On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY National Immigration Reporter Lauren Villgran talks about a Border Patrol agent who shifted to migrant aid. The mother of the Georgia shooting suspect said she called the school before the attack. A tropical system could be a hurricane by Wednesday in the Gulf of Mexico. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses geoengineering and whether it could be a viable climate change fix. The U.S. Open is in the books. NFL Week 1 wraps up after a week of firsts.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Monday, September 9th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today we hear about a long-time border patrol agent who shifted to migrant aid. Plus, new developments this weekend in the aftermath of the Georgia shooting. And, could geoengineering help fix climate change?

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After decades working as a border patrol agent, one man has a new role, migrant aid. I spoke with USA TODAY national immigration reporter, Lauren Villagran for more. Lauren, thanks for hopping on today.

Lauren Villagran:

Hey, Taylor. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Lauren, would you just start by telling us about Michael DeBruhl and his career as a border patrol agent?

Lauren Villagran:

Yeah. Michael DeBruhl was a border patrol agent and sector chief in a 26-year career with the agency. He started as a border patrol agent back in 1989, patrolling the Rio Grande in Texas, and his career took him all over, to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, to Washington D.C. and back to Texas.

Taylor Wilson:

How and why did he then shift to working in migrant aid after he retired?

Lauren Villagran:

It's such an interesting story. I met Michael a couple of years ago during an intense wave of migration at the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, where he had taken over a migrant shelter at a Catholic church in Downtown. When I went to visit the refuge to speak with migrants, I learned that he had previously been a border agent. In a place like El Paso, where folks were born and raised on the border, things often aren't black and white, and people's lives intersect in extraordinary ways.

But Michael had told me that after he retired in 2014, he became a homeland security investigator, of course the pandemic hit, he retired a second time. That was around the time, Taylor, that the conversation nationally around immigration became very heated. He started to hear things that bothered him that he knew not to be true at the border as a law enforcement officer and also as a resident.

He decided he didn't really know how to change what the national conversation was, but he figured he could volunteer somewhere, and he began volunteering at a local migrant shelter.

Taylor Wilson:

What lessons has he really taken away since doing some of this work, Lauren?

Lauren Villagran:

I don't know if there are lessons for him or rather lessons that we all can learn from his experience. As you know, the immigration debate is so polarized in this country. It's very interesting to meet someone like Michael, who spent an illustrious career in law enforcement and now in retirement, works on the side of migrant aid.

What I think it really told me, and also has told people who have heard him speak, "That it is possible..." in his words, "... to pursue strategies for border and national security, while also providing for the dignity of people amid a heavy wave of human migration at the border." What's really interesting, Taylor, is that his work is now winding down.

Taylor Wilson:

Do we not need this kind of migrant aid to the same level that we talked about earlier this year, last year, and in recent years?

Lauren Villagran:

In El Paso, no. And all along the border Taylor, over the past five months, migrant crossings between ports of entry have declined dramatically. In fact, in July, El Paso sector in Texas saw just 12,000 migrant encounters. The number hadn't been that low since 2021. It looks like Sacred Heart Catholic Church is going to be closing its migrant shelters soon.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow. Lauren Villagran covers the border and immigration for USA TODAY. Really interesting perspective in this story, Lauren. Thanks so much.

Lauren Villagran:

Thanks, Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

The mother of the 14-year-old boy charged with killing four people at a rural Georgia high school said she alerted the school counselor the morning of the shooting that there was an extreme emergency and her son needed to be found. That's according to a Washington Post report over the weekend. A call log obtained by the Post shows Marcee Gray, the alleged shooter's mother, made a 10-minute phone call to the school about half an hour before the shooting is believed to have started.

The suspect's grandfather told the New York Post that Gray rushed to Winder, about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, after getting a text message from her son that read, "I'm sorry, Mom." A 14-year-old suspect has been charged with four counts of felony murder and is being held without bond at a juvenile detention facility. His father was also arraigned on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children.

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A potential tropical storm forming in the Gulf of Mexico could be a low-end Category One hurricane by Wednesday and headed toward a landfall on the upper Texas or southwestern Louisiana coasts. The National Hurricane Center put the chances of tropical storm formation at 90% within 48 hours in an update last night. A tropical storm watch has been issued for parts of Texas and the Mexican coast. Unless one of the systems being watched in the tropical Atlantic forms first, this storm would become the sixth name storm of the 2024 season and would be named Francine.

It's been a relatively quiet storm season so far, despite dire outlooks initially. No name storms have formed since August 12th. That's the longest stretch since 1968 that's this long with no hurricane formations between August and September according to Phil Klotzbach, senior hurricane scientist at Colorado State University. You can stay up on all the latest with this week's storm on usatoday.com.

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Work around geoengineering aims to cool the planet. Is it a climate-change fix or could it backfire? I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent Elizabeth Weise to learn more. Hey there, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Hey, how's it going?

Taylor Wilson:

Good, good. Thanks for hopping on today. I just want to start here. I think a lot of folks may not be familiar with this term. What is geoengineering and how does really the science work here?

Elizabeth Weise:

It sounds like it should have something to do with maybe Legos or perhaps a movie that Pierce Brosnan was in a long time ago. Basically, the idea is that someone would literally engineer the climate of the planet because of climate change. There are two types of geoengineering.

There's the type of geoengineering where we just pull excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere, because we've put so much into it and that's causing global warming. So, we suck as much out of the atmosphere as we can and we push it back down under the earth where it came from originally, and someplace where it can't come out again, and hopefully eventually get back to pre-industrial revolution levels of carbon dioxide so that we no longer have global warming. But realistically, that is a huge endeavor, insanely expensive, not even sure we could pull it off. Lots of problems there.

The other kind of geoengineering, which is often called solar geoengineering, is various schemes that would cause the earth to reflect back a tiny bit more solar radiation than it currently does, which would cool things down. The idea is we could do things that might cool down the atmosphere a bit, and this would buy us time while we try and lower the amount of CO₂ that we're pumping into the world.

Taylor Wilson:

You spoke with folks from a company that really is trying to advance climate engineering. What work exactly are they doing?

Elizabeth Weise:

These are these two guys down in Silicon Valley. They're like, "This is something that scientists in the UN and maybe national government should be talking about and doing, but nobody's doing it, so we're just going to do it ourselves." They are doing it at such an infinitesimally small level that it's not even clear it's going to have a huge amount of effect, but they're proof of concept.

They started this company called Make Sunsets. They go out to this rural park, they get these big, biodegradable, latex weather balloons, maybe when you fill them up, they're about eight feet round. They fill them up with sulfur dioxide and a little bit of helium, and then they release them. The things go way high up into the atmosphere, 14 miles up, where they pop and they release their sulfur dioxide.

The sulfur dioxide, although it's clear, is slightly reflective of solar radiation. So, each time they send one of these little weather balloons up, a little less sun gets through to the earth, and the earth gets a tiny, tiny bit cooler. So, it's a proof of concept that if we really needed to bring the earth's temperature down, this is how we would do it.

We know that this works because this is what happens when there are enormous volcanic eruptions, when they throw so much dust and sulfur dioxide up into the upper stratosphere that it reflects enough of the sun's radiation that the earth actually cools by a degree or two. It only lasts for about a year to two years, but we know it works. The thing is, it's really hard to replicate the size of the volcanic eruption.

Their name, Make Sunsets, actually comes from the fact that when you throw dust and sulfur dioxide and things way up high in the stratosphere, like volcanoes do, you actually get really bright red, beautiful sunsets.

Taylor Wilson:

Wow, interesting. What have been some of the historic concerns, and what could still go wrong?

Elizabeth Weise:

People have been talking about this for decades. Scientists and conservationists, they're like, "Absolutely no. Never, never, never. This is a horrible idea. What if the earth cools at different levels so that other areas get hotter when some areas get cooler? What if it impacts the way that global wind patterns happen, or when the monsoons come that lots of places in the world depend on for agriculture?"

Taylor Wilson:

In terms of what's next here, Beth, I know there are, as you outlined, still debates over regulation and... Really, where do we go from here?

Elizabeth Weise:

I've written about geoengineering a couple of times in the course of my career, and every time I've talked to scientists or to conservation groups, they've all said, "No, no, no, don't do that." And all of a sudden, they're starting to say, "Whoa, climate change is so bad and it's going to get so much worse that maybe we at least need to start doing the research to figure out what works, what doesn't, what's dangerous, what isn't. Because we may not have a choice. We may have to do some of these things. And better that we figure out now what the most dangerous ways are and avoid them, than stick our heads in the stand and then look up 10 years from now and say, 'Oh, boy. What are we going to do?'"

And that really surprised me. I mean, even US groups that have always just been a hard no, were suddenly saying, "We're looking into it." And we need to figure out, if we are going to do it, who's in charge? Because right now, there's nobody to stop you from sending a weather balloon up and throwing some sulfur dioxide into the air. Because if there were, we'd all have to stop arriving immediately, because that's what our cars do too. A lot of things are starting to shift, which is making it interesting and also worrisome.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. We'll be keeping an eye out for what's next. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thank you, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

As always, a pleasure.

Taylor Wilson:

For more on the science of geoengineering, check out our May 23rd episode from earlier this year on the topic, with Yale lecturer, Wake Smith, author of Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention.

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The US Open is in the books. Italian Jannik Sinner took down American Taylor Fritz yesterday in the men's singles final. He lived up to his number one ranking, taking Fritz down in straight sets. It's Sinner's first US open title. And earlier this year, he won his first major of any kind at the Australian Open.

Sinner's victory came after Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka won the Women's singles final over American Jessica Pagula on Saturday. It's Sabalenka's third Grand Slam. You can read more from USA TODAY Sports.

And arguably the busiest sports time of the year continues tonight with the first Monday night football contest of the season, featuring the defending NFC champion San Francisco 49ers hosting the New York Jets. The game caps off a busy week one that saw the defending Super Bowl champion, Kansas City Chiefs, win on opening night. And on Friday, we saw the first NFL game in Brazil or anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.

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