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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm your host John Bickley.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: We're learning more about the background of an El Salvadoran citizen deported by the Trump administration. Rayo Garcia's wife petitioned for an order of protection against him for two instances of domestic violence in May of 2021. Why are Democrats and the media fighting for his return?
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, April 18th, and this is Morning Wire. The State Department announces that it's fully dismantled an agency accused of censoring conservative voices. And the UK's Supreme Court hands down a landmark ruling defining the word woman. The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. American meat at a steady price today. Subscribe now at GoodRanchers.com and get free meat for life and $40 off with code WIRE. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered.
--:-- John Bickley: As the Trump administration pushes forward with its deportation agenda, Democrats are fighting for the return of a deportee sent to El Salvador. Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips is here now with the latest. So this case has really dominated the immigration discussion all week. First, walk us through how this all started.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So the story centers around Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old man who came to the U.S. 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 because he might face potential threats from rival gangs there.
--:-- John Bickley: 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 his 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.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: For their part, the Trump administration conceded that it was a, quote, clerical error on their part, but that it was up to officials in El Salvador about whether he should be released or not. So yet another showdown between federal courts and the White House on immigration. And now we're seeing Democrat lawmakers get involved here as well.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Tell us about that.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Right, Democrats certainly used the incident to try and prove the Trump administration was being careless in their mass deportation efforts. They say Ebrego Garcia was a law-abiding father who never should have 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.
--:-- John Bickley: First up was Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen who appeared on MSNBC from El Salvador. Have a listen.
--:-- John Bickley: That's Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen. In response, the White House hosted Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was raped and murdered in Maryland by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. She had a strong message for the lawmakers fighting to free Abrega Garcia.
--:-- Patty Morin: To have a senator from Maryland who didn't even acknowledge or barely acknowledge my daughter and the brutal death that she endured fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that's not even an American citizen. I don't understand this.
--:-- John Bickley: And now the White House has pointed to a slew of evidence that Abrega Garcia has had some run-ins with law enforcement in the past. What do we know about that so far?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, Democrats have depicted him as an upstanding citizen, husband, and father, but new reports are painting a very different picture. First, the DOJ released the police report from his initial arrest back in 2019. Those documents show that Abrego Garcia was found loitering with three other men, two of whom were previously convicted MS-13 members.
--:-- Georgia Howe: When officers approached, they attempted to hide drugs under a nearby car. At the time of his arrest, Abrega Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. That's important because authorities say it's a clear symbol of, quote, members in good standing with the MS-13.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And then we learned that in 2021, Abrega Garcia's wife sought a protective order against him following years of alleged domestic abuse. According to her sworn affidavit from the time, the wife alleges that at different times, Abrego Garcia punched her, leaving her with black eyes. He allegedly hit her with his work boots, scratched her eyes, and even drove erratically with her one-year-old in the car.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And that's not all. The Tennessee Star learned Wednesday that Abrega Garcia had been stopped by Tennessee Highway Patrol in 2022 on suspicion of human trafficking. In that case, he had 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, quote, boss, who worked in, quote, construction.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Abrega Garcia was detained for two hours and was found to not have a valid driver's license, which is a misdemeanor. The officer in that case immediately contacted the FBI and informed them he was concerned Obrego Garcia was engaged in human trafficking. But for unknown reasons, the FBI reportedly advised him to take photos of the passengers and then allow them on their way.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Republicans say these stories are just further proof Obrego Garcia should have been deported long ago.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, a lot of questions to be answered there for sure. Kevin, thanks so much for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Absolutely.
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--:-- Georgia Howe: 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. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio put the final nail in the group's coffin. Here's what he told Ben Shapiro.
--:-- Georgia Howe: They started it by saying you know Al Qaeda ISIS all these terrible groups are radicalizing people online We should do something about it And you know back when they came up with that 12 years ago whatever it was people are like you know it makes sense And then it metastasized And it's like, oh, there's foreign interference in our elections. We need to start going after that.
--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now is investigative reporter Luke Rosiak, who has been following the story closely. So, Luke, first off, what is the Global Engagement Center?
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Hi, Georgia. So the GEC was created in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. In 2016, Barack Obama gave it a new name and said it would, quote, coordinate U.S. government communications aimed at countering foreign terrorist propaganda, particularly from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.
--:-- Georgia Howe: 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.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Like other State Department propaganda efforts, it was specifically barred from operating against Americans. But there's evidence that's exactly what it did. When you look at things like 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.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The Dilly Wire and the Federalist actually sued the State Department, alleging that the GEC was violating the First Amendment by funding groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: The Global Disinformation Index put American media outlets on a, quote, dynamic exclusion list that was distributed to advertisers and named mainstream publications like the New York Post, Reason Magazine, and the Daily Wire and the Federalist as risky.
--:-- Georgia Howe: NewsGuard's CEO said its goal is, quote, empowering governments to support quality journalism and systematically defund sources of harmful misinformation.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: The Daily Wire argued that GEC was funding proxies to do what would obviously be illegal for the government to do. And GEC was extremely secretive. It used a suspicious financial structure that hid the money flow and refused to provide info to Congress.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So this agency is now gone?
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Yes, technically. In fact, Congress let GEC expire last year after all the outrage. But Joe Biden moved those employees to a different group, basically doing the same thing. That's why Rubio has initiated a reduction of force for 50 positions working in that successor group.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So not only is that group going to be gone, but those people will also be out of government instead of playing a shell game.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Well, it's like whack-a-mole.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Luke, thanks for coming on.
--:-- Luke Rosiak: Thanks, Georgia.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The UK Supreme Court has ruled that in the eyes of the law, a woman is a biological woman, not a transgender woman. Joining us now from Europe to break down the ruling is Guy Dampier of the Legatum Institute. Guy, thanks for coming on.
--:-- Guy Dampier: So the ruling is all about what constitutes a woman. And it starts with the Scottish government. So the UK has a slightly unusual system of devolved governments. So there are governments in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland who've got powers devolved to them from the main government in Westminster. And in Scotland, the Scottish nationalist government, which is very left wing have been seeking to extend what they call trans rights.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The most controversial part of this is they've been pushing for the self-ID, which essentially allows somebody to declare that they are a woman and be recognized as a woman without any doctor being involved, without any surgery, without anything else at all.
--:-- Guy Dampier: So that's very, very open to abuse. And we've seen some bad cases, as in the United States, of individuals using that as a cover for sexual fetishes or for other things. Now, the particular argument here was about a new law to increase the number of women on public boards. It what Americans call affirmative action In Britain it called positive action And it allowed by something called the Equality Act The Scottish government argued that this positive action should include transgender women as long as they had a gender recognition certificate.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So they would be counted as women, and you would basically be allowed to hire more of them, even if they had lower standards, just to reach a 50-50 level.
--:-- Guy Dampier: The campaign group for Women Scotland disagreed, and they said that this should be restricted only to biological women. They've had a long court battle. There's been judicial reviews. They've won some things. They've lost some things. And it's finally gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And that court has now decided that the use of sex and the use of women in the Equality Act refers to biology and to biological women, which means that transgender women are not protected against discrimination as women because they aren't women.
--:-- Georgia Howe: They are still protected against discrimination as people who've undergone gender reassignment, however.
--:-- Guy Dampier: So a pretty significant ruling. What will it actually mean in practice?
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's going to be a very far-reaching ruling. Britain, much like the United States, this has been a really contentious topic over the last few years. There's been a huge battle. And in fact, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was famously once unable to say whether or not a woman has a penis. He sort of flip-flopped on what he considers to be a woman.
--:-- Guy Dampier: But at the same time, he's a former lawyer. So this should hopefully be professionally clarifying. And I hope that going forward he will now be able to confidently say that the law is clear that a woman is a biological woman.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What it means in practice is that the Gender Recognition Act, which is the law in Britain that covers transgender people, is going to be pretty null because the law is now saying that sex is biological and not social.
--:-- Guy Dampier: That said, transgender women who have a gender recognition certificate can still have all their legal documents describing their sex as female. And as I understand it, it's discriminatory to ask somebody if they have a gender recognition certificate. So there may be some ways to undercut this ruling.
--:-- Georgia Howe: There may well be. I mean, the ruling has now gone out, and that is clarifying, but it's going to change a lot of things. So as the Supreme Court said, Parliament is going to have to legislate to deal with those issues, including the fact that the Gender Recognition Act has now basically been superseded and will need to be amended in some way, probably.
--:-- Guy Dampier: We just have to hope within that that the current Labour government will recognise biological reality. The danger is that the party is very split on the issue. On the other hand, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been very clear that the law now says that single sex spaces must be based on biological sex.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So I think there'll probably be a battle within the government over the next few years about this, and they're going to have to legislate. But that legislation will be very controversial. And we can also expect to see legal challenges from left-wing activist groups.
--:-- Guy Dampier: I think the hope has to be that we've hit peak trans, that the vibe has shifted, that the tide is beginning to roll back against the madness we've seen over the last decade. There have been a lot of scandals recently in Britain because people looked into the clinics that were dealing with transgenderism and they were encouraging children to have life-altering surgery and not really giving them all the information, not really letting them understand that these were completely life-changing operations and that for most people, you know, while some people do have real confusion over their sex, most people actually just get over it and it turns out it's not a real issue at all.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So we have to hope that if the vibe has somewhat changed, that this sort of irresponsible push for vulnerable people and vulnerable children to change sex will decrease and that there will be an admission that this is something that's biologically impossible.
--:-- Guy Dampier: Let's hope that the culture catches up to that.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, historically, the UK has been a few years ahead of us on this issue, so maybe it will here.
--:-- Guy Dampier: My pleasure.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.
