WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: 04.25.25

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about an executive order promoting AI in schools, a Supreme Court case that helps explain the backlog in immigration courts, a House Resolution that would make April "Arab American Heritage Month," and more. I’m your host, Luke Miller, and on this show we’ll cover the news you didn’t catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome, to “Under the Radar.”  

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about an executive order promoting AI in schools, a Supreme Court case that helps explain the backlog in immigration courts, a House resolution that would make April Arab American Heritage Month, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media.

While they're covering the president's latest tweets, Here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the president on April 23rd, called Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth. The goal of the executive order is to promote AI literacy and proficiency among young Americans through integration of AI and AI studies into education. It will also provide training for educators, and it hopes to foster early,

exposure to AI concepts and technology to develop an AI-ready workforce. So the executive order sets up a training system for teachers in public schools to incorporate into the training that they have to do to become a licensed teacher, AI studies. And so what that means is they are taught by the government as part of the curriculum, how to teach kids to use AI to increase what they call AI literacy, which sounds to me like ability to use AI, which is kind of what it has to be, right? I mean, they're not going to be teaching in public schools how to code AI, although that might come later. This is an AI literacy program. And so what that means is they're going to teach kids how to use AI in public schools.

There's obviously problems that are going to come with that. Naturally, if you teach kids how to better use AI, they're going to better use it to cheat on their schoolwork. While the kids might be better at using AI, the kids might be better at getting information through AI. They might be better at accomplishing tasks more quickly through AI. they're not going to be learning how to accomplish it themselves. And that's the real problem with this executive order is, yes, it's a good resource to have. Yes, it's going to make life more efficient in a lot of ways. But if you're teaching kids, especially from that young of an age, I mean, this is going

through elementary school age kids. This is going to cover all public schooling. So if you teach elementary school kids, middle school kids, high school kids, how to use AI to accomplish tasks, find information, all that kind of stuff, they're not going to learn to do the tasks themselves. and that's kind of a prerequisite to having that additional tool. If you have the prerequisite abilities to be able to do research, to effectively research something, to effectively communicate,

which is another thing that people use AI for. Those are things that you need to have to be able to function effectively as a working adult in the American workforce. You have to be able to find information. You have to be able to communicate. And if the next generation develops a reliance upon AI to do those things, then you're going to have a generation that can't think for themselves, that can't communicate very well, that can't analyze problems for themselves and solve those

because they can get AI to do that for them as well. And that's a real problem. American literacy has been trending down for a long time. I mean, in the last couple of years, the National Assessment for Education Progress is showing that well under half of students in fourth grade can read at a fourth grade level, like well under half. And it's a downward trend for a long time now. And I don't think that this executive order is going to stop that. I think that it's going to exacerbate that problem, especially when kids are not only allowed to use AI in school, but taught to and encouraged to use AI in school. My worry is this. The book report that the next generation of children is going to have to write on Pride and Prejudice or a Tale of Two Cities is going

to quickly become them looking up a summary of it on AI, AI laying out an outline for an essay or even writing the essay entirely. We're already trending in that direction, but pretty soon children aren't even going to have to read these kind of books anymore to pass school. And then not only do we run into an educational problem and a communications ability problem, we run into a cultural problem too because then we're actually losing the value of traditional literature, of Western literature that makes up our culture. And if we raise a generation that isn't educated in the foundations of our cultural values, that's going to create real cultural problems for the United States.

That's my worry about pushing AI in elementary schools. and this executive order essentially is going to make it necessary. It's going to require teachers in public schools to teach AI literacy. My worry is just that it's leading us in a bad direction and going to exacerbate a problem that we already have in public schooling. Now that's also not to say that AI isn't important. AI is going to be a huge part of the future of the United States and of the future of the world.

It's going to be a big part of technology. It's going to be a big part of military operations. And I agree with the executive order's contention that we need to be the leaders of the world in artificial intelligence. I get that and I agree with that. One really cool part of the executive order is that it creates a national challenge called the Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge and it's going to set up in the next year a nationwide competition for educator achievements in AI, student achievements in AI. And the goal of that is to get students across the nation to work on

development in artificial intelligence. And that's a great thing. That's the positive side of this executive order. And that's what they could really do well with. If the goal is fostering AI development across the country, then that's a great goal. I just think that there's going to be a side effect of this goal that just furthers the decline in our educational system that's been happening for a long time. Now, the artificial intelligence challenge is a really cool thing, and I'm excited to see what the young people of America can do as far as making advancements in the AI world. However, I don't necessarily think that adding AI literacy as a part of public school curriculum

is going to be a positive thing for the country. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case called Monsalvo Velazquez versus Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States. The case is about Velasquez who illegally immigrated to the United States about 20 years ago. He lives in Colorado, where he is married with two American children. In 2011, the government started deportation efforts against Velasquez, and he did not claim that he had entered the country legally. He admitted that he had illegally immigrated to the United States. However, he claimed that he would face persecution if he went back to Mexico, and so the government had to suspend its removal efforts because they're required to when somebody appeals under fear of persecution. The appeal for fear of persecution lasted eight entire years until an immigration judge rejected that claim of persecution, but found that Velasquez was eligible for something that they call voluntary departure, which means that he's not necessarily a flight risk and that he gets 60 days to leave the country.

Involuntary departure is forced deportation, and that usually happens for violent criminals, people who have committed other felonies while in the United States. People who have been peaceful since they came into the United States generally will get this voluntary departure, which is what Velazquez got, and it meant he got 60 days to leave the country. Here's the catch. That 60th day fell on a Saturday, and so the judge extended the deadline to the following Monday, which gave Velasquez time to appeal the denial of his persecution claim, to the Board

of Immigration Appeals. They also rejected his argument and gave him 60 more days to leave the country. That deadline was December 11th, 2021, and it was also a Saturday. One day before that deadline, so the night before that deadline, his lawyers filed a motion to reopen the case, which would have delayed his deadline even further. But it wasn't until the following Monday that the Board of Immigration Appeals accepted the motion, and so they denied the motion because they said it arrived too late, even though it had been submitted before his deadline technically, but the government wasn't operating on the weekend. So then his lawyers filed another lawsuit, claiming that the immigration board acted illegally by saying that his appeal had arrived too late. And so that was taken

to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and that was taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court four years later, almost four years later, this week, which is pretty insane. The government started trying to deport Velasquez 14 years ago, and they've been unsuccessful in doing so so far. U.S. Supreme Court this week decided that the Board of Immigration Appeals had to accept his motion because the voluntary departure deadline has to extend to the next business day if it falls on a weekend or legal holiday, which is just insane. There's basically an unending appeal process that can happen for these deportation efforts, it seems like. It's kind of hard to argue that given the fact that we're 14 years into trying to deport this single person, and we've been unsuccessful

in doing so even though his appeals have been denied three or four times at this point. Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion saying that the deadline works like others found in immigration law where the term days operates to extend a deadline that falls on a weekend or legal holiday to the next business day. But this week, the court decided against Velazquez's appeals and there's no higher court to appeal it to. So now after 14 years of legal processes, Velazquez, who is an illegal immigrant to the country, who came here in 2004, has now been officially ordered to leave the country. I bring up this case just to bring up the problem of how messy our immigration system is. The United States government has spent 14 years trying to deport one single person who came here illegally.

This is why you see a lot of people arguing that it's just not worth it to try to deport people because it takes so much time and there's so much red tape that you have to go through in order to actually make it happen. The Trump administration is facing even more of that than previous ones have. They've faced 32, I believe, injunctions so far when trying to deport people. And most of those people have been violent gang members, but there are people like Velasquez, too, have been peaceful since being in the United States, but are not U.S. citizens and have committed felonies under U.S. law by immigrating here illegally, and it's almost impossible to make deportations happen because of the insane amount of red tape and backlog in the U.S. immigration court system.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the current backlog in the immigration courts is at 3.687 million active cases. There's over 3.5 million active cases in the United States immigration courts. The average wait time for an immigrant who's either seeking citizenship, seeking asylum, or facing deportation efforts, is up to 636 days. That's the average amount of wait time to have a case heard in the immigration courts. And the case from this week just outlines why that exists, why that backlog is such a problem. One individual man, his deportation efforts started in 2011, it is 2025 now, and the man has still not been deported from the United States. That's how much red tape goes into this.

It's not 14 years for everyone, obviously. but one major incentive for illegal immigration is the fact that it's so hard to deport illegal immigrants, which makes it almost not even worth it for the government to try to do. So if we want to take a serious look at the illegal immigration issue on a fundamental level, something's got to change about this because that's really creating a pile up and that's not going away anytime soon. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio for Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a House Resolution submitted by Representative Rashida Talib, a Democrat from the State of Michigan, entitled

expressing support for the recognition of the month of April as National Arab American Heritage Month and Celebrating the Heritage and Culture of Arab Americans in the United States. So the resolution is trying to elicit support in the House of Representatives for naming the month of April as nationally recognizing Arab Americans in the United States. Now, there are two main reasons that I bring out this House resolution. The first reason is that in the resolution, it states that in recent, recent years, at least 48 states and territories have taken steps to recognize April as Arab American Heritage Month, which means that it's already going on in most states across the country. Notably, the three states that have not taken any steps to recognize April as Arab American

Heritage Month are Florida, Idaho, and Tennessee. Every other state, including the state of Michigan, has at least introduced some type of legislation or some kind of governmental order to recognize April as Arab American Heritage Month, which I really didn't know that that was a movement that was happening, but clearly it is, if that many states have taken some kind of steps to do this, only three exceptions to the rule, and I said 48 states and territories, to leave includes Washington, D.C. in the groups that have recognized April as American Heritage Month. However, that's a pretty widespread movement if 48 states are taking steps in that direction. Now, the second reason that I bring this up is to say, why April specifically? Sure, we in the United States take one day to celebrate

our independence. We take one day to celebrate our veterans. We take one day to celebrate our veterans. We take one day to celebrate those who have died in service of this country. But 48 states and territories and now the House of Representatives, the United States House of Representatives, are drafting legislation to make a whole month, the month of April, Arab American Heritage Month. There are 3.7 million Arab Americans in the United States. There are 16.2 million United States military veterans that live in the United States. It seems like a disproportionate recognition, first of all.

Second of all, there are some religious implications to the United States. this as well. And while it's certainly not the case that all Arab Americans are Muslim, there is a disproportionate number of Arab Americans who are Muslim. And there is another significant religious event that happens in April, most years, namely Easter. Easter is not a federal holiday. Good Friday is not a federal holiday. It is the most sacred holiday for Christians who make up the majority of Americans, according to polling data, and it's not recognized as a federal holiday. And so that's the other problem that it creates is if we recognize the month of April as Arab American Heritage Month, a major part of that Arab heritage is steeped in the religion of

Islam, and it's hard to work your way around that, without saying that the government would be recognizing the celebration of Islamic culture, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but doing so during the most holy time of the Christian religious calendar, would at least be taken by many people as an attempt to undermine Christianity and Christian culture in the United States. And I don't think that it's too big of a jump to make to say that celebrating Arab American heritage include celebrating Islamic heritage, given the fact that the resolution was drafted by Rashida Talib, who is the first Muslim to serve in the Michigan legislature and one of the first Muslims to serve in the United States legislature. Again, this House resolution has not yet been

passed, but it is a movement that's clearly going on, given that there have been drafts of this same kind of resolution in at least 48 states and territories across the United States. So there is an effort to make April specifically Arab American Heritage Month. While I'm not against recognizing the contributions that Arab Americans have made to the United States, it just seems somewhat disproportionate, and it could certainly be argued that there could be a religious undertone to this that undermines the Christian holidays that usually fall in April, like Easter and Good Friday, which are not recognized as national holidays. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another Supreme Court case, this one

entitled Mahmoud v. Taylor. The case was filed by a group of Maryland parents who are seeking a decision that would allow them to opt their elementary school children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ plus themes. They're arguing that the school board's decision to not let them opt their children out of these kind of instruction violates their religious freedom, and the Supreme Court justices seem to question whether there would even be any harm to simply allowing the parents to excuse their children from the instruction. The case originated in Montgomery County, which is in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, and the challengers include both Christian parents and Muslim parents who had a problem with the school board approving books

featuring LGBTQ plus characters for use in the language arts curriculum that the school teaches. For example, there is a book describing the story of a girl attending a same-sex wedding and another one called Pride Puppy that tells the story of a puppy that gets lost during a Pride parade. In 2023, the school board for Montgomery County declared that it would not allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybook. And after that, the parents decided to take this case to court. It has now gone up to the Supreme Court, where the arguments have mostly boiled down to what it means to be exposed to those kinds of storybooks, whether it's just that they're in the schools or whether they're actually forcibly taught to the children. The parents explained that the teachers are actually being required to use the books, and the school board has suggested that the teachers do so five times before the end of every year, claiming that the whole point of including the storybooks in the curriculum was that every student would be taught from them.

Justice Amy Coney-Barritt suggested that the teaching of the content in the storybooks might amount to more than just exposure. She said, quote, presentation of an idea as fact, such as telling students that this is the right view of the world, is different from exposure, such as telling students that some people think a particular. particular thing. The court made the distinction that mere exposure to things that you object to is not necessarily coercion, but that because the children were forcibly being taught this, that the parents could not excuse their children from learning from these kinds of books, meant that it did, in fact, violate their religious freedom, and the Supreme Court is forcing the Montgomery County School Board to let parents opt their children out of this kind of instruction. The only potential problem that I really see with this decision is how far the Supreme Court's

actually going to let this go? How far do claims of religious freedom as far as exposure to ideas go in the public schooling system? For example, could a parent opt their child out of history studies because American history features a lot of Christianity? Could Christian parents opt their children out of science class because science class might teach evolution? That's the part of this decision that's kind of left unexplained, it seems like, by the Supreme Court. They just addressed this on a very individual level, saying that in this particular case, it was coercive, it was not limited to exposure to the ideas, but it was actually promoting the ideas as fact, which is what the Supreme Court had a problem with. So we'll see how far the Supreme Court takes this and what this means

that parents can opt to children out of, but overall this decision is a great stride towards religious freedom and allowing parents to have a little bit of say in the kind of ideology that their children are educated in when it comes to public schooling. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the president on April 23rd, entitled Transparency Regarding Foreign Influence at American Universities. The executive order claims that during the first Trump presidency, the Department of Education opened investigations into 19 college campuses for the years of 2019 through 2021, which led universities to report $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funding.

It also claims that the Biden administration undid the transparency work that the Trump administration put into place during the first term. And so this executive order essentially charges the Department of Education with opening more investigations into these universities and setting regulations on these universities requiring them to completely disclose all sources of foreign funding. He even goes so far as to attach the Department of Education funding of public colleges to their transparency about foreign funding that they receive, which I'll just point out is not a problem for Hillsdale College because we don't receive public funding.

However, for those universities that do receive funding from the federal government, they will now be required to disclose any funding that they receive from any foreign contributors. Now, this was always required since the Higher Education Act of 1965. However, many of the presidential administrations have not necessarily enforced it. The Trump administration claims that from 2010 to 2016, universities failed to disclose more than half of reportable foreign gifts. And even when foreign funding is reported, its true sources are often hidden. And so this executive order seeks to address that problem saying that publicly funded universities must not only disclose the amount of money that they receive from foreign funds, they must also disclose the donor of those funds. Now, the reason for doing that is rather simple. There's usually some type of promise or agenda attached to donations of any kind, really. Whether you're donating to a charity or whether you're donating to a university or a cause of any kind, there's an agenda that you wish to see forwarded by that institution.

And so the Trump administration worries that other countries have interest in swaying public opinion in the United States. And so they're concerned that foreign contributions to U.S. public universities could be forwarding the agendas of other countries, particularly of our enemies. It's also worth noting that we don't know whether a lot of the universities that have been more lenient towards the pro-Hamas protests have had any foreign funding from sources that might look unfavorably on an institution that would shut down pro-Hamas protests. So it just boils down to the idea that transparency is the best policy, and that's what the Trump administration is forwarding through this executive order. So to summarize this week, we had two executive orders, one instituting AI literacy training in public schools, and one enforcing transparency of the sources of foreign funding at public universities. We had two Supreme Court cases, one that demonstrates the backlog in the American Immigration

Court system, and one that addressed parental rights when it comes to LGBTQ issues in schools. And lastly, we had a House resolution hoping to designate the month of April as national Arab American Heritage Month. Tune in next week for more. Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time

for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.