How asylum-seeking migrants got stuck living at O’Hare

Good morning! It's Monday, February 26th. I'm Mark Garrison in for Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, how the Alabama IVF ruling forced a family to leave the state to continue treatment, the people who came to the U.S. for a better life and got trapped at O'Hare Airport, and an unusual way managers are trying to get more workers back into offices.

But first, let's take a quick look at some major stories in the news. The Biden administration says negotiators have an understanding on the broad points of a potential temporary ceasefire deal in Gaza that would include the release of hostages held by Hamas. But the specifics aren't public. The death toll in Gaza is close to 30,000 people. Representatives from the U.S., Israel, Qatar, and Egypt are expected to continue talks to iron out technical details.

We're not going to give it up if we have a deal, it will be delayed somewhat, but it will happen. If we don't have a deal we'll do it anyway. It has to be done because total victory is our goal and total victory is within reach, not months away, weeks away, once we begin the operation.

To U.S. politics, where former president Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley in South Carolina's Republican primary by a wide margin over the weekend.

That is really something. This was a little sooner than we anticipated.

Haley said she'll stay in the race through Super Tuesday on March 5th.

I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina that I would continue to run for president.

Tomorrow, Democrats and Republicans head to the polls in Michigan's primary. Also, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is stepping down. Trump had criticized her management of the party. He endorsed a group of new leaders, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. In Washington, lawmakers are on the verge of a partial government shutdown again. They have just a few days to strike a deal or else services including food stamps, housing assistance, and more could be affected.

President Biden is bringing Congressional leaders from both parties to the White House tomorrow to talk about the looming shutdown and funding for Ukraine. Fertility doctors across America are frustrated with the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children. They're worried about the impact on patients.

Several fertility clinics in the state are pausing services while they look at the new legal risks for patients and clinics. An Alabama Fertility, which performed around 700 rounds of IVF last year, they're pausing new treatments because of the ruling.

We're incredibly worried that IVF as it stands will not continue in Alabama.

That's Dr. Mamie McLean from the clinic on "MSNBC." She says patients are worried.

They feel like they've been left alone by the state of Alabama, we have patients who plan for months in the lead up to both IVF and a frozen embryo transfer. So, these treatments are not… They've been ongoing for quite a while. And so, the decision to cancel a patient's treatment is devastating news for them.

Gabrielle Goidel talked to "CNN" about trying to get pregnant in the middle of all of this. The court's ruling came just days before she was scheduled to have her eggs retrieved.

I'm probably 15 shots in and my body is bruised and hurt, it's not been great physically. I don't feel the greatest. I've already been so poked and prodded with the IVF process. And now I feel like there's somebody else who's coming into my personal life and it's very invasive.

Goidel and her husband frantically called other IVF providers. They found one that could take her, but it was in Texas. So she'll continue IVF there, but that adds additional travel costs to the already expensive process. She told "CNN," the ruling makes a difficult ordeal even worse. Goidel had three miscarriages, and the family has already spent tens of thousands of dollars on IVF.

All we want is to just have the American dream and have a family,

and I never thought that this would be something that would be conceived as immoral.

Now to a story about families coming to the U.S for a better life who got stuck in limbo, living at Chicago's O'Hare airport.

Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott says that he's sent more than 30,000 migrants to Chicago since 2022. The state has been sending tens of thousands of people who cross the southern border to cities led by Democrats to protest U.S. immigration policies.

And that meant that migrants started arriving in the city without a place to live, and some of them got stuck at O'Hare Airport.

Elly Fishman writes in "Rolling Stone" about these families. She spent the holiday season reporting from O'Hare, at one of its busiest times. It was meant to be only a temporary shelter for migrants, where people could wait for better housing. But the large number of new arrivals meant many people spent a lot of time living at the airport. Fishman profiled a woman called Angi.

She had five young children, between the ages of two and eight, and they were living in a place in the airport that is not set up to house families.

They were trying to escape poverty and instability in Venezuela. It took her family months to make the dangerous journey north, through the jungle and desert. After arriving, Angi accepted the offer of a flight to Illinois. She’d never been on a plane before. And she’d heard Chicago was welcoming to immigrants. But the reality was, she had no place to stay. So she wound up in a vast field of makeshift beds at O’Hare, with hundreds of other migrants.

It is a transient place by nature. No showers, no real private spaces to reflect or even just take a moment for yourself. And I just was so struck by what it would mean to try and move through your day with five kids in a place like that. You know, the sink that you use for five seconds to wash your hands on the way to your gate, for Angie is not only a sink, it's a laundry basin, it's a shower.

Angi’s asylum case is one of two million pending in the U.S. Angi and her family eventually found a motel to move into. Many other people camped out at O’Hare have also been able to move to other accommodations. But resources in Chicago are still stretched.

It's a massive crisis, and trying to figure out how to support these families and these individual people

has been a contentious and heated topic in the city.

It's Monday, and that might mean you're heading back to the office. Or not, if you work from home. Or, maybe you work from home, but you get the sense that your boss would really rather have you in the office more often?

That kind of push and pull has been going on between companies and employees ever since the pandemic lockdowns ended. Some companies take a hard line: basically, come to the office or you're fired. Others have a softer approach, which includes making the workplace more appealing. Offering free food, nice coffee, better gyms, laundry services. "The Wall Street Journal" looks at how a few companies are trying something different: changing the smell.

It's not clear that offices adding a signature scent will get more employees coming in, but it does sound like an improvement. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a Narrated Article coming up next and it's the Apple News pick for Story of the Month. Every month, our editors are selecting a News+ article that they don't want you to miss. This one, from "The Atlantic," is about Scot Peterson.