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.USA TODAY 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.USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise asks what the deal is with those purple streetlights.Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [email protected] Transcript available hereAlso available at art19.com/shows/5-ThingsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What are the recent changes at USAID under the Trump administration?
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. Personnel at the U.S. 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. The death toll is rapidly rising after a devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Southeast Asia.
Chapter 2: How has the earthquake in Myanmar affected the region?
The death toll in Myanmar rose past 1,000 earlier this morning, while at least nine people were killed in neighboring Thailand, where massive buildings were destroyed. In Myanmar, the U.S. Geological Service's predictive modeling estimated the death toll could exceed 10,000 and that losses could exceed the country's annual economic output. The U.S.
Chapter 3: What are American travelers fearing about border crossings?
has said it will provide some assistance, though it has previously sanctioned officials with the ruling military. Some American travelers are fearing U.S. border crossings under recently increased vetting. I spoke with USA Today consumer travel reporter Kathleen Wong for more. Hello, Kathleen. Thanks for hopping on the show today.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So would you just start by telling us about Ginny Williams and her experience here?
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.
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Chapter 4: How is increased border scrutiny impacting citizens?
So 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?
So we're seeing a lot of high-profile cases of detainments and deportation and just higher security across the borders. And a lot of 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.
And I mean, are legal residents actually facing detention or deportation in some of these border crossing situations?
So what we're seeing are mostly green card holders and visa holders, so student or work visas. They're lawfully allowed to live here or 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.
Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of those increases, Kathleen, what specifically has this administration really instructed immigration officials to do in this moment?
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.
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?
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Chapter 5: What measures should travelers take before crossing borders?
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 trained-to-Iragua street gang.
But internal Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by USA Today reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of the gang.
The internal documents provided exclusively to USA Today 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 USA Today'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.
Purple streetlights cast a mysterious eerie glow across the country, and they're a photographer's dream. I spoke with USA Today national correspondent Elizabeth Weiss to find out what's behind them. Howdy, Beth. Hey, how's it going? Okay, thanks for hopping on. So another fun piece from you. What are you hearing from photographers in their quest to find purple streetlights?
I mean, what's happening here?
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.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the case against Mahmoud Khalil?
which kind of freaked people out but photographers love it and it turns out there's this like all these photographers who are 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
So 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 light? I mean, is it just cool looking? Is there anything more to it than that?
It is pretty cool looking. Yeah. We have a nice photo gallery in the story and, and also I've got links to some of the photographer's 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, 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.
All right. So what's the science on kind of why this is happening?
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Chapter 7: How is free speech being threatened under the current administration?
So this is kind of fascinating. So if you go back to like 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 You know, it's kind of like you put a filter in front of the light and it's suddenly a different color.
That filter went away and suddenly they're just emitting purple light.
All right, good explainer. So amid this phenomenon, is there any risk to the public with these funky, faulty bulbs, Beth?
Nobody has attributed any massive pileups or anything to them, if that's what you're wondering. The lighting experts have said that, you know, 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 just you know 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
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