Morning Wire - CA Wildfires Fuel Tensions & DHS Blocks Deportations | 1.13.25

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

The fires in SoCal burn on as officials blame each other, the Biden administration makes deportations harder for Trump, and a new documentary from TPUSA and The Daily Wire exposes so-called “gender-affirming” care. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Shopify: Go to https://Shopify.com/morningwire to start selling with Shopify today. Black Rifle Coffee: Get 20% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code DAILYWIRE: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com Watch "Identity Crisis" Here: https://www.dailywire.com/videos/identity-crisis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The death toll continues to rise in L.A. as the fires burn on while officials blame each other for catastrophic failures. The impact of our budget really did not impact what we've been going through over the last few days. What I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we're still under-resourced, and we're still underfunded. How contained are the fires now and why do some fear they may get worse in the coming days? I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Monday, January 13th, and this is Morning Wire. The Biden administration shields hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, making deportation more difficult for Trump.

And as the Supreme Court considers the issue of so-called gender-affirming care, a new documentary from TPP USA and the Daily Wire exposes its harsh reality. This goes deep into the severity and the graphic brutality of what transitioning actually is. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. tuned. We have the news you need to know. What's the secret sauce behind wildly successful businesses? It's not just great products or brilliant marketing.

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The death toll and property damage continues to rise in Los Angeles as wildfires rage on nearly a week after they started. Here are the latest on the ongoing disastrous DailyWire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips-A-Cabbit. So the nightmare continues for the people of Los Angeles. Where do things stand now? Well, three of the six main fires continue to rage. They've now destroyed more than 40,000 acres. and 12,000 structures as the death toll continues to rise.

At latest count, that number stands at 24, but the LAPD says they've received dozens of missing person reports, so the obvious fear is that the final count will be far higher. At the moment, though, most resources are being devoted to actually stopping the fire, so recovery efforts, as you can imagine, are taking a bit more of a back seat. By Sunday, the largest blaze, the Palisades fire continued to burn. It was just 11% contained. In the Eden fire, the second largest, was just 27% contained.

Meteorologists warn that strong Santa Ana winds are likely to return Tuesday. They're expecting gusts up to 60 miles per hour, which obviously could exacerbate the problem even further. Yeah, the last thing residents need. Now, we're also sadly seeing even more reports of widespread looting in this time. Tell us about that. Yeah, the LAPD continues to make dozens of arrests related to looting. A number of residents have posted just shocking videos. showing what they say are organized gangs of burglars posing as residents, ransacking abandoned homes in a number of luxury neighborhoods.

Police even arrested two men who were, get this, dressed as firefighters, but burglarizing properties. And in perhaps the most infuriating case, a group of apparent looters broke into an Army Reserve warehouse in Santa Ana, stealing three Humvees, machine gun mounts, and other gear like bayonets and binoculars. Meanwhile, investigators continue to probe the location where the virus first broke out, looking for signs of arson. Sounds like total chaos. Now, much has been made about the budget cuts to the L.A. Fire Department last year, there's been some debate about that. Talk to us about that. So last year, L.A. Democratic mayor Karen Bass did direct $17 million in cuts for the fire department's overall budget. That was the second largest cut for any department in the city, while simultaneously reallocating tens of millions of dollars towards programs for L.A.'s growing homeless population. In response, last month, L.A. fire chief, Kristen Crowley sent a memo to the city, warning that those budget cuts were already impacting her department's ability to respond to emergencies and also their preparedness for wildfires.

In Crowley's words, the budget cuts had, quote, severely limited the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies. For example, she said a $7 million reduction in overtime pay had reduced the amount of hours spent on brush clearance and residential inspections over the last few months. For her part, though, Mirabash this weekend strongly denied that the budget cuts had any impact on the fire response. I think if you go back and look at the reductions that were made, there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days. But LA's fire chief herself came out Saturday

in an interview with Fox 11 and reiterated that budget cuts did indeed impact her department's preparedness and response to these latest fires. Was the budget cut? Yes, it was cut. And it did impact our ability to provide service. Did they fail you?

Yes. When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there's going to be water. We don't control the water supply. Our firefighters are there to protect lives and property and to make sure that we're properly trained and equipped. For his part, President Trump issued a statement on truth social saying, quote, the fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent polls have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. They just can't put out the fires. What is wrong with them? California officials, including Governor Newsom, have invited Trump to visit

the city toward the damage for himself. See if he takes them up on that offer. Right. Let's hope in the meantime first responders are able to get more of these fires contained. Yeah. Kavana, thanks for reporting. Anytime. The Biden administration on Friday shielded hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation, just days before President Biden will leave office. Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce is here to talk about those protections and what impact they'll have on Trump's agenda. Hey, Tim. So another significant 11th hour move here by the Biden administration. What did they just do? Yeah, Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas,

issued a sweeping extension of what's called the temporary protected status for immigrants. The extension covered nearly 900,000 people in the U.S. from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. This means that for roughly the first year and a half of Trump's administration, those aliens under the order are free to stay and work in the U.S. Biden was able to do this under a law signed by former President George H.W. Bush, which gave the president authority to protect certain nationalities from deportation in six to 18-month increments. So here the Biden administration went with the longest possible extension. And these protections can only apply to aliens whose home countries are deemed too dangerous to go back to,

whether that's from war, natural disaster, or for some other reason. Now, some of these immigrants are from some pretty controversial groups. Venezuela really stands out because of the problems many states have had with violent gang members in Tren de Aragua. Will this order actually shield gang members? It shouldn't. Anyone who doesn't qualify for asylum can't qualify for TPS. That includes aliens with a serious criminal background or those deemed it be national security threats.

But as we've seen many times, officials often have trouble identifying and catching many of these people. For their part, Trump and Vance have been highly critical of the temporary protected status program and want to drastically reduce it or phase it out. And while there isn't much they can likely do about the extensions, They remain committed to mass deportations. Here's Vance on Fox News Sunday, already pushing back against accusations about separating families.

If you say, for example, in the United States, we have a guy who's convicted of a violent crime and has to go to prison, we want that guy to go to prison. But yes, it does mean that that guy is going to be separated from his family. That is the consequence of committing violence upon your fellow citizens. If you come into this country illegally, you need to go back home. You need to have basic law enforcement. And what the Democrats are going to do is they're going to hide behind this. They're going to say that this is all about compassion for families. Now, it looks like Trump and Vance want to hit the ground running next week.

How is the administration shaping up in D.C. so far? It looks good. Confirmation hearings on some of Trump's top nominees are scheduled to start this week. And Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas appeared on Fox News's Sunday morning futures to say, it looks like all of Trump's nominees have enough votes in the Senate to be confirmed. I think that they need to go through the hearing process. They're going to get beat up by the legacy media and the left as well, but I think the votes are there. So after some early trouble with Trump's first Attorney General pick, his administration appears to be shaping up nicely.

We'll definitely have a more in-depth report on those confirmation hearings up tomorrow. Tim, thanks for joining us. Good to be on. I think this is the kind of universal answer of when did this become an issue to get engaged. engaged about is when it stopped being a thing for adults to deal with whatever issues they have going on. And it started to be a, let's teach this to kids. Let's tell kids that it may be that they can be the opposite sex. That was best-selling author Dr. James Lindsay in the new documentary Identity Crisis, which scrutinizes how gender ideology has impacted ordinary Americans and their

families. The film from TPSA and The Daily Wire comes on the heels of a landmark superiors. Court case determining whether states may ban transgender procedures on children. Here with more as Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham. So, Megan, we've seen a rapid sea change when it comes to public opinion about transgenderism, particularly as it relates to children. Only a couple of years ago, it was an expanding field within the medical establishment, but since then, 25 states have moved to outlaw these practices, and were actually well behind Europe in that regard. Several countries, including the UK, most recently have banned the use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. Why is the sentiment

shifting now? Well, I think it's a combination of factors, but one of the biggest is that enough time has now passed that a lot of those kids who were given puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries, all of those things to ostensibly change their gender, well, they've now grown up. And they're telling stories of regret and they're sounding the alarm about the long-term and irreversible harms of transgender procedures. Here's one example. The surgeon asked me to go off of the testosterone for the mastectomy.

And because I had no one really helping me or overseeing my care in any way, I was naive enough to go cold turkey off of a high dose. And I had a mental breakdown from quitting testosterone. And so I was suicidal that by the, that point, severely suicidal on the day of the surgery. And I told the surgeon, but we proceeded anyway with the double mastectomy. And I had my breasts removed and nipple grafts placed

back on. And after the surgery, I didn't really feel any better. And then beyond the detransitioners, we're also hearing from family members who are speaking out about how this issue has created havoc and pain in their lives. For instance, we're now hearing from parents, particularly men, about how gender ideology has been wielded as a weapon in divorce cases. Essentially, what you have is one parent who wants to proceed with the transition for the child and the other parent is against it. I think one of the turning points was when I received a text message when he was two years

old of my son and address. I remember going to my dad and Sean in the picture. and telling my dad, how could she do this to my son? Why would she do this to my son? And then I text her and I said, please stop. He's a boy, not a girl. Boys don't wear girls clothes. And that was when he was two.

Now, that was just one case in California where the father tried to stop the ex-wife from transitioning the child, and the state responded by removing his custody. In other cases, you have schools and doctors framing both parents who don't agree to facilitate gender transitions for their children as guilty of, quote-unquote, abuse. Now, 20 years ago, there was virtually no parents transitioning their kids. How did this happen so fast and what was driving it? Well, I think that's a complex issue, as you might imagine, it involves a lot of societal pressure from dominant institutions like academia, from the political world, things like that.

But it does seem pretty clear that at least part of the. answer resides in that old axiom follow the money. Sales of sanctuary assignment surgeries and the pharmaceutical products in 2018 was $2.94 billion. By 2022, that figure had rose to $4.18 billion. And by 2030, our analysis indicates that that would increase to $7.5 billion, which represents an 8.5% compound annual growth rate, which is relatively significant within a health care vertical. So this has become an incredibly lucrative field, as the film does illustrate, and what makes it so lucrative is that these kids will need a lifetime drug therapy. But depending on how SCOTUS rules and how some detransitioner lawsuits proceed, those financial incentives might start to disappear.

and a decision is expected to come down this spring. Well, that is going to be absolutely a landmark decision. Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. And for those who want to see the film identity crisis, it's now available exclusively on The Daily Wire. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know.

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