U.S. Employers Forced to Fire Thousands of Immigrants, and a Showdown over Peptides

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[upbeat music] From The New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

Today is Thursday, July 23rd.

Here's what we're covering.

Employers across the US are facing a deadline of tomorrow to fire hundreds of thousands of people whose authorization to work in the country has been terminated by the Trump administration.

Last Friday was the deadline for businesses to dismiss immigrants from six countries, including Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Syria, whose temporary protected status has now ended.

Tomorrow, the work permits of Haitians with TPS will expire.

More than 330,000 Haitians have been living in the US under that program, and they could also now be deported.

The Department of Homeland Security gave employers the deadlines this month after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to end some TPS protections.

The status is given to migrants from countries facing crises like natural disasters or civil unrest, and the administration stressed the program was designed to be temporary.

One industry that's expected to take a big hit from these changes is healthcare.

At least 50,000 TPS holders work in that field, which has already been struggling to fill positions, especially as Americans get older and need more long-term care.

Around the country, The Times has been talking with senior care facilities that are having to let people go, some of whom have worked there for years.

The chief executive of a senior living provider in the Boston area said he's expecting to have to dismiss 40 Haitian workers tomorrow.

It comes as these facilities were already losing staff due to changes in the DACA program, which shields people brought to the US as children from deportation.

Renewing your DACA status used to take several weeks, but under the Trump administration, it's now a months-long process, forcing thousands of people out of the workforce, at least temporarily.

The head of an industry group that represents more than 5,000 senior service providers called the Trump administration's immigration policies a disservice to older adults and families in need of care, and said, quote, "There is no workforce waiting in the wings." In Washington today, there could be a high-profile showdown over the future of what's become a buzzy wellness trend: peptides.

Peptides are everything right now, and we all have our favorite.

Tirzepatide gets the job done, suppresses your appetite.

Number two, Sloop three three two cranks up that metabolic rate.

What this is gonna do is improve fine lines, wrinkles, and firmness.

Add this to your routine and thank us later.

Recently, influencers and celebrities have been talking up what they describe as a miracle drug, claiming peptides can give you brighter skin, bigger muscles, heal your wounds, or even extend your lifespan.

I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides.

I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.

One of the most prominent supporters of the drugs is Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been pushing the FDA to make peptides more widely accessible.

Chemically speaking, our bodies naturally produce thousands of peptides, which are short chains of amino acids.

They do everything from regulating hormones to reducing inflammation.

Endorphins, for example, are peptides.

So are medications like Ozempic.

But when influencers talk about them, they're often talking about a vast constellation of experimental products that can, in some cases, be dangerous, potentially leading to severe allergic reactions or tumor growth.

A few years ago, the federal government banned specialized pharmacies from producing a number of peptide injections because of safety concerns.

Now, under Kennedy, the FDA is considering whether to overturn that ban.

Starting today, a 19-member FDA advisory panel will take up the issue.

And in a highly unusual situation, six of the people appointed to the panel sell or dispense peptides themselves, even though panels like this are intended to be neutral bodies of outside experts.

Kennedy has argued that lifting restrictions on these peptides would bring them into mainstream production instead of letting them circulate on a more dangerous black market, though he's also made more sweeping arguments, saying at one point, quote, "If you want to take an experimental drug, you can do that.

You ought to be able to do that." Meanwhile, critics of opening the peptide floodgates point to the fact that there is little to no data about exactly how many popular peptide products actually work in humans.

One doctor and researcher told The Times, quote, "I don't have a bias that the peptides are bad necessarily.

I just want to see the evidence, and we don't have any." After it meets today and tomorrow, the FDA panel will make a recommendation about the peptides to the agency's commissioner, though Kennedy will have the authority to overrule any final decision.

In response to questions about the makeup of the panel, the Department of Health and Human Services said, quote, "All committee members underwent the same ethics review and vetting process required of all FDA advisory committee members." In the past year- Airports are seeing their highest wait times in TSA history ...

multiple government shutdowns turned the security lines at airports into an absolute mess.

The line snaking its way through the terminal for a second straight day.

With TSA workers going unpaid, some lines stretched all the way outside into the parking lot as passengers waited three, four, even five hours.

But a handful of airports, like San Francisco, avoided that crisis because their checkpoints are staffed by private contractors instead of the TSA.

And now more airports are making the switch.

Tampa, Des Moines, and Charleston are opting into a similar public-private screening initiative that's being rolled out by the Trump administration.

Under that program, a small handful of TSA managers oversee private employees who've gone through the same training as regular TSA agents.

Airport security actually used to be all private before September 11th, at which point the TSA replaced the patchwork of security operations across the US.

This week, the head of a union representing nearly 50,000 TSA agents argued that a return to a system like that, even with increased federal oversight, could jeopardize public safety.

He said, quote, "We don't have to theorize about what that may look like because we have been through this before." [Instrumental music] Should people stop eating fresh produce? Like, how do you avoid getting this thing? Across the country, Americans are in the grip of a great lettuce scare.

All I want is a crispy Caesar salad, but we can't have lettuce right now, so-

Cyclospora infections tied at least in part to leafy greens have soared to record highs, with state health departments reporting more than 11,000 infections, which can cause severe diarrhea.

There's been one major lettuce recall by Taylor Farms, the country's largest produce supplier, and consumers are now very wary.

Did you know you can make salad without lettuce? And that there's veggies that you can peel?

Shelves at grocery stores are full of unpurchased bags of spinach, arugula, romaine, and visits to chains like Sweetgreen, Chopped, and Chipotle are down, according to one market research group.

The group also found that Taco Bell has been hit especially hard.

Visits to the chain have plummeted almost 20% after authorities linked some cases of the illness to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and served at Taco Bell locations.

Overall, there's still a lot of uncertainty about the outbreak, exactly where it's coming from, what specific produce is affected, and that is contributing to people's decision to just stay away from greens.

Some smaller restaurants said they've decided to pull all lettuce from their menus, and one food influencer told The Times she recently went out to dinner to a restaurant where she usually orders a salad, and instead, quote, "I ate some french fries." [Instrumental music] And finally, a little more than a decade ago, people fishing in a vast lake on the Vermont-Quebec border started noticing something strange.

The brown bullhead catfish they were reeling in were covered in velvety black growths.

Skin cancer.

Scientists who started looking into why the fish were getting sick thought that was a bit odd, since skin cancer is often caused by UV light, and the catfish live in the mud deep at the bottom of the lake.

Now, after years of research, doing DNA testing, and ruling out a wide range of possible explanations, a team at the University of Vermont has reached a remarkable conclusion.

The catfish are victims of a contagious form of cancer.

According to a report published yesterday in the journal Nature, the scientists say they think it started with a single catfish getting a tumor, and the cancer then spread through the water and invaded other catfish, potentially through scratches or wounds on their bodies.

Contagious cancer isn't unheard of, but so far it's only been found in a tiny and seemingly random collection of species.

Some shellfish, dogs, which can transmit a cancer called CTVT during sex, and Tasmanian devils, which have been pushed to the brink of extinction by devil facial tumor disease, which is just a horrifying name.

For now, there's little research to indicate that contagious cancers are circulating among humans, but experts say it's conceivable that one could be discovered in the future.

One of the authors of the report on the catfish told The Times, quote, "Is this really as rare as we think it is, or are we just not looking?" [Instrumental music] Those are the headlines.

Today on The Daily, why the Trump administration is helping build a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia at the same time as it's trying to destroy the nuclear program in Iran.

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 with the latest and the Friday News Quiz.

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