Speaker 1: It's Thursday, January 23rd. The fire risk never went away, and now the blazes are back. We start here. New wildfires are sweeping through Los Angeles. There were multiple fires starting in multiple different places, seemingly all at once. This comes amid new investigations into emergency alert failures. We'll take you there. The first bill sent to President Trump's desk will crack down on migrants.

Speaker 2: But if a person finds themselves wrongfully accused, they still might end up detained and removed from the country.

Speaker 1: Meanwhile, troops are on their way to the border, so what impact will these policies have? And when you say something's got a snowball's chance in Florida, that means it's unlikely.

Speaker 3: Our infrastructure is designed differently than states that are used to this.

Speaker 1: How a historic blizzard completely snarled the South. From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Brad Milkey. So much has been said of the recovery effort in the wake of the Los Angeles fires. More than two dozen have died, and in fact, when you factor in the toxic smoke that has clouded parts of the metro area there, health officials say the indirect death toll will potentially be much higher. But remember, it's still dry and windy there. And yesterday, new fires exploded.

Speaker 4: Dangerous Santa Ana winds. Back in fueling the flames. This is the Hughes fire spreading 30 acres a minute.

Speaker 1: This time in the northern areas of L.A. County, just past the city of Santa Clarita. So while we've been talking a lot about politics this week, and we will talk about politics later in the show, I want to start the day with the most pressing news of the morning. ABC's chief national correspondent, Matt Gutman, is based in L.A. He is back on the fire lines right now. Matt, what is happening there?

Speaker 5: I can tell you personally, Brad, that my family, people I know, are scared. And when we watched the plumes start, there was a chill that ran up most people's spines in L.A. There were multiple fires starting in multiple different places. Just driving to this fire, I encountered another fire on the 405 freeway, one of the primary north-south thoroughfares in Los Angeles. A car went on fire, burned a couple of trees.

Speaker 6: They managed to get the car fire under control right off the 405, but all these trees keep igniting, and in the background is the Hughes fire.

Speaker 5: From the freeway, you could see the massive towering column of smoke of the Hughes fire

Speaker 7: here. The moment you hear about it, and then it goes from, what, 50 acres to 300 to 3,500.

Speaker 5: And of course, people here in Castaic, in these towns north of L.A., also very afraid. 55,000 people in the evacuation zone.

Speaker 8: We have neighbors that got out, got our pets.

Speaker 5: We got our dogs out. That's my niece. That's a baby that's in here. We got her out. Immediately, they began evacuating five schools here. You see the traffic of people carrying their go bags, their pets, their kids, trying to get out of here.

Speaker 8: I was really scared because I thought I was going to get really hurt.

Speaker 5: And then there were lots of folks who tried to fireproof their homes, to stay behind, to ensure that they could try to spare their homes.

Speaker 6: How long have you been standing here trying to water everything down? Well, we started at the front of the house a couple hours ago.

Speaker 5: And one of the people I met, hose in hand, was Tony Caballero, here in Castaic, who was watching the fire devour the mountainside just across the reservoir from where he lived.

Speaker 6: So you're pumping pool water to hose down the vegetation here?

Speaker 9: Absolutely. I don't want to leave the farmer without pressure on the hydrant.

Speaker 10: There has been this massive firefighting effort over the past 18 hours here. The situation remains dynamic and the fire remains a difficult fire to contain, although we are getting the upper hand.

Speaker 5: And again, with the fire swirling because of this erratic wind pattern that we're in, nobody exactly knows where it's going to move because the wind picks up embers and can cast them hundreds of yards ahead of the fire, even miles ahead of the fire, depending on

Speaker 1: the wind speed. Yeah. What is the forecast? Because there's rain on the way, we've heard, right? So will that mitigate what we're seeing there?

Speaker 5: So the winds are expected to persist through today. And then this weekend, we have another weather pattern coming in for the first time in over eight months, Brad. And when you see the vegetation out here, you can tell how dry it is and why it's igniting like tinder. It is so dry. So for the first time in over eight months, we are going to get, or forecast to get some appreciable rain. We're not sure how much, but the concern is that in the burn scar areas above Altadena and above Pacific Palisades, that the soil there is now hydrophobic. This is a word that we're going to hear a lot more of in the coming weeks and months. Basically what happens in these fires, they burn so hot, they cook and burn, not just the vegetation, but also the soil and the rocks. And I was on the Eaton fire, and I can tell you, it feels like quicksand when you're walking through it. It feels like you're at a dune at a beach. You can't imagine that this was once a mountainside with trees and vegetation. And what happens is when the rain hits that, it's like water off a duck's back. It becomes slick, it comes roaring off the hillside, and that's what causes mudslides. And the concern is that that is the next calamity that Los Angelinos have to fear right now. And already I'm told that the National Guard has been moving off from trying to protect some of these neighborhoods to filling sandbags.

Speaker 1: That's unbelievable because you think rain, you're like, oh, thank goodness. And yet this. Lastly, Matt, the scariest part about the fires earlier this month was how quickly they spread. We saw people struggling to escape. And the question has been, was there a way to get people out earlier? You've been reporting on these electronic alert systems that were supposed to aid that process, right? What are you learning?

Speaker 5: So what we've noticed and what the LA Times and the New York Times have reported on as well is that there were many people living west of a street called Lake Avenue in Altadena who didn't get emergency alerts. And these are absolutely essential to informing people when to get ready to go. That's the evacuation warning. And when they need to leave their house, that's the evacuation order.

Speaker 11: I'm so sorry.

Speaker 12: It's the first time I'm seeing everything is gone.

Speaker 5: The people we've spoken to, including a woman named Linda Zhang, who we found in the debris of her home looking for her cat, say they didn't get it until well after they evacuated. Were there evacuation alerts on the phones?

Speaker 12: When I got on the ambulance, then I received it.

Speaker 5: Only once you were on the ambulance and everything was burning around. The fire started at 6.15, 6.10 p.m. on Tuesday, January 7th. Linda left her house because someone banged on her door at 5 a.m., went to a fire station, was taken via ambulance out of the danger zone as her house burned down. And only half an hour after that, did she get her first emergency alert, which is more than 11 hours after the fire began. There are people in that same section of Altadena who say that they never got an emergency alert.

Speaker 13: I would have been dead if I had listened to that.

Speaker 5: And it's that western part of Altadena where 17 people, all 17 people killed in the fire were found dead.

Speaker 13: There must be a thorough examination of the life-saving emergency notification actions that took place throughout the wildfire events earlier this month.

Speaker 5: And so at this point, L.A. County Supervisor Catherine Barger is demanding an independent investigation into the emergency alert system. And it wasn't just one mistake. There had been continuous mistakes throughout those first couple of days. The most notable of them was on January 9th, two days after the fires began, there was a countywide evacuation order issued to all 10-plus million people living in L.A. County. Even if they were really far from where the fires were, which you can imagine caused a tremendous amount of fear and confusion, and even more dangerously, a little bit of suspicion and lack of trust in the emergency alert system in L.A. County.

Speaker 1: Right. You need to have people taking these things seriously, and you need to have the alerts coming out in a quick and accurate way. Matt Gutman, back on the fire lines in Southern California. Stay safe and thank you. Thanks, Brad. Next up on Start Here, President Trump is sending troops to the border, but what will they do when they get there? We're back in a bit. For this new White House, this week is all about firsts. President Trump issued his first executive orders this week, he got his first cabinet member confirmed, and he issued his first pardons. In fact, you've probably heard so much about the January 6th pardons, you might have missed last night the president issued a pardon for two Washington, D.C. police officers convicted for their roles in a motorist's death. They'd been chasing a guy on the scooter, but then smashed into another person driving their car, and then tried to hide details of that crash from their department. It turned out that scooter driver they were originally chasing was an undocumented immigrant, and that seemed to play a key role in why President Trump issued his pardon.

Speaker 11: They got five-year jail sentences, you know the case, and we're looking at that in order to give them a, we gotta give them a break.

Speaker 1: Last night, more firsts, once again tied to Trump's focus on immigration. The Pentagon announced it's sending active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Washington, Congress has passed a bill that will become Trump's first that's signed into law, one that might get ICE agents involved in responding to low-level crimes. ABC's Armando Garcia covers immigration, and so Armando, I mean the first law President Trump seems poised to sign is the Lakin-Riley Act. This was named after a young woman who was murdered in Georgia by a Venezuelan migrant who had been caught at the border when he was trying to come into the country. He was released into the U.S. as he awaited asylum hearings, and in the meantime was arrested several times for different low-level crimes, and he was never sent back for any of them. So what would this new law do?

Speaker 2: Well, the point of the law, Brad, is for DHS to quickly be able to detain migrants convicted or charged or who admit to certain crimes like burglary and theft, and that was a major problem for a lot of critics of the bill.

Speaker 14: You're asked to vote to advance a constitutionally dubious bill that fails to address any of the real problems of our broken immigration system, but requires the mandatory detention and deportation of people simply accused of a crime.

Speaker 2: What if a person finds themselves wrongfully accused, they still might end up detained and removed from the country? The bill also gives the states a lot more power to challenge federal immigration law. I mean, you and I have been talking about this for many, many years now. We saw that play out a lot in Texas with them literally stalling almost every single Biden immigration policy by filing a lawsuit in conservative-leaning courts.

Speaker 15: The standing provisions in the Lake and Riley Act actually give the states the ability to challenge it in court in future open borders administrations that refuse to follow the law as written by Congress.

Speaker 2: That's now the law of the land, and states will have more power to do just that. Now, according to documents we obtained, ICE has been telling Congress for weeks that given the current funding that they have, it would be impossible to fully enforce the law. They say they need at least $27 billion just to start with. That's for removal flights, tons of new positions that they need to add, as well as at least 110,000 additional detention beds. FYI, they're currently only funded for about 41,000, so that kind of gives you an idea of how much they would have to beef up their detention capacity. And of course, we're only talking about enforcing one specific law, not any of the executive orders that Trump has issued. So Congress is definitely finding out that mass deportation costs a massive amount of money.

Speaker 1: I see, so you'd actually have like federal agents more involved with what in some towns might be considered just kind of like local crimes. However, this did have some bipartisan support. Some Democrats like John Fetterman in the Senate were on board with this. Hey, in the meantime, Armando, the other, I mean, it's very dramatic to hear that we are going to be sending more than a thousand troops to the southern border under President Trump's orders. Some of these deployments apparently are happening right now. By the end of the week, apparently it's going to be 1,500 members of the Army and Marines. What is the mission and how significant is it?

Speaker 2: Well, senior defense officials say troops are going to be down at the southern border by the end of the week, but they are not going to be used for law enforcement use. To be clear, there's already about 1,500 troops down at the border serving in support roles. The DHS and CBP, they've been down there for years. That's separate to some state National Guard that's also there supporting Governor Abbott's Operation Lone Star in Texas. Now, when troops are deployed to the border, they're typically helping with building barriers or processing migrants. Typically only CBP actually arrests and apprehends migrants. But in Texas, for example, we've seen National Guard's responsibilities expanded under Governor Abbott's direction. But Brad, when these troops get down there, it's possible that they're not going to see a ton of action. The number of daily encounters at the border have actually been lower than at some points during the first Trump administration. In December 2024, Border Patrol encountered migrants about 47,300 times in between ports of entry. That's 81% lower than in December 2023. It's also the lowest daily average for a month since July 2020, when Trump, of course, was president. And Brad, this is obviously another way that President Trump wants to show that he's making good on his promise to be tough on immigration.

Speaker 16: This border crisis is 20 times worse than it was in 2016. But I'll get it solved. I'll get it solved fast. And we'll get back to making our country strong again.

Speaker 2: So while the military might not have a lot to do when they get there at first, in the next few days, we might see larger groups of people congregate on the southern side, on the Mexican side of the border. And that's because we're still in the first week of the Trump presidency and Asylum is essentially dead at the border. He has really struck down a lot of the Biden policies that allowed people to come here legally. For example, CBP One app, he got rid of that on day one. People were told that even if you had an appointment and were ready to present yourself legally at a port of entry to try to seek asylum, that those appointments were canceled. So of course, that coupled with the military now heading down to the border, it's just a big, big show of force. And I think that's exactly what the Trump presidency campaigned on and what they're trying to deliver now on their very first week.

Speaker 1: I see. So less illegal crossings right now, but then once you put a lot of people on the other side of the border and make them desperate, like there's no legal ways to enter and no sign of any legal ways to enter, that is when the desperation creeps up and that is when you start seeing more illegal crossings. Just good reality checks here on both sides of the border. Armando Garcia covering immigration. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. I've got a buddy who leaves New York most winters. He goes down south to escape the snow. Well, yesterday he sent me a photo from New Orleans of him covered in powder, like icicles hanging from the eyebrows type stuff. These are the scenes that are dominating Instagram feeds and newsrooms across the American South as residents deal with the biggest snowstorm in decades. ABC's Trevor Ault is in, wait for it, Florida, where there have been full blown blizzards this week. Trevor, how much snow are we talking about? Because this is not just like a cute dusting.

Speaker 17: No, Brad, we're talking about more recorded snow than we've ever seen for the state of Florida. And this is not just a Florida issue. Texas has been hammered. Georgia also really has been battling a mess. And Louisiana, too. I mean, there are parts of Louisiana that got their first blizzard warning ever issued. Your buddy in New Orleans, they're talking about eight inches of snow there in the French quarter where there's still bands marching down the street in the midst of snowball fights, too. I mean, this is truly a once in a lifetime snowstorm. We're talking about weather records and how long we've been tracking it. We can only go back 130 years. And at least in Florida, in the area around Pensacola, they had more snow than they've ever had before. So there's literally not a single person alive in Florida that has ever seen the amount of snow that they have gotten from this snowstorm.

Speaker 13: I knew it was going to snow, but I didn't know it was going to be like actual thick snow.

Speaker 8: I had exams. I had no choice. I had to walk.

Speaker 18: It was cold. My bucket list was to see it snow here at the beach just to experience it.

Speaker 17: And of course, it's not just a one off thing. You have to deal with the treatment in a place where they don't often get a lot of snow and they're not really equipped for it. As the weather continues to move, it's still warm because it is Florida. So you have some of that snow melt, but then it gets cold again. It freezes.

Speaker 19: It is a beautiful, sunshiny day, not a cloud in the sky, but just frigid. I think I woke up at around 6 a.m. this morning. It was 16 degrees, which is highly unusual for us at any time of the year.

Speaker 17: Those conditions are really dangerous still. And this has been a deadly storm to begin with. There's already been at least 10 deaths and counting a lot of them on the highways, Brad.

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I'm trying to figure out what is it? Because I'm sure there are people that are like, well, yeah, welcome to snowstorms. Deal with it. But I guess I'm wondering what this does to an area that's not used to it. Because we've seen in the Pacific Northwest, when there were big heat waves, a lot of houses don't have air conditioning. And so it actually becomes more dangerous there than it would in hotter places. What happens when there's a huge snowstorm in the south? Yeah.

Speaker 17: And you could be forgiven for thinking, well, they just don't know how to drive down there. I mean, yes, there's an element where, of course, they don't know how to drive in it because they never had to do it before. But there is a lot to be said about how much of a difference salt treatment and snow plows really can make in the aftermath of a snowstorm like this and all those areas that usually get hammered. I mean, Chicago by itself, Brad, has hundreds of snow plows ready to deploy all the time.

Speaker 3: Our infrastructure is designed differently than states that are used to this. I mean, if this were South Dakota, they would just shrug their shoulders. Now, the state has done a lot to prepare.

Speaker 17: Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis said the other day that they had 11 plows for the state. Now, they've been taking some out on loan. I mean, Houston brought in some snow plows from Wisconsin, a few different states that have been generous enough to give some of their supply of snow plows. That will help out a little bit. But I spent all day in Tallahassee yesterday. I did not see a single snow plow. And I can tell you, based on those conditions, and ice is certainly a factor in it, too, a treated road, no matter how much snow there is, is much better than an untreated one. And having spent a lot of time reporting on lake effect snow in Buffalo, where they'll get well over a foot, sometimes two feet, it felt safer to drive there after all that snowfall than it did here in Tallahassee yesterday after one and three quarters inches of sleet because there was no treatment on the roads. And so, yeah, there's an element where the drivers are just having to figure it out. But there's also the problem of having to deal with it, and it sticks around because it has been so cold. So it's a several-day event. Even that one and a half inches of sleet is enough to shut down basically every business in Tallahassee.

Speaker 1: I was going to say, what is this meant for just interstates, companies, businesses throughout this? Because this is so widespread.

Speaker 17: Yeah. It's paralyzed a ton, huge portions of the Gulf and really a lot of the South, granted. I-75, we saw some drivers that were stranded near Atlanta for 15 hours overnight because a truck getting into a crash, catching on fire. There's been a few different accidents like that, not to mention the number of deadly incidents too. And in the severe cold, it is truly life-threatening. When you have a storm like this, naturally, there are a lot of power outages. They've had to open up a lot of different shelters to hundreds of people that just need a place to stay where they can stay warm in a place where, even in January, a lot of people would be watering their lawns because it would be so dry and warm.

Speaker 1: Really bizarre scenes here. People have described it as kind of an upside-down storm, that the North is relatively dry. Very cold, but relatively dry compared to what we are seeing across the South right now. Trevor Ault, thank you so much. Thank you, Brad. Okay, one more quick break. When we come back, he was bearish on the blockchain until he started selling his own crypto. One last thing is next. And one last thing. Lots of people watch the stock markets in the first days of a new administration. But if you're just keeping track of dollars and cents, you're thinking in the wrong currency.

Speaker 20: I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet.

Speaker 1: Just ahead of Inauguration Day, Donald Trump launched his own brand of cryptocurrency. This is like Bitcoin or Ethereum, those currencies that exist solely in digital form that have no central bank and can be started by anyone. However, unlike those ones that you might have heard of, this product, simply called Trump with a dollar sign in front of it, is not expected to be used as a currency, really. These are called meme coins. That's ABC's Elizabeth Schulze, who covers economics and meme-onomics.

Speaker 12: I was trying to think of an analogy for what a meme coin is. It's kind of like a digital baseball card or Pokemon card. Like basically, it's a way to invest in a personality.

Speaker 1: This is a great analogy because there are people that buy baseball cards solely because they like baseball players. It's a hobby. And there are Trump supporters who will go, oh, this is like a cool way to show support and be part of this community. It's like buying a pair of Trump shoes or a Trump-branded water bottle. But this is digital. Good, clean fun. But then there are those who buy baseball cards solely to see their value go up. If it's scarce enough and if people want it enough, that trading value can skyrocket.

Speaker 12: The value of that meme coin, of the Trump meme coin, went from zero. This was worth nothing on Friday. Launched Friday night. And on Monday, when Trump was inaugurated, it went to $8 billion.

Speaker 1: But here's the important thing to know about these sorts of cryptocurrencies. President Trump and the people around him created this crypto coin and presumably would own large quantities of it. So when people initially buy these coins, that money is going to Trump Ventures. And then when the president sells his stake, he'd earn even more. Which is why it's worth noting that the first lady now has also started minting crypto.

Speaker 12: Sunday night on the eve of the inauguration, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, also launched her own meme coin, which briefly hit $1 billion. That's a little bit below that now. But what you're seeing is the president and the first lady find a way to basically directly cash in on this crypto trend and put their names out there. And people are buying into it.

Speaker 1: Now, to some people, this enterprise comes off as shady. We've seen it happen before, where the creator of a cryptocurrency sells their stake in it right when the value starts to tank. It's the regular people that got swept up in the moment that have now spent hundreds or thousands of dollars buying something they now can't even hold and that nobody wants. However, that's a risk with all types of crypto. They're not regulated like traditional currency. What's different about these coins, Elizabeth says, is who's doing the regulating.

Speaker 12: The crypto industry says Trump is the crypto president. Trump went to a Bitcoin conference over the summer and basically vowed to be a best friend to this industry. He said that he would take a light-handed approach toward regulation. And that is exactly what the crypto industry wanted to hear, because for years, Brad, there's been this back and forth about how exactly should cryptocurrency be regulated.

Speaker 1: She says it's no coincidence that the price of Bitcoin has exploded since Election Day. It's no surprise that those around Trump would think they could profit off of selling meme coins. But what is unprecedented is the commander in chief himself effectively launching a business that he profits from in a nascent industry he will have a hand in shaping. There are far-reaching questions about conflicts of interest.

Speaker 12: Also, you have the reality that you could see a foreign government decide to invest millions, billions of dollars into Trump's crypto meme coin and then essentially maybe in return say, OK, hey, that made you really rich. What can you do for us when it comes to foreign policy?

Speaker 1: We hear about meme stocks all the time, investments that are driven by vibes more than financial discretion. Well, compared to stocks, crypto is the Wild West and the sheriff has something he'd like to sell you. By the way, did you catch how Elizabeth translated the concept of baseball cards for anyone who's not an old man at heart like myself? She was like, you know, like baseball or Pokemon cards. Like, thank you. Now they understand. Yes. The magic of the gathering cards. Like, those have cultural relevance. Well, I, an adult man, have a Mike Trout rookie card on my mantle that I got as an adult and I'm never selling him. More on all these stories on ABCnews.com and the ABC News app. I'm Brad Milkey. See you tomorrow.