Trump’s $47 Billion-Dollar Border Wall Plan, and Why a Tupac Murder Trial Is Starting After 30 Years

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, August 18th, here's what we're covering. "I just landed in Texas, headed to Big Bend National Park last night. I put a pause on all activity in that park as far as construction goes." The head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that the Trump administration is temporarily stopping work on a controversial border security project that cuts through a national park in Texas. For months, environmentalists, local officials, and lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration's plans to cut through the pristine desert wilderness. Environmental local sheriffs have opposed it to calling it "unnecessary," since in recent months, authorities have encountered fewer than six migrants a day in the whole area. Amid the backlash, the administration scaled back its plans for a 30-foot wall in the park. But this month, bulldozers and excavators started tearing up the landscape for a new patrol road and other security measures, setting off a fresh wave of anger. Now, the CBP says that work has been paused. The fight around Big Bend National Park comes as the Trump administration has been trying to fill in the gaps of the border wall. In President Trump's first term, work on the wall mostly involved replacing existing barriers. But now, efforts to extend it are accelerating, boosted by about $47 billion in dedicated new funding. The administration is underway in all four border states, even as illegal crossings have fallen to historic lows. Now two other quick updates on the Trump administration. Question for the Prime Minister, do you expect to speak with the U.S. President before Wednesday's tariff deadline, and if so, what will your message be for President Trump? Canada is scrambling to try and avoid new 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods that the White House says will go into effect at midnight tonight. Canadian officials stayed in DC over the weekend to continue negotiations with the U.S. And Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has told them to try and offer targeted concessions. He's hoping to both keep the new tariffs from kicking in and ease existing levies on Canadian products that President Trump has already put in place. If no deal is reached and the new U.S. surcharges kick in, that could push Canada to retaliate, further escalating economic tensions between the U.S. and one of its largest trading partners. And President Trump has cast his vote ahead of Florida's Republican primary today using a method that he has long railed against. Trump has criticized mail-in voting for years, using it to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. But this is at least the third time he's used mail-in voting himself, casting ballots in Palm Beach County, home to Mar-a-Lago. In response to questions, a White House spokeswoman downplayed Trump's choice, saying that, quote, "This is a non-story." Across the country, the cyclospora outbreak is now waning, after becoming the largest of its kind in U.S. history, with almost 25,000 confirmed or suspected cases. Some food safety experts the Times spoke with said they feel comfortable eating salad again. But my colleagues have learned new details about how in the early days of the outbreak, officials struggled to pinpoint the source of the contamination. According to emails reviewed by the Times, back on July 1, state health officials in Michigan, which had a lot of cases, had identified that many people who'd gotten sick had eaten at Taco Bell. So they wrote to the company asking for its supply chain records. But it took multiple emails, and almost two weeks, during which time the FDA also got involved, before the government finally got all the paperwork it needed to identify a lettuce from a facility in Mexico as a source of the outbreak. Notably, a federal rule that was supposed to take effect this year would have required companies like Taco Bell to send those records in 24 hours, but the Trump administration delayed implementation of that until 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare. Food safety experts say the postponement hindered the response to the Michigan outbreak, which was the largest cluster in the U.S. In response to questions from the Times, the Acting Deputy Commissioner for Food at the FDA disputed that the 24-hour rule would have made a major impact in this outbreak, and Taco Bell said it responded to all requests from health officials in a timely manner. In Nevada, a criminal trial is now underway about one of pop culture's most notorious unsolved crimes, the murder of Tupac Shakur. It's been nearly 30 years since the hip-hop artist was killed in a drive-by shooting, and there have been endless theories about who was responsible. In opening remarks yesterday, prosecutors laid out their case against Dwayne Keith Davis, accusing him of orchestrating the murder. And while cold cases are often revived after decades because of fresh leads or surprising new evidence, that's not the case this time. Davis has been talking about his role in the shooting for years. As far back as 2008, Davis told detectives that he and other gang members had chased after Shakur, and he said that his nephew, who has since died, had opened fire from the car they were in. Prosecutors didn't pursue charges at that point because he'd struck a deal in order to talk to them. But over the years, Davis continued to share his story on TV, podcasts, and a memoir, some of which is now featuring in his trial. Davis's lawyers though say that his memoir was fiction, and that he has a long history of embellishing the truth. They claimed he wasn't charged years ago because police "new" he was full of crap. The trial, which will likely dredge up a lot of hip-hop history and infamous rivalries, is expected to last about a month. And finally, so this morning, I drove 100 miles north out of Las Vegas into a remote part of southern Utah. I'm here in this spectacularly beautiful canyon, but I'm not here to hike. I'm here to see a show. It's one that I've seen a number of times before. My colleague, Michael Paulson, covers theater for the times, and he's been looking at how productions of Les Mizz are popping up everywhere, even 40 plus years after the musical about a French rebellion first hit the stage. There's the elaborate production that he went to see at the Tuacan Center for the Arts in Utah, but productions are also opening in Arizona, California, Colorado, to in Georgia. Illinois, Kentucky, the list goes on. Michael says the Les Mizz surge is being driven by two key things. One, a long-running national tour of the show just ended, which has freed up the license for regional theaters to perform it. And two, theaters are really hungry for a hit. This production is coming in the middle of a pretty serious financial crisis facing regional theaters in the US, and they're turning to this show, remembering how popular it was, knowing that there's a eagerness to see this title again, and hoping that by staging it again, they're going to draw large crowds that will not only love the show, but will also bolster the theater's finances. Michael says some theaters have seen their production costs go up 50% or more since the pandemic, so they're banking on a big flashy classic that some super fans might even go see more than once, basically the hope across the country is that they'll go see it, and then go see it one day more. Those are the headlines, today on the daily, a look at the deteriorating conditions on one of the US Navy's aircraft carriers in the Middle East, which has now been deployed for months longer than planned. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to everything we publish when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow.