Brian Laira on WNYC.

Now we'll talk with two WNYC reporters about two major stories from the last day that converged in a surprising way.

Mayor Mamdani's unannounced meeting with President Trump at the White House

and the detention and release of a Columbia University student by ICE. We might have seen the meeting coming Tuesday night

when Trump gave Mamdani a shout out at the State of the Union. And even the new communist mayor of New York City, I think he's a nice guy, actually.

Speak to him a lot.

Bad policy, but nice guy.

And two days later, without any notice, Mom Dani was in the Oval Office.

That same morning, yesterday morning, ICE detained Columbia student Elmina Aga Yeva in a questionable way.

By the afternoon, she was free.

With me now to talk about this meeting between the mayor and the president and the events of

Columbia are WNYC and Gothamist reporters, Bridget Bergen, our senior political correspondent,

and Arias Sundaram, who covers race and immigration.

Bridget, Mamdani surprised us all with this an unannounced meeting between him and Trump yesterday.

What do we know about how this meeting came together?

Well, we know that it didn't appear on either of the official's public schedules, but it had been scheduled in advance.

And the mayor was headed to D.C. to talk about housing. That was the agenda for the meeting. Some of these other issues that we're

going to talk about also came up in that meeting. But it's something that they wanted to,

you know, it was a follow up to their initial meeting back in November.

You know, as our listeners would probably recall, that was a meeting that went, I think,

shockingly, surprisingly, bizarrely well. And people were really taken with the chemistry that

seemed to be between the mayor and the president,

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