LONDON — Top researchers say scientific discoveries using AI — including new drugs and better disaster forecasting — will help win people's trust in the technology. But they also cautioned against moving too fast.

• Why it matters: Public trust in AI is eroding, putting the technology's wide adoption and potential benefits at risk, Axios' Alison Snyder reports from a forum hosted by Google DeepMind and the Royal Society.

🖼️ The big picture: Efforts range from the search for beneficial new materials to the quest to build a quantum computer, to mapping the human body's 37.2 trillion cells.

Google's top executives in attendance — DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and James Manyika, SVP of research, technology and society — said they're trying to increase trust in AI by using it to solve practical problems, including forecasting floods and predicting wildfire boundaries.

• "What could be a better use of AI than curing diseases? To me, that seems like the number one most important thing anyone could apply AI to," Hassabis said.

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It's one thing to call for the largest deportation in American history. It's another to pull it off logistically, given the highly complex process of spotting, detaining, holding and evicting people in the U.S. illegally.

• Why it matters: The judicial process — one small piece of a long, expensive deportation machinery — illustrates vividly the complexity ahead.

The U.S. immigration system's backlog of 3.7 million court cases will take four years to resolve at the current pace. But that could balloon to 16 years under President-elect Trump's mass deportation plan, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.

• Without a huge increase in immigration judges, millions of new cases would flood the non-criminal system. Trump's administration likely would need new detention centers nationwide to hold people suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization — possibly for years.
• Immigration experts estimate the whole operation could cost taxpayers $150 billion to $350 billion.

⚖️ By the numbers: Immigration courts closed 900,000 cases from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

• That's the most cleared cases in a fiscal year, and 235,000 more than the previous year, TRAC reports.
• At that pace, immigration courts wouldn't clear all of the active cases until 2028, an Axios analysis of TRAC data found.

Add 11 million undocumented immigrants — who Trump said would be part of his mass deportation plan — and the backlog would go into 2040 at the current pace, according to an Axios review.

• That's not counting millions of other migrants trying to enter the U.S. in the future.

📺 How it works: Tom Homan, just over 12 hours before he was named Trump's border czar, told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" that the administration will "concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first, because they're the worst of the worst. So it's going to be the worst first."

• "That's how it has to be done," Homan added. "And we know a record number of people on the terrorist watch list have crossed this border. We know a record number of terrorists have been released in this country.
• "We have already arrested some planning attacks. So, look: The president is dead on when he says criminal threats, national security threats are going to be prioritized, and that's the way it's going to be."

Go deeper: "How Trump's deportation threats impact D.C.-area undocumented immigrants," by Axios' Cuneyt Dil and Russell Contreras.

Donald Trump's 2016 win sparked shock, outrage and massive protests. The response to his 2024 victory has been more muted, Axios' Sareen Habeshian reports.

• Why it matters: There's still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization. That could change as Trump moves to implement his agenda. But experts and activists expect the renewed resistance to come in different forms.

Some activist groups are working with a new resistance playbook and pivoting their strategies.

• Tamika Middleton, managing director at Women's March, told Axios the organization is trying to find new ways to mobilize people, such as holding local-level training sessions on combating misinformation and sharing strategies for immigrants to protect themselves.

🔮 What we're watching: An event scheduled for January — dubbed "The People's March" — will inevitably be compared to the massive Women's March eight years earlier, which garnered hundreds of thousands of participants and spurred nationwide sister marches.

• Some activists are wary that turnout will be much smaller.

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President-elect Trump said he will nominate former White House aide Brooke Rollins to be his agriculture secretary yesterday. He has now made picks for every Cabinet secretary position.

• Rollins is a longtime Trump associate who served as White House domestic policy chief during his first presidency, AP notes.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met earlier this week with Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), President-elect Trump's incoming national security adviser, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.

• The first meeting between Sullivan and his successor, who will inherit a set of spiraling crises around the world, took place even though the Trump transition team hasn't signed a memorandum of understanding, allowing the transition process to begin.

👀 Behind the scenes: Sullivan and Waltz discussed several national security and foreign policy issues, including the war in Gaza and the hostages held by Hamas, the sources said.

• Sullivan said last week: "He and I obviously don't see eye to eye on every issue. But I am very much looking forward to engaging him over these next 60 days ... so that we can have this smooth handoff."

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In northeastern Pennsylvania, Luzerne County — with two major cities, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton — is in what used to be called coal country. Now it's an e-commerce warehouse hub — Amazon, T.J. Maxx, Chewy.

• Why it matters: Luzerne County once voted reliably Democratic. Now it's one of the many American places that have shifted right in the Trump era.

Donald Trump won it in 2016, and again in 2020, 57% to 42%

• "Democrats hoped they could move the county back in their direction and made an intensive effort to do so," The New York Times reports after spending two weeks in the county, which was a hotbed of election denialism after the 2020 election.
• "In the weeks ahead of the election, busloads of Democratic canvassers fanned out across Luzerne County."

🗳️ Instead, as in most of swing-state Pennsylvania, Trump improved his margin against Vice President Harris to 59% to 40% — fueled by concerns about bathrooms, abortion, immigration and the price of grapes.

• "We changed the world!" crowed Dave Ragan, an Army veteran who arrived on his motorcycle for a Bikers for Trump gathering at D's Diner the morning after the election.
• "We got our country back!" said Terry Eckert, a real estate agent celebrating with other women over cosmos and wine.

An undocumented man who worships at a local Pentecostal church — who came to the U.S. two years ago to start a new life, and has overstayed his tourist visa as he worked in construction and other jobs — told The Times:

• "I love Mr. Trump ... Of course he could send me back at any moment, but if he did, I would still love him."

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Former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris (D-Okla,), the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, a panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to examine the causes of the 1960s riots, has died. Harris was 94.

• He sought the Democratic nomination for president twice (in 1972 and 1976) and was DNC chair from 1969 to 1970.

🔦 Harris was elevated into the national spotlight in 1967 when President Johnson appointed him to the Kerner Commission following a series of urban riots from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

• The country, the report famously warned, was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."

Harris would spend the rest of his life telling reporters and future leaders that the work of fighting racism and poverty was not over.

• "Immediately after the Civil Rights Movement, we made progress on every aspect of poverty and racism in the U.S. But today, we are moving backward," he told Axios in 2021.

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Fans stormed the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Ala., yesterday, after the Tigers defeated the No. 15 Texas A&M Aggies, 43–41

• It was senior night — Auburn's last home game of the season — and the Tigers won in four overtimes.