Transcript of Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave

President Trump called for the US to take territory in the Middle East.

He says the US should own Gaza, displacing 1. 8 million residents to develop seaside real estate. What do other countries think?

I'm Steve Inskeep with A. Martínez, and this is up first from NPR News. The first plane load of migrants from the US landed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Critics think they know why. Are you using this facility because it has the stain of the name Guantanamo. And of course, the answer is yes. We'll hear how the White House explains the move.

Also, all staffers at the Foreign Aid Agency USAID were told, Thank you for your service, and put on leave. So how does that affect US influence around the world? Stay with us. We've got all the news you need to start your day. This is Ira Glass of this American Life.

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President Trump is talking of another territorial acquisition by the United States.

He says he wants the US to take over Gaza, the current home of many Palestinians. Trump brought up the idea during a visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Turn it into seaside real estate. The President did not rule out the possibility of using US troops while sending the current residents to live somewhere else not yet named. In just over two weeks since his inauguration, the President has called for the US to take over a total of four countries or territories, Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and now a war-torn 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean.

It's time to discuss is NPR international correspondent, Ayyap Thrawe in Dubai. What's President Trump's vision of Gaza look like?

Well, Trump already signaled clearly many times that he thinks Palestinians should be relocated outside of Gaza. He says Gaza is now a demolition site, that it's uninhabitable. This is largely true. After nearly 16 months of war and Israeli airstrikes that also killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, with the UN and Gaza's health officials saying at least 10,000 more bodies are buried under that rubble. Now, rather than live in what he called a hellhole, Trump said yesterday the nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza should go elsewhere, other countries.

This can be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth. It could be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, seven, eight, twelve. It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site.

It's really unclear if this is actual policy ideas being formulated or his musings at this point. But Trump, who's an international real estate developer as well, said he envisions the US taking over this coastal enclave long term and turning it into what he called the Riviera of the Middle East.

We're going to take over that piece. We're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it'll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.

And Trump has said that it's an idea that everyone he's spoken to loves, but is it something that Palestinians in Gaza would support?

Half of those 2 million people in Gaza are children. They need security, stability. They haven't been in school for two years now. There isn't even electricity or running water in Gaza. So Yeah, some families would leave given this reality. They have said that to us. But also people have lived in Gaza for generations, and leaving would mean the end of any hopes for a Palestinian state. In Israel, expelling Palestinians from Gaza was an idea that had mostly been relegated to the far right corners of Israeli society. Israel's Prime Minister didn't comment directly on Trump's idea yesterday, but he praised his, quote, willingness to think outside the box with fresh ideas. And he said this.

After the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and they say, You know? He's right.

All right, so that's one view from the Middle East. But what are other countries in the region saying?

The major Arab states, they don't want Hamas to rule Gaza, but they also don't see mass displacement as a solution either. Certainly, publicly, I don't see how they could get behind this. Now, Egypt has made clear it will not accept the forced expulsion of Palestinians. Egypt has called this an injustice that they won't take part in. Saudi Arabia, one of the countries of great wealth that the President referred to that would be needed to pay for whatever comes next in Gaza, says it rejects attempts to displace Palestinians. They say their position is non-negotiable and that they've made this clear to the Trump administration.

That's NPR Zahba Trahi. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

The Trump administration has started sending migrants from the United States to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The first plane load arrived yesterday. White House Press Secretary, Caroline Levit, gave this reason.

President Trump is not messing around, and he's no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world.

The President has said he wants to make room for 30,000 migrants at Guantanamo.

Npr Sasha Pfeiffer has been talking with some lawyers who question the legality of that plan. So how many people have been sent there so far?

The US has not released an official figure, but it appears to be a small number, possibly just one flight with about a dozen migrants on board. The Department of Homeland Security says they're all members of a Venezuelan organized crime group called Tren de Aragua, And overnight, it released photos of handcuffed men in gray sweat pant outfits, some with neck tattoos, being led onto military planes. And several hundred US service members were deployed to Guantanamo in the past few days to prepare for these arrivals.

Where are they going to be held in Guantanamo?

The US says they will not be housed alongside the accused foreign terrorists held at the military prison there. Instead, a Guantanamo's US naval base has had a detention facility used for migrants intercepted at sea, usually Haitians and Cubans. It's had for years, but it's been mostly empty for a long time. It's not ready for large numbers of people. The military has also circulated photos of service members putting up green army tents to help with what it's calling a Migrant Operations Center expansion. The defense secretary says that migrants will be held at Guantanamo only temporarily until the US finds other countries to take them.

Okay. Now, to the legality question, can the Trump administration legally send migrants from the US to Guantanamo? Can they do that?

I've gotten conflicting from lawyers. Some say yes, some say no. One who thinks it is not legal is a lawyer at UCLA named Ahilan Arulanatham. He says US immigration law dictates where these migrants can be sent. If Cuba has presumably not agreed to take them, he says it's an illegal deportation. But Steve Wlodek at Georgetown Law School thinks it's legal. He argues a deportation is not official until the US has relinquished custody of the migrants, and that won't happen until they're moved to another country after being at Guantanamo. But you know that they disagree, suggests we're in murky legal territory. Wlodek also thinks the Trump administration is sending migrants there as a macho performance art. Here's Steve Wlodek.

All you're doing this for is the symbolism to be able to say, Look, I moved these folks from the detention center across town to Guantanamo. It's all like very expensive flash with very little substance. We mentioned symbolism. What symbolism is there by sending finding migrants to Guantanamo?

He points out it would be cheaper and easier to hold them somewhere in some big open space elsewhere in the US. But by shipping them to Guantanamo, you send a certain message. Here's how the editor of the website, Law Fair, Ben Wittes, put it.

Are you using this facility because it has the stain of the name Guantanamo? Of course, the answer is yes, that's exactly why he's attracted to it. He's attracted to it for the same reason that it repels human rights groups.

By the way, all those people I interviewed are skeptical that 30,000 migrants will ever end up at Gitmo, given the legal questions plus financial, political, practical barriers. But even sending a handful is getting a ton of public attention, which is part of the point.

Npr Sasha Pfeiffer.

Thanks a lot. You're welcome.

The Trump administration is telling all employees of the United States Agency for International Development to stop doing their jobs.

Yeah, the workers are told to go on administrative leave by Friday at 11: 59 PM, according to a new directive sent to agency staff globally and posted on the website. This comes after more than two weeks of chaos at the agency, as the President and Elon Musk said they were in the process of shutting it down.

Npr Global Health Correspondent Fatma Tannis, joins us now to tell us all about this. Who exactly signed off on this?

Well, it was a short note. It was not signed by any official, and it said that there would be some exceptions, that essential personnel expected to continue working would be notified by Thursday afternoon. Now, around 10,000 people work for USAID. Most of them are serving overseas, and they've been given 30 days to pack up and come back home. The note ended with the words, Thank you for your service.

What are you hearing from the people who work there?

Well, they're shocked and gutded. I spoke to several officials of the agency who didn't want to be named because they're not authorized to speak publicly. They said that this is effectively a shutdown of the agency, and they call the process inhumane. Now, for staff who are overseas, there are other concerns. People have kids in school, spouses who have jobs, they have pets. It's going to be hard to brute their lives in 30 days, and many are expecting the next step to be mass layoffs. I also heard concerns about what this means for the US. I spoke with Susan Wrightley, a retired USAID official, and here's how she put it.

This This is taking away a critical element of our national security, and it's affecting people's lives from not just a humanitarian perspective, but we're leaving a huge vacuum for China and Russia.

I mean, it seems like the Trump administration wants to get rid of this agency. Why would they want to do that?

Well, President Trump has been saying that USAID is too independent, that it is full of, quote, radical left lunatics, and that its programs are not in line with his America First policy. Now, people who work in the agency, they say their allegiance is to the Constitution and not to any political party. Many of them serve under multiple administrations. They say that everything they do down to the countries and the issues that they work on is approved by Congress. Now, since Congress chartered USAID, legal experts say the administration doesn't have the authority to abolish it on its own, but there are still a lot of questions about how this is going to play out.

They've had programs all over the world. So what happens now to all of those things?

Well, for now, most programs receiving US foreign aid have been halted. You know, there are multiple disease outbreaks going on, Ebola in East Africa. There's a different hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia. These are part of USAID's work overseas. Here's Matt Cavenagh, the Director of Global Health Policy at Georgetown University.

The USAID team was literally preparing to respond to these new outbreaks that occurred literally as the President was being inaugurated, and now that's stopped.

So have distributions of HIV medication and pox vaccines, a therapeutic food for malnourished kids. Millions of people around the world aren't getting those services anymore. All right, A lot still up in the air.

That's NPR's Fatma Tennis. Thank you very much for letting us know about all this.

Thank you.

And that's up first for Wednesday, February fifth. I'm E. Martínez.

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