Democrats and the media defend a deportee. The State Department announces that it has fully dismantled an agency accused of censoring conservative voices. And, the UK’s Supreme Court hands down a landmark ruling clearly defining the word “woman.”
It’s Friday, April 18, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:
Controversial Deportee Has A Checkered Past
(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Topline: As the Trump administration pushes forward with its mass deportation effort, Democrats are fighting for the return of one deportee sent to El Salvador.
The story centers on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old man who entered the United States illegally in 2011. Back in 2019, Garcia was arrested by ICE for suspected ties to the MS-13 gang, and given a deportation order. However, a court ruled at the time that Abrego Garcia should not be sent to his home country of El Salvador over potential threats from rival gangs there. Despite that deportation order, he remained in the country until he was arrested again by ICE in March and deported to El Salvador days later.
By April, the Supreme Court ruled that Garcia’s return to El Salvador violated the previous court order that he be sent elsewhere — and directed the White House to facilitate his return to America. The Trump administration conceded that it was a “clerical error” on their part, but stated that it was up to officials in El Salvador to decide whether he would be released or not.
Democrats used the incident to argue the Trump administration is being careless in its mass deportation efforts — they say Abrego Garcia was a law-abiding father who never should’ve been deported in the first place. As the story gained traction, a number of Democratic lawmakers vowed to go to El Salvador to fight for his release, including Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who traveled to the prison where Abrego Garcia’s being held. Van Hollen was initially denied access by local authorities, but successfully met with Garcia on Thursday night.
“This is like taking away people’s freedom,” Van Hollen told MSNBC. “That does not sound like a conservative idea to me. That is something that, of course, authoritarian governments engage in. And it’s a very fast road to tyranny if we don’t all stand up against it.”
Democrats have depicted Garcia as an upstanding citizen, husband, and father, but new reports are painting a very different picture. A police report released by the DOJ from his initial arrest back in 2019 shows that Abrego Garcia was found loitering with three other men, two of whom were previously convicted MS-13 members — when officers approached, they attempted to hide drugs under a nearby car. At the time of his arrest, Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat — authorities say that’s a symbol of “members in good standing with the MS-13.” Then, in 2021, Abrego Garcia’s wife sought a protective order against him following years of alleged domestic abuse. According to her sworn affidavit from the time, his wife alleged that on different occasions, Abrego Garcia punched her, leaving her with black eyes, hit her with his work boots, scratched her eyes, and drove erratically with their one-year-old in the car. She wrote in her own words, “I am afraid to be close to him.” That case did not move forward after Garcia’s wife failed to appear in court to testify against him.
And that’s not all — the Tennessee Star learned Wednesday that Abrego Garcia had been stopped by the Tennessee Highway Patrol in 2022 on suspicion of human trafficking. In that instance, he’d been pulled over with seven individuals in his car, but no luggage. When questioned, he told officers he was driving them from Texas to Maryland on behalf of his “boss” who worked in “construction.” Abrego Garcia was detained for two hours and was found not to have a valid driver’s license, which is a misdemeanor offense.
Rubio Dismantles The Global Engagement Center
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Topline: On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Global Engagement Center, an Obama-era propaganda branch of the State Department, has been completely dissolved.
In 2011, the State Department created the Global Engagement Center, designed to combat propaganda from hostile foreign groups. But after Trump’s 2016 win, the department turned its attention to throttling Americans’ political speech.
The GEC was created in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications. In 2016, Barack Obama gave it a new name and said it would “coordinate U.S. government communications aimed at countering foreign terrorist propaganda, particularly from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.” But soon, it was creating pressure on U.S. platforms, via advertising boycotts, to delete “conspiracy theories” like the idea that coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.
Like other State Department propaganda efforts, the GEC was specifically barred from operating against Americans. But there’s evidence that’s exactly what it did. In the Twitter Files, which showed how the Biden administration pressured Silicon Valley platforms to censor or remove content, one of the names that keeps popping up is GEC. Even an FBI agent who played a similar role, Elvis Chan, expressed concern about GEC, saying in its world, which was supposed to be foreign countries, the First Amendment didn’t exist.
The Daily Wire and the Federalist sued the State Department alleging that GEC was violating the First Amendment by funding groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. The Global Disinformation Index put American media outlets on a “Dynamic Exclusion List” that was distributed to advertisers and named mainstream publications like the New York Post, Reason Magazine, The Daily Wire, and the Federalist as “risky.” Newsguard’s CEO said its goal is “empowering governments … to support quality journalism and systemically defund sources of harmful misinformation.” The Daily Wire argued that GEC was funding proxies to do what would obviously be illegal for the government to do.
UK Supreme Court Settles ‘What Is A Woman?’ Debate In British Law
(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Topline: The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled that in the eyes of the law, a woman is a biological woman, not a transgender woman.
The UK has decentralized governments, which means there are governments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland who have powers devolved to them. In Scotland, the Scottish Nationalist government sought to extend what they call trans rights. Most controversially, it pushed for self-ID, which would allow someone to declare themselves a woman and be certified as such, no questions asked.
The legal case that led to this being brought to the UK’s Supreme Court began with a new law aimed at increasing the number of women on public boards. Affirmative action, known in Britain as “positive action,” is permitted by a law called the Equality Act. The Scottish government argued that this should include discriminating in favor of transgender women with a Gender Recognition Certificate. The campaign group For Women Scotland disagreed and argued it should be restricted to biological women.
The Court decided that the use of “sex” and “women” in the Equality Act refers to biology and biological women, so transgender women are not protected against discrimination as women, although they will still be protected against discrimination as people who have undergone gender reassignment.
“This is going to be a very far-reaching ruling,” Guy Dampier, Senior Researcher on Nationhood at the Prosperity Institute, told Morning Wire. “Like a lot of the West, there has been this huge battle over transgenderism. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was famously once unable to say whether women have a penis or not. … the Gender Recognition Act is functionally null now, as it is now the law that sex is biological rather than social. That said, transgender women with a Gender Recognition Certificate will still have their legal documents describing their sex as female, and it’s illegal to ask someone if they have a GRC.”
