The struggle to reunite families separated under Trump

Good morning! It’s Tuesday, March 12th. I’m Yasmeen Khan, in for Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today’s show: Many parents and children separated at the border are still not back together; The work of a famous author gets published against his wishes; And why there is still so much progress to be made on equal pay around the world.

But first, let’s take a quick look at some other stories in the news. Starting in Haiti, where Prime Minister Ariel Henry is preparing to resign. Armed gangs have threatened to start a civil war if he does not. And in recent weeks, they’ve tightened their grip on the capital of Port-au-Prince, attacking the airport, main seaport, and other public buildings. Haiti has not had a president since 2021, and its National Assembly has been empty since lawmakers' terms expired last year.

It woke me up instantly and I looked up towards the ceiling, my head was back and my person sitting next to me was glued to the ceiling. And then I thought I was dreaming for a second. I thought, am I having the nightmare or something? And then he fell from the ceiling straight down on his face, three meters down to the floor.

The flight, operated by LATAM Airlines, had more than 270 people on board. At least one person is in serious condition . There’s an investigation underway, and Boeing says it’s working to gather more information. Since the aircraft was made in the U.S., the head of the FAA says they’ll be monitoring the situation closely as well.

This president has made very clear that he will not support extending tax cuts for those that make over $400,000. The top one and two percent should pay their fair share, in that way, that will pay for tax cuts for those that make under $400,000.

Biden’s plan would cut 3 trillion dollars from the national debt over the next decade. With Republicans in control of the House, the odds of it passing are low.

So, this budget proposal is more like Biden’s economic pitch to voters, on why he should be re-elected in November and what he'd want to do if that happened. It’s been several years since approximately 5,000 migrant children were separated from their parents under the Trump administration, and still today, as many as 2,000 are still not reunited.

"New York Magazine" takes a close look at the slow, and often painstaking work, of finding kids still in the U.S., and then tracking down their parents, who were deported to their home countries. Piper French wrote the story:

The more you delve into this process, the more you realize just how much work it is to undo something that was done so quickly and carelessly.

One big problem, French says, has been record keeping:

I mean, there's a few different aspects with regards to record keeping that made this really complicated. One was that there are a bunch of different agencies involved in separation and detention, and they didn't communicate with each other. They didn't have online systems that shared information.

So, the Biden administration created something called the "Family Reunification Task Force" in 2021 to set up some kind of system for finding families. To be clear, the government was compelled to reunify families by the courts. French says the success of this task force rests with individual lawyers and advocates, people who are willing to work for weeks, or months, to reunify a family, often based on flimsy information.

For years, they were getting names. Sometimes it was only a name. They would try to track down a birth certificate. And then, based on whatever information was available on the birth certificate, they just start calling and then start driving. and drive hundreds of miles in some cases, going to often pretty remote villages, places where they didn't know anyone.

Under a court settlement, the government is allowing eligible parents to reunite with their children in the U.S, with permission to stay for three years under something called “humanitarian parole.” In her reporting, French heard from lawyers and advocates that the intensive search of finding kids, and eventually tracking down parents, was not even the hardest part of their job. Sometimes it was watching the actual reunion, because so many years have passed since families were together.

Reunifications are supposed to be this joyful thing, right? And in some cases, they really are. The Amadors, who I profile in the piece, I watched a video of their reunification, and it's totally beautiful and happy, and they're all just hugging each other and won't let each other go. But that's just not always the case, because the trauma of the separation is very present.

She says in some cases, children do not recognize their parents. And others are angry, believing it was their parents’ choice to leave them. Today, a new novel by the late writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez will be published in English. The book, called “Until August,” is highly anticipated. It’s also highly controversial.

"NPR" has the story. Towards the end of his life, García Márquez was attempting to finish writing what would be his final novel about a married, middle-aged woman and her secret sex life. He suffered at the time with debilitating dementia and was struggling to make the novel work. He apparently attempted multiple versions before he finally gave up and declared that he never wanted the book to be published. In fact, he instructed his sons to destroy it. Shortly after, in 2014, he died.

We concluded that the book, though unfinished, made a lot of sense and was very moving.

That’s one of his sons, Rodrigo, speaking with "NPR" last week. Rodrigo described how Alzheimer’s robbed his father of the ability to assess the quality of his work, or even recognize it. Often, he would sit down to read one of his own books and couldn't make a sense of it. And it wasn't ‘til he reached the last page and saw his picture in the back cover that he realized, "Oh, this is one of my books," and then he'd start to read it again.

I'm really worried that something has been authorized which should not have been authorized.

The book’s editor, Cristóbal Pera, argued that the strong female protagonist from "Until August" makes it a good addition to his late friend's catalogue, which includes book like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera." Garcia Marquez’s son, Rodrigo, says he and his brother understand that people may feel uncomfortable with their choice. But they believe they made the right decision. We are speaking for our father because he gave us permission to speak for him.

that their father will forgive them, even if they made the wrong call. Finally, today is Equal Pay Day, one of the more sobering days on the calendar, because it’s a reminder of how much longer women must work to earn what men do. And places around the world still have a ways to go

to close the pay gap, according to a recently released global study. The World Bank found that not a single country offers women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, and that the gender gap is even wider than previously thought. So is the legal protection gap. For the first time, this report measured the impacts of workplace childcare and safety policies on men and women. And researchers found, on average, that women had far fewer legal protections in the workplace than men.

One of the things that we're trying to really emphasize is that it's important to write strong laws that legislate towards gender equality, but it's also important to invest in institutions and systems that implement those laws. And then to also understand, are those outcomes being achieved, that the law is intended to achieve.

Globally, women earned just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Many will argue there’s a moral imperative to making equal pay for equal work a reality. But there are also real financial incentives to do so.

According to the report, closing the gap could raise the global GDP by more than 20 percent. 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, stick around. We have a narrated version of the "New York Magazine" article on family separations that we talked about. If you’re listening in the Podcasts app, follow Apple News+ Narrated to find that story. And I’ll be back with the news tomorrow.