ICE Arrests Soar Across U.S., and Meta Agrees to Make Major Changes to Instagram and Facebook

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, August 27th, here's what we're covering. New data on ice arrests around the country shows how this summer the Trump administration has dramatically stepped up its mass deportation campaign. In June, ice arrests hit 43,000. In July, that surged to 49,000, hitting record highs. The numbers have been rising as agents have detained people who weren't prioritized for deportation under previous administrations. That's included people married to U.S. citizens and people who had entered the country legally and were pursuing an asylum claim. While the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said it's focused on detaining quote, "the worst of the worst," the data shows agents are increasingly targeting people with no criminal record. In July, for example, the share of those arrested who had a violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent. The data, which was obtained by an academic group through a public records lawsuit and analyzed by the Times, covered all ice arrests through August 5th. And it shows that they are nearing an all-time high in almost every state. The surge is most pronounced, though, in Florida and Texas, two states with a large number of unauthorized immigrants and officials who support the administration's crackdown. Beyond arrests, other data shows that the number of deportation flights is picking up too. According to a tracking effort run by a human rights group, at least 329 deportation flights left the country last month, another record. One former ICE official told the Times that, overall, the agency now has quote, "more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems," adding quote, "they're finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine." A spokesperson for DHS said the administration was keeping its promises to arrest and deport criminals, and that anyone in the country illegally is a target. It is a rare occurrence for any attorney general to get to make an announcement as big as the one we are making today. Yesterday, the tech giant Metta agreed to a landmark settlement over claims it endangered children by making social media platforms addictive. We will look back on today as the beginning of the end of the battle days when children had unfettered access to products designed to addict them and expose them to serious mental harm. In announcing the settlement, officials representing 47 states said the company had agreed to pay up to $17 billion in penalties and to make major changes to its platforms, Facebook and Instagram. Metta agreed to put in place a two-hour daily time limit for young users, to silence notifications during school hours, and to interrupt endless scrolling. Metta has fought restrictions like this tooth and nail for the better part of the past decade, and so to see them kind of agree to this and capitulate in some ways really is telling of how they felt their case was going. My colleague Mike Isaac covers Silicon Valley for the times. He says one thing that's notable about the new settlement is that in it, Metta is trying to make sure that other social media companies also have to pay penalties and make changes to their products. Under the deal, Metta says it will pay more and impose stricter time limits on kids using its platforms. If companies like Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle similar lawsuits that states have brought against them, Mike says Metta's argument is that kids will be safer if all companies get on board, but at its core, this is also a business strategy of keeping its competitors in check. One of the things I would say that's really key to Metta and Facebook and Instagram being on top for more than two decades was this constant obsession, specifically from Mark Zuckerberg, keeping new young people coming into the app, and that puts them at a great disadvantage if other companies like, say, TikTok or YouTube are able to basically continue what they've been doing all along and keep people coming back from an early age. That's why I think Zuckerberg is really trying to secure for himself this idea that as of today, if Metta's no longer able to lean on some of its advantages on how to bring people back into its app to the future, no other company should be able to do that either. For now, this settlement resolves one of the biggest cases against Metta, and following news of the deal, the company's stock price went up, but Metta is still facing a number of other lawsuits over the safety of its products that could go to trial as soon as this fall. Search and rescue efforts are underway with more than a thousand people still missing after a violent flood surged through a valley in the Himalayas yesterday. As of early this morning, the official death toll had already crossed more than 250, and it's expected to rise. By early afternoon yesterday, we saw these images coming in of the devastation, just angry, mudwater gushing down, washing away neighborhoods. This one image in particular of this border crossing between Nepal and Tibet on the China side just seems horrific, the way the water just consumes everything as people are trying to run away for their lives. So pretty quickly, it became clear to us that this is devastation of massive scale. Mujeeb Michal covers South Asia for the times. He says the flood swept up cars and buses and smashed through buildings, taking out schools, roads, bridges. He says entire villages are now covered in thick mud. Much of the area, the communication lines have been cut off, so we don't have a sense from the ground of how quickly help reached, but we were hearing that in the initial hours, helicopters and military personnel were on their way trying to help out. And even today, the picture we're piecing together is from very patchy information that officials are gathering and we're hearing from sources on the ground. Mujeeb says scientists and geologists are still trying to pinpoint what exactly set off the sudden flood, but some say that satellite imagery suggests it was triggered by an enormous chunk of ice, possibly 2,000 feet wide, that snapped off a glacier and tumbled thousands of feet down into the valley. Along the way, the avalanche pulverized itself into a fast moving barrage of ice and rock that crushed everything in its path. Experts say it's too early to draw a direct link between the ice fall and climate change, but that warming temperatures may have accelerated the glacier's collapse. In 2021, a piece of another Himalayan glacier broke off, causing major flooding and killing more than 100 people in northern India. Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a breakthrough new drug for advanced pancreatic cancer, and it could help usher in a new era of treatments for a wide range of other cancers. Pancreatic cancer has long been considered one of the most hopeless diseases in medicine, but just 3% of patients whose cancer has spread living for five years after their diagnosis. It kills more than 50,000 Americans a year. Until now, grueling rounds of chemo have been the main treatment for the cancer, even though it barely extends people's lifespans. Earlier this year, when scientists presented key clinical trial data showing that the new drug, called deroxin-rosib, doubled the median survival time for patients from less than seven months to more than 13, the room burst into a standing ovation. Many oncologists had long thought they'd never see these kinds of results, and some in the audience even broke down into tears of joy, according to people in the room. The drug, which is taken by pill twice a day, works by shutting down a mutated protein called K-RAS, that fuels nearly all pancreatic cancers. And since K-RAS also helps drive many lung and colon cancers, as well as other tumors, there is hope that similar types of medicines could be effective against those diseases too. And finally, closing out today with two remembrances of truly "out there" artists. This week, the actor Tim Curry, who brought a garish, outlandish, winking sometimes sneaky villainous nature to his performances, died at 80 years old, best known for playing the cross-dressing mad scientist Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror picture show, which still gets people up and dancing at midnight screenings. He also brought his deep voice and eyebrows that were born to arch, to a lot of other roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. His turn include perfection, and who else can do both the clown in it and Muppet Treasure Island? Curry had been largely out of the spotlight for the last decade after suffering a stroke that made it difficult for him to speak. But he published a memoir last year, Vagabond, and insisted on recording the audiobook himself so people could hear the real him. Also, Yoyoi Kusama, whose pension for polka dots made her an icon in the art world, has died at 97. As a teenager, she enrolled in art school in extremely unusual move for a woman in conservative post-World War II Japan, and she then immersed herself in the surreal in the avant-garde. By the 60s, she began sewing thousands of stuffed fabric fallacies onto everyday objects, armchairs, coats, a robot. Later, after moving to the US, she used her art to protest the Vietnam War, getting volunteers to strip naked in public as she painted their bodies with polka dots. More recently, she began creating mirrored reflective spaces covered in dots and lights, so-called "infinity rooms" where your reflection seems to go on forever, and the installations became sensations at museums around the world. One thing I just learned about Kusama's career is that when she was thinking about making the move to the US, she decided to ask the only American woman artist that she knew of for advice. So she tracked down Georgia O'Keefe's address through the American Embassy, and she wrote to her, "O'Keefe was encouraging, so Kusama got on a plane." Those are the headlines. Stay on the daily, more on Metta's groundbreaking settlement, and how it could be complicated by a major challenge facing every social media company. How do you check how old your users actually are? Kids are really, really good at getting around age verification tools, and it's not even just that kids are cunning. It's oftentimes age verification is just too easy to get past. It's just a simple drop-down box that asks how old you are. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday news quiz.