In today's newsletter: A look at how the most harrowing hours of the Texas floods unfolded. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino is considering resigning over the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. And some companies are turning to AI recruiter bots to conduct job interviews.

Here's what to know today.

In the hours before the flood, the Miller girls — Eliza, Genevieve and Birdie — were eating fajitas in the Camp Mystic mess hall and watching counselors act in a “Wicked” skit. Down the river, Lucas Brake and his wife, Irene, had invited Lucas’ parents to a cabin for a weekend of fishing and a July 4 barbecue. And 19-year-old Riata Schoepf and her boyfriend were out kayaking on the placid Guadalupe River before heading back to the River Inn Resort.

“The sun was shining like it was just perfect weather,” Schoepf said. But there was a storm coming. The National Weather Service sent out an emergency alert on July 3, warning about a flood watch in effect.

Sometime before midnight, the rain started to fall. Hard. The river swelled and surged over its banks, suddenly rushing with a reckless violence that snapped trees, carried away victims as they slept, swallowed up the cars they fled in and pulled them under as they ran for higher ground. First responders couldn’t keep up, and in many cases didn’t get there in time. At least 129 people died, and 166 are still missing, mostly from Kerr County.

NBC News recounted how the disaster unfolded in the crucial and deadliest hours of 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. July 4 for a dozen people. This report uses firsthand accounts, interviews with parents, official alerts, news reports and videos.

In Giggle Box, one of the Camp Mystic cabins, staff scramble to evacuate campers, who are holding hands in a long chain as they wade through rushing water to head to higher ground. In Hunt, 25-year-old Christian Fell said he stood on a meter box mounted to his house for hours, waiting several hours until the waters receded. In Kerrville, Blue Oak RV Park owner Lorena Guillén ran door to door urging her guests to flee — while hearing screams, cars honking and cabins crashing against trees. All 28 trailers at Guillén's park have been washed away.

A week later, there are still many questions that authorities have refused to answer. How could all these campers, revelers and residents be caught off guard? Why didn’t many of them get flash flood alerts? What time did emergency response officials snap into action, and by then was it too late? Why were at least two high-ranking Kerr County officials still asleep when the waters were surging?

Read the full story here.

More coverage of the Texas floods:

Judge halts certain immigration raids in Southern California

Immigration officers in Southern California can't rely solely on someone's race or speaking Spanish to stop and detain people, a federal judge ruled. The temporary restraining order issued yesterday by District Judge Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong bars the detention of people unless the officer or agent "has reasonable suspicion that the person to be stopped is within the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law" — and not based on a person's apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent, presence at a particular location or the type of work they do.

Frimpong also issued an order that lawyers be granted access to an area in a federal building in Los Angeles where those detained by immigration authorities are held, and to allow those who are detained phone access with legal counsel. Read the full story here.

In recent weeks, the federal law enforcement agencies have aggressively made immigration arrests in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In Ventura County, a worker at a cannabis farm was in critical condition after falling 30 feet during a federal immigration raid on Thursday, local officials said.

Dan Bongino considers resigning from FBI over Epstein files

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is "out of control furious" and considering leaving his job after a heated confrontation with Attorney General Pam Bondi over how the Justice Department is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to a person who has spoken with him and a source familiar with the interactions that he and FBI Director Kash Patel have had with Bondi.

Bongino didn't report to work yesterday, a source familiar with the perspectives of DOJ leaders said.

Bongino and Patel have been increasingly frustrated with Bondi over a variety of issues, not just the Epstein files, a source said. But things "got pretty heated" on Wednesday during a meeting with Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in which Bongino and Patel were asked about a news story suggesting they were dissatisfied with the DOJ's decision not to release any additional files related to Epstein, the convicted sex offender and financier who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2019. The meeting came two days after the DOJ released a statement saying that an "exhaustive review" of materials related to Epstein "revealed no incriminating 'client list'" and that no further charges against others are warranted. Read the full story here.

More politics news:

How Trump's megabill is playing in a Medicaid-heavy red state

Few states stand to lose as much from Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” as Louisiana. With more poverty and disease than most of the country, many in the Southern state rely heavily on Medicaid benefits. Yet the state voted heavily for Trump in the 2024 election and, polling shows, approves of his job performance so far.

So how does a deep-red state reconcile the two? Interviews with a dozen Louisianans suggest many have absorbed the arguments Republicans used to sell the bill, especially the talking point that Medicaid is rife with abuse and changes would expel undeserving recipients.

“You have people that have paid into it their entire life,” one man said. “They’re physically messed up. They can’t work any more and they can’t get it. But you have people who have never worked a job with any meaning and they’re getting it that quick because they know the ins and outs of the system.”

Weeding out those who are abusing the program might be a worthy goal, but Medicaid advocates worry cuts won’t be made with such precision. “It’s many of the same staunch supporters of our president who are going to suffer as a result of this bill,” said Keith Liederman, the CEO of an organization that helps struggling families in the state. Read the full story here.

TSA ended what security checkpoint policy?

A. Shoe removal
B. Belt removal
C. Liquid limits
D. Putting large electronics in a bin

Find out the answer and test your knowledge of this week's most-read stories. (The answer to the question is also at the bottom of this newsletter.)

AI job recruiters might be interviewing you next

This spring, videos of job interviews started to go viral on TikTok. But they weren't just any job interviews — they were being conducted by AI recruiter-bots. The videos showed a new breed of computer-generated interviewers glitching mid-conversation with flummoxed humans on the other side of the calls. They were a funny, and a slightly horrifying, sign of the times and largely faded into a sea of viral content online.

NBC News' Dalila Muata dug into what happened with the recruiters, and found that despite the viral glitches and data security concerns, the recruiter-bots had been adopted by multiple Fortune 500 companies and brands, from McDonalds to Whole Foods Market.

— Ben Goggin, deputy tech editor

Amazon’s mega-sale has come to an end, but other retailers like Target, Walmart and Best Buy are still offering deep discounts to customers.

Thanks for reading the Morning Rundown. Today's newsletter was curated for you by Elizabeth Robinson.

By the way, the answer to the quiz question above is A. Shoe removal.

If you have any comments — likes, dislikes — send us an email at: MorningRundown@nbcuni.com

If you're a fan, please forward it to your family and friends. They can sign up here.