward right before a federal judge stepped in to temporarily block the project. At the ongoing legal back and forth, the Trump administration has started changing how it refers to the structure. It used to just call it the triumphant arch. Now it's stuck another word in front of that to make it the blank triumphant arch, potentially as a way to help justify the project. Your question, what have they started calling it? The answer. The military triumphant arch with President Trump himself claiming the 250-foot tall gold-topped structure is about defense. The triumphant arch military complex is going to have tremendous drone capability. Or you would say sniper or shooter capability. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has backed Trump up on this rebrand, saying recently that the sheer height of the arch would create a, quote, "significant elevation advantage" against threats. Next question. A San Francisco company is waiting into a particularly controversial topic right now with a new pitch for homeowners. In exchange for having access to a bit of space, on the side of your home, we'll help the customers pay for the energy and internet bill as well. The company wants to install new, grey, boxy units in people's backyards. Each unit has a big fan in it, but the company promises it's only about as loud as an electric toothbrush. What does this company want to install in your yard? A data center, a micro one anyway, the theory is that instead of building the kind of big behemoth data centers that have become so controversial, the computing work could be spread across thousands of backyards instead. And we're into the final stretch here. On the back of Democrats' blue wave last week, we've got questions about the old lives of some of the newly elected officials. Many of them have some surprising little forays on their resumes. We will name the past gig, you name their state. Starting off, "This is a fire line, dig a well and the fire stops." This state elected its first Democratic congressman in 30 years when it went for a candidate who used to be a smoke jumper, fighting wildfires. Which state is it? The fire stops here. That is Montana's Sam Forstag. Next one. This states new governor once strutted down runways in Milan and Paris. You were a model for a second. Yes. He doesn't talk about it often, but has said it was a good way to make extra cash when he was young. Everything's expensive in college, and I'm like, well, this works and I can make money doing this great. That is the governor elect of Iowa, Rob Sand, who Prada picked before voters did. Next one here. One of this states new representatives is a Latin Grammy award-winning musician. That is Texas with Bobby Palito, who, as part of his voter outreach, performed for free at Kinseneiras. And last one for you. We were a pioneer with respect to fried chicken tenders, at least according to journalists that have looked into this thing, and we sell a lot of them. This states soon to be senator is an heir to chicken tender's royalty. He spent years working at his family restaurant, which is often credited with inventing the fried delicacy. I mean, I started working there and busing tables and washing dishes where I was 14. That is New Hampshire, where Chris Papis put in his time at the Puritan Backroom Restaurant in Manchester. That is all for now, but we could have kept going. I didn't even tell you about Nathan Johnson, who set to replace Ken Paxton as the Attorney General of Texas. He used to be a composer who helped score the anime series, Dragon Ball Z. That is range. That's it for this week's news quiz. If you want to tell us how you did or what your favorite politician backstory that we missed is, our email is the headlines at nytimes.com. I'm Tracy Mumford. The show will be back on Monday.