What One ICE Officer’s Emails Revealed, and the Frantic Scramble Over New Medicaid Rules

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today is Wednesday, November 11th. Here's what we're covering. For many of the millions of low-income Americans on Medicaid, the clock is ticking. At the start of next year, major new rules for the public health insurance program are set to kick in. The changes are part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, championed by President Trump and Republicans in Congress. And they will require many of those on Medicaid to follow lengthy new regulations to prove that they're employed or in school to keep their coverage. I've been talking to hospital leaders across the country, leaders of small community health centers, safety net clinics, and universally they're all bracing for impact on this. They tell me that they see a potential train wreck in the making, where ultimately millions of people. Christopher Rowland covers the business of health care for The Times. He says hospitals and clinics are concerned about the potential cascading effects of the changes. If Medicaid recipients lose coverage, hospitals will lose a huge source of revenue, and they expect their emergency rooms to fill up with people who waited to the last minute to see a doctor because they couldn't afford preventative care. So hospital systems across the country are launching what amounts to a huge mobilization effort, together. "We need to get people to understand that these work rules are coming down the pike, and that they need to take action." "In one hospital I talked to in Indianapolis, they are actually mobilizing teams to go into the community, and they're calling them SWAT teams, you know, armed with information, to try to tell them, first of all, what's coming, make them aware of the work rules, and then help them understand what they need to do." "They might have to go find old paid stubs and contact old employers from earlier in the year." "And then, you know. " "And then, you know, help walk them through the process of uploading it into these state Medicaid portals. It's quite a complicated process. And so these SWAT teams are going to help hold people's hands through this." Christopher says with Democrats about to take control of Congress, some health systems are preparing to lobby to get the Medicaid cutbacks reversed. On Capitol Hill yesterday. "On this vote. " "The yeas are 2-11, the nays are 2-0-4. The motion is adopted." House Republicans successfully shelved an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Republican Representative Thomas Massey had broken with his own party to introduce the articles of impeachment against Hegseth earlier this week. The charges accused Hegseth of violating the Constitution and abusing his power when it came to the war in Iran, the capture of Nicholas Obama, Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela, and U.S. military boat strikes in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The vote by Republicans to effectively kill the impeachment effort came just hours after Hegseth held a fiery press conference defending himself. "We destroyed terror regimes capabilities. We sank the boats carrying poison into our communities. We put a narco dictator in handcuffs. These are not high crimes. This is the job." President Trump had also jumped in to back Hegseth. Urging Congress earlier to "stand up for Pete." In the end, Massey was the only Republican to try and keep the charges afloat alongside Democrats. The Kentucky representative lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger earlier this year and will leave office in January. Massey said the failed impeachment effort was worth it because it made clear that despite huge losses in the midterms, his Republican colleagues "still haven't broken from the spell of Donald Trump." A rookie ICE officer fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine during an attempted traffic stop. "This morning, a person reportedly shot and killed during an incident involving an ICE officer in Biddeford." A rookie ICE officer fatally shot a Colombian man in Maine during an attempted traffic stop. "Now the shooting did bring out large protests today and some counter-protests as well." The Department of Homeland Security said the driver, Johan Guerrero, was attempting to flee and that the officer "feared for public safety." Statements very similar to what it said in other shootings by immigration agents during traffic stops. But it did not provide evidence confirming that account. And The Times has now learned new information about that rookie ICE agent, who was brought on at a time when the administration was rushing to double the number of deportation officers. So our reporting turned up some things that a good background check would have flagged, as well as things that a good background check might not have turned up. My colleague Katie Benner has been looking into the shooting and the officer, David Brouillette. Through court records, emails, and interviews with some of Brouillette's relatives and former colleagues, The Times found he had a troubling work history, complaints of physical abuse by two ex-wives, and mental health challenges. His mother said he'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and hospitalized multiple times. My conversation with David's sister, Liz, was probably one of the most surprising. Her relationship with her brother, David, was strained largely because he was making comments about people who weren't born in America that she thought were deeply racist. And it culminated in what I would describe as an angry email exchange where he excoriated her for being in a relationship with a Colombian man, for having children with him, and for basically not understanding that, you know, in his telling, her partner was the kind of person who shouldn't be in the United States at all. I think that the email raises questions about the kinds of people who are being hired by ICE and what sort of feelings, what sort of racial animus they may or may not be bringing to those kinds of jobs. Katie says that according to a person with knowledge of Brouillette's hiring, he was fast-tracked through a vetting process that DHS had made more lenient. A background report was compiled, but The Times was told that officials hadn't looked at it yet when Brouillette was armed and deployed on the streets of Maine. In a statement, DHS said that "any claims of substandard training or vetting are false." Brouillette declined to speak to a Times reporter who came to his home. He called the local sheriff to warn the reporter not to return. You can find the full investigation at NYTimes.com. Now, big news from Silicon Valley. Yesterday, the AI giant Anthropic gave new details about its upcoming IPO, which could be the biggest in history. The company is set to hit the stock market next week, and based on preliminary pricing and other data it shared, it could raise up to $100 billion. By comparison, Elon Musk's SpaceX brought in $86 billion when it went public in June. My colleague Corey Weinberg, who covers Anthropic for The Times, says that "all eyes will be on this IPO, not just because of its staggering size, but also because Wall Street really needs it to do well, to validate all the money that's already been poured into AI." Still, he says, it's coming at a volatile moment for the industry. Investors have been stressed out regularly about the future of AI, but it's really become more pronounced in the past week or so. The midterm elections where Democrats really swept and spoke out against data science, and now we're in the midterms of an era when the data centers had investors thinking maybe, you know, sort of, we're not actually going to be able to have enough AI infrastructure to keep these businesses going. And on top of that, there's just constant worry that there may not be enough revenue or sales to actually pay for all the data centers, all the chips, all the power and energy that you need to actually build this technology. Corey says Anthropic is just one of several fast-growing companies in the market. It's one of several fast-growing, but still unprofitable AI companies testing investors' appetite for the industry. OpenAI, which kicked off the AI boom when it launched ChatGPT, is expected to go public next year. And finally, a lost draft of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech has emerged from a desk drawer. Handwritten in King's cursive, with many, many lines crossed out, words swapped in, ideas reshuffled, it was found by the widow of a man who'd worked with the civil rights leader. It's the only handwritten final draft known to have survived. And one King scholar who's written a book on the speech said looking at it gave him, quote, "actual chills." Seeing some of these refrains in his own hand is electrifying. He thinks the draft likely dates from the night before the speech. King stayed up working on it until at least 4 a.m., when he finally sent his words off to be typed up. The document is going to go on display for the public this weekend in Atlanta, followed by stops in Chicago and New York, before it goes up for auction in January. It's expected to fetch more than $10 million, with some of the proceeds going to the King Center and other philanthropic causes. Though only a draft, it does include many lines like "free at last" that made it to the mic. Like when King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Not in the draft, though, are the actual words "I have a dream." That section, King famously improvised. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look at the new crisis facing public schools in the U.S. Not enough students. Over the last decade, Los Angeles public schools enrollment down 20 percent. Houston down about 17 percent. Chicago, 17 percent. Dallas, 13 percent. Philadelphia, 10 percent. I can go on and on and on. 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.