--:-- John Bickley: The Biden administration will send more than a thousand troops to the southern border as a surge of migrants is expected with the end of Title 42. DHS, Department of State, is putting forth processes to deal with the changes that are going to be ahead of us. How many migrants are expected to begin crossing? And how are border communities reacting?
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Daily Wire, Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, May 3rd, and this is Morning Wire. A writer's strike in Hollywood is bringing some shows to a screeching halt. If there is a strike, the longer it goes, the more significant the impact, because nothing happens without a script. What are the writer's demands and how much will it end up costing Tinseltown? And two California teachers are suing their school district over a policy they say forces them to lie to parents. The school district says the policy is state law. We have the details.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. The Biden administration is now sending hundreds of troops to the southern border before Title 42 is repealed on May 11th. Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce is here to talk about the troop surge to the border and what to expect next week when Title 42 ends.
--:-- Tim Pierce: Hey, John. So tell us about how the Biden administration is preparing for next week. Things are escalating quickly on this. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress last month that the government was preparing for a surge, but he was light on details then. We learned on Tuesday that Biden is taking another cue from former President Trump and sending 1,500 troops to the border for 90 days after Title 42's repeal. The hope is that those soldiers will blunt the impact of the thousands of additional migrants that are expected at the border daily once Title 42 is gone.
--:-- John Bickley: We've already seen signs that a migrant surge is coming. On Monday, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz reported that law enforcement tallied over 7,000 apprehensions at the southern border per day and approaches the peak rates we saw last year. But the estimated surge starting next week is expected to be even more intense, some predicting about 11,000 apprehensions a day. That surge is prompting a lot of border towns to sound the alarm and take some action. What are we seeing there?
--:-- Tim Pierce: Well, the city of El Paso preemptively declared a state of emergency on Monday to prepare for a surge in migrants. The city's Democratic mayor, Oscar Leeser, said the day before that he wanted to prepare the city for the unknown. We've been really looking at and assessing the situation. I did have the opportunity to go into Juarez on Friday morning, spent about four hours there. And I literally went through the streets, looked at people camping out on the streets, went to the shelters and kind of assessed the amount of people really that are getting prepared to come into the United States for asylum seeking.
--:-- John Bickley: The mayor said that the migrants he and his team spoke with were waiting just on the other side of the U.S. border for Title 42 to end. Those migrants believe that once it happens, they'll be free to walk into the U.S. without documentation. All right, so migrants are camping out in Mexico until then. Do you know what the response from Border Patrol will be? It will go back to border enforcement under Title 8, or standard immigration laws.
--:-- Tim Pierce: The difference will be that under Title 42, migrants could be expelled right after apprehension and before making an asylum claim. Under Title 8 asylum requests from migrants will have to be processed but their eventual removal could mean they barred from applying again for five years.
--:-- John Bickley: How is the Biden administration talking about this publicly? Well, despite the ongoing crisis, the White House is still attempting to frame its work on the border as a success. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday claimed that Biden's border policies have supposedly dramatically reduced immigration. And that's why you've seen the parolee program be so successful. It has, when it comes to illegal migration, you've seen it come down by more than 90%. A note on that. Illegal migration is still at historic levels.
--:-- Tim Pierce: What Jean-Pierre was specifically referring to is a program that the Biden administration put in place earlier this year for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Candidates can apply to come to the U.S. temporarily on a humanitarian basis or for what could be called a significant public benefit. The program will take up to 30,000 people a year.
--:-- John Bickley: Meanwhile, border towns are bracing for next week. Tim, thanks for reporting. Absolutely.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. Coming up, a writer's strike shakes Hollywood. For the first time in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America has failed to reach a new deal with Hollywood Studios. More than 11,000 film and television writers have now gone on strike. Here to tell us what they're asking for and how this could impact your favorite shows and movies is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Megan, before we get into the reasons why the writers have walked off the job, I think people probably want to know how this is going to impact them at home. Yeah, and they're right to wonder about that because this could be pretty seismic. So Late Night, which has already been experiencing a dwindling audience, is likely to be the hardest hit here. All four of the big broadcast shows, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, well, they all immediately went dark. And so have Bill Maher on HBO, Daily Show, Saturday Night Live.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So Meyers was a writer for SNL during the last strike, and he showed support for the strikers on Monday night. Strong writing is essential to this show. It's essential to any show where the host, myself, is at best a C-plus performer. No one, look, no one is entitled to a job in show business. But for those people who have a job in show business, they are entitled to fair compensation.
--:-- Megan Basham: But live shows like his aren't going to be alone in this. Basically, any production that hasn't wrapped for the season is going to take a hit. And that includes those that are shooting overseas. So we're talking about the HBO juggernaut House of Dragon, Amazon's Lord of the Rings, a number of big Marvel movies and shows could all be impacted. What are the sticking points in this negotiation? What do the writers want? I mean, obviously the age-old issues are at play here, higher wages, more recognition, but really streaming is at the center of this.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the Guild says streamers have in essence created a gig economy for writers. It largely did away with what used to be the writers' big payday, and that's syndication. So streaming shows have fewer episodes. They have much longer breaks between new seasons. So what that's done is led to smaller writing staffs working for shorter periods of time. And that means more writers are working at minimum rates. So what they want is a new residual pay structure that more closely mirrors that old syndication model especially when a show becomes a big hit.
--:-- Georgia Howe: One really interesting element of this though is AI. The writers want guarantees that programs like ChatGPT are not going to be writing first drafts of scripts that they then have to turn around and doctor. Essentially, it would be taking work away from them. But the alliance of motion picture and television producers, the side that's representing all the studios, including Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers, basically all the biggies, Well, it says it offered all the increase it can to still turn a profit. And you have to say, they have a point.
--:-- Megan Basham: You and I have talked in the past, Georgia, about the pressure streamers are feeling from Wall Street to show stronger balance sheets. And that has led to rounds of layoffs and some pretty steep cuts. So how long are we expecting this to go on? You know, the two sides are really far apart right now. All told, the Guild is asking for about $430 million more per year. The studios have countered with $86 million, so they're really not close.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The strike in 2008 went on for 14 weeks, and the time before that in 1988, it was just over five months. So given how dug in the two sides are right now, it certainly seems like we could see that again, if not longer.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. Two middle school teachers are suing their school district and the California State Board of Education over policies requiring educators to actively hide gender transitions from parents. Here to discuss these gender policies and the pending legal challenge filed last week is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Presta-Giacomo.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Hey, Amanda. First, tell us what we know about these policies. Sure, John. So two veteran teachers, both Christians from Rincon Middle School in Escondido, California, they say they were not only required to participate in students' social gender transition without hesitation, but were required to hide and actively participate in deception to conceal these transitions from parents.
--:-- John Bickley: The complaint says teachers under these policies are required to use preferred pronouns or gender-specific names requested by students during school hours, but then they have to revert to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking to their parent in order to, quote, actively hide information about their child's gender identity from them. Teachers say that if parents were to ask them specifically about their child's identity in school, they were basically given a scripted response they had to relay to parents, telling them they could only talk to them about their child's education, assignments, and things of that nature.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And if a parent never asked, it could not be brought up to the parent's attention. I spoke to one of the teachers suing the district, Elizabeth Mirabelli, and she indicated to me that these weren't merely guidelines but mandated policies. A teacher was formally reprimanded and written up in a disciplinary letter for questioning the policy, and that's when I realized we were in really big trouble.
--:-- John Bickley: Mirabelli told me she was allowed a partial religious exemption when she told the school these policies violated her Catholic faith. She was told she could call all students by their last names, therefore bypassing these requested gender-specific names. But she still had to use preferred pronouns if she were to use pronouns at all. And she had to participate in hiding social transitions from parents.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Now, the Escondido Union School District, which is kindergarten through eighth grade, they sort of avoided commenting directly on what these policies mandate for teachers. But the superintendent has said in a statement that the district is merely complying with quote state and federal law.
--:-- John Bickley: And to that, let's start with the legal argument against these policies, according to this lawsuit. What does it say? Well, I actually spoke directly to an attorney representing Mirabelli, Thomas More Society's special counsel, Paul Jonna, and he told me the policies violate parental rights and more fundamentally, the First Amendment. The school is now basically taking the role of parents and leaving parents in the dark.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: But more fundamentally for our clients, they're violating their First Amendment rights. Our clients aren't asking to affirmatively speak their views on gender ideology or transgender theory or any of that. They're only asking not to be forced to speak in a way that violates their faith. Janna emphasized to me that he believes the law is on their side, noting that a teacher from Kansas named Pamela Ricard recently won a lawsuit against her school in a very similar case based on First Amendment grounds.
--:-- John Bickley: All right, so now for the supporters of these policies, why do they argue these rules are necessary? So as I mentioned, the school district has publicly claimed they're just complying with state and federal law. To that point, this lawsuit says that district representatives actually told the teachers that these policies might be required by state and federal law and referenced a page on the California Department of Education website referencing an assembly bill that was approved in 2013, the School Success and Opportunity Act.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: The DOE website states that, quoting here, schools must consult with a transgender student to determine who can or will be informed of the student's transgender status, if anyone, including the student's family. The DOE warns that, quoting again, disclosing that a student is transgender without the student's permission may violate California's anti-discrimination law by increasing the student's vulnerability to harassment and may violate the student's right to privacy.
--:-- John Bickley: All right, so the California DOE claims that this may violate a state anti-discrimination law. Right, and Jonna disagrees with that. He told me there is no state or federal law that requires this policy. He also noted that students do have certain privacy rights, but those don't trump the, quote, constitutional rights of parents to raise their own children.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Now, another similar argument that we've seen from some Democratic politicians pushing these sorts of gender policies is that without them, a teacher could, quote, out a child to their parents or guardians. I relayed this to Jonna, and here's how he responded. I think one of the biggest flaws with that argument is that it just assumes that all parents are going to be harmful to their own children or abusive or unloving or unsupportive, and that the school is the place where the child can go for trust and love.
--:-- John Bickley: I mean, the assumption should be parents know what's best for these children. And leaving parents in the dark is not the solution. A lot of growing national attention on the issue of parental rights. And this is a big one.
--:-- Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Amanda, thanks for reporting. Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire reporter Amanda Presta-Giacomo. Another story we're tracking this week. Texas law enforcement said Tuesday that after a multi-day manhunt, they have caught the man suspected of fatally shooting five of his neighbors, including a nine-year-old boy. The shooting occurred near Cleveland, Texas on Friday night. It followed a confrontation when one of the victims asked the suspect to stop target shooting. Immigration officials say that the suspect is a Mexican national who was illegally in the country after having been deported several times.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.
