WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: April 11, 2025

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about a Supreme Court ruling that the Trump administration violated due process when deporting an undocumented gang member, an executive order that could end almost every environmental regulation on the books, an executive order revamping foreign military sales, 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 a Supreme Court ruling that the Trump administration violated due process when deporting an undocumented gang member, an executive order that could end almost every environmental regulation on the books, an executive order revamping foreign military sales, 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 this controversy surrounding the Supreme Court decision directing the Trump administration to return a man that they had deported to an El Salvadorian high security prison. The man's name was Abrago Garcia. He was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement Custody on March 12, where he was then removed to Texas from his home in Maryland. and then he was taken to El Salvador's notorious terrorism confinement center.

The case goes back to the Supreme Court decision that I've talked about previously, which allowed the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport members of this Venezuelan gang, MS-13, classifying them as a foreign enemy as a terrorism group. Now, what that decision allowed the Trump administration to do was to assess through Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers, whether people that they had picked up were members of this gang, and if they ruled that they were, they were able to deport them as alien enemies of the United States. So this man, Abrago Garcia, was picked up. He is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador. In 2019, ICE began efforts to deport Garcia. They ruled that he was a member of MS-13 then, which was at the time considered an international criminal gang and is now considered a terrorist organization.

At the time, an immigration judge blocked Garcia's request for release because he said that the evidence shows that he's a verified member of MS-13. using evidence like clothing that the gang is known for using particular tattoos and things like that. Now, after some time, Garcia was eventually granted what's called a withholding of removal from an immigration's court, which is something that allowed him to be protected from being deported to El Salvador because they said that the gang might do harm to his family in D.C. Because he was caught, essentially. However, with the recent crackdown on international gang members, ICE recently took Garcia into custody, where he was sent to Texas, and then he was deported to El Salvador's Terrorism Confirmatement Center, where he was apparently stripped, shackled, and had his head shaved.

He has not been able to speak with his wife or his lawyers since then. After that, though, his lawyers filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Maryland, asking the judge to instruct the Trump administration officials to take all steps available to them proportionate to the gravity of the ongoing harm to return the plaintiff Abrago Garcia to the United States. Now, here's where the case gets really interesting, because that district court judge ruled that the federal government did not have the legal authority to deport him without quote-unquote due process. I say quote-unquote because due process

isn't really defined here yet. And so this brings up the question of what is due process when it comes to these domestic terrorism groups that are mostly made up of undocumented immigrants. This man, Abrago Garcia, was an illegal immigrant. He did not have U.S. paperwork, which makes it really hard for him to receive due process under law within the United States. And it brings up the question of whether he's actually entitled to that right. Due process is a right given to U.S. citizens. So while the federal government wants to treat illegal immigrants with as much dignity and rights as possible, it's very difficult to do so when he's been living in the country without documentation for many years at this point. This also brings up a problem that I mentioned briefly when I talked about this before.

I said that the decision to allow the federal government to use wartime provisions against foreign terrorist organizations was going to allow the government to identify kind of whatever they wanted at their discretion as a terrorist organization. And what that opened the door for was this interpretation by ICE and Border Patrol members of who is in one of these foreign gangs or not, because it's really hard to determine that. Nobody's going to actually admit that they're in a domestic terrorist group. And so it kind of leaves it up to the agents who are dealing with these individual cases to discriminate whether somebody is part of these gangs or not part of these gangs.

And the best thing that they can really go off of generally is these signs like tattoos or by clothing or their associates or things like that. And it's really hard to determine whether people are actually in a gang or not, especially when they're illegal immigrants. When they don't have documentation, when they don't have as many records in the United States, it's very hard to do that. And so ICE and Border Patrol, because of the Supreme Court decision recently, under the Alien Enemies Act, we're able to take that discretionary power and deport people like Abrago Garcia. Now the Supreme Court is ruling that they didn't have that discretionary power to determine that he was a part of the gang without due process. There's obviously a problem here. If ICE is actually required to take every single person that they suspect of being part of these international criminal gangs to trial and receive full due process like any other American citizen under the law, that's not particularly going to work because you have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to a jury that they're a member of these gangs, and that's just never going to be able to happen.

It's really, really hard to prove that somebody is a member of a particular gang, particularly without paperwork, without documents because they're not citizens. Not that there would be documents saying that they're part of a gang, but there's just less tabs that they have on people who are undocumented. And let's say they were able to. Let's say they were able to prove to a jury beyond a shadow of a doubt that somebody was a member of a gang. Would they be able to do that with every single person that they suspect of being part of one of these gangs? It would take forever. By the time the Trump administration has ended, they would deportation, because trials take a long time. It takes a long time to collect evidence, particularly evidence that would be sufficient to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that somebody was a part of one of these criminal gangs. And so that's just not a feasible system for deportations. But the other side of that coin is the Supreme Court decision recently that, that decision gives ICE and Border Patrol a lot of discretion to determine whether somebody is actually a member of one of those gangs or not, which could lead to a lot of administrative errors. They could be wrong about whether somebody's part of a gang. So that was the trouble with that particular decision and has led to cases like this. However, this guy, they're not really even claiming that he's not part of the gang. His lawyers are not even really claiming that. They're just saying that the evidence that has been submitted was not sufficient under due process to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was member of the gang. And therefore, the Supreme Court has now ruled that the Trump administration has to facilitate his return from this El Salvadorian prison. So it'll be interesting to see the trial that he's going to have in Maryland. What due process is like in that particular situation and what the standard is for future deportation and immigration policy. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive

order signed by the president on April 9th entitled Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy. I'll start off by saying that with all the trade wars that we're in right now, the U.S. needs to produce more energy domestically, and that's the end goal of this executive order, but it takes an interesting route in getting there. This order direct certain agencies to incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production to the extent permitted by laws. So what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that the executive order is requiring the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to put an expiration date on essentially all regulatory laws that their agency is in charge of enforcing.

So a few examples of that would be like the Atomic Energy Act under the Department of Energy. The Atomic Energy Act is the primary regulatory law that's put in place on nuclear energy plants. And obviously, if mismanaged, nuclear energy plants can be very dangerous to the environment and to other people, because nuclear energy is dangerous, even though it's very helpful to our economy and to our energy production. Another example within the executive order would be like under the Environmental Protection Agency, you have pretty much all of the endangered species bills. So the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Bald Eagle Protection Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, all of those are included in this as well.

And what the executive order requires is that within those bills, within the enforcement of those bills, these agencies put sunset provisions, which means that there's an expiration date on the regulations. And in order to extend the expiration date, what the agencies have to do is present sufficient cause for them to keep the operations going. So the whole idea of this is to make sure the bureaucracy that's managing these regulations as being efficient and they're actually being proactive in doing something. Otherwise, the default is supposed to be deregulation and to be free market management of all this kind of stuff, which is understandable. Obviously, you have to have some of these environmental requirements and they're good thing. Like you have to have some kind of law managing the disposal of nuclear waste or else you're going to be in trouble, right? You have to have some of these regulations.

The problem that the Trump administration is finding here is overregulation is allowing the bureaucracy to work very, very slowly in managing energy production. So with over 200,000 pages of federal regulations, the bureaucracy is taking a lot of time to give rulings and to give guidelines to companies, particularly energy producing companies, on how they're supposed to be. compliant with federal environmental regulations. And that's the problem here. We're trying to produce more energy. The end goal really is just to produce more American energy, which is something that we really, really desperately need, particularly with these tariffs that are going into place now. With these tariffs, our major imports from all other countries is energy. That's just what it comes down to, whether it be oil, whether it be gas, whether it be minerals. That's our primary imports from other countries. Tariffs are increasing the price of those things, at least in the short run.

and so the more energy that we can produce as quickly as possible here within the United States, the better. So that's the goal of this. So while energy producing companies are being bogged down by regulations now, the goal of this executive order is to say, this regulatory agency has to say that they're doing something proactive in order to extend their management of those laws. If they're not doing something proactive to help businesses understand the laws that they have to follow to produce energy, if they're not doing that, then their management of those laws is going to expire. And so I think this executive order is going to be an effective way to encourage and

incentivize the bureaucracy to act more efficiently and ultimately speed up and increase American energy production domestically, which is something we really need right now. You're listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. The next piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed on April 9th, entitled Reforming Foreign Defense Sales to Improve Speed and Accountability. So there's a couple things that this executive order does. The first thing that it does is it increases the collaboration between the government and the military industrial complex within the United States. The second thing that it does is that it expands the kinds of weapons and technologies that we're allowed to sell or give to other countries.

And then the third thing that it does is that it requires other countries that we're working with who are currently giving stuff long term to essentially work out a payment plan for these kinds of things. So we're actually making money on our military sales industry. So there's some mixed feelings about this kind of executive order. Reading the executive order, there's one part that really stood out. It requires the U.S. government to reevaluate restrictions imposed by the missile technology control regime on category one items and consider supplying certain partners with. specific category one items. Category one items refer to the biggest kind of military drones that you can have. The missile technology control regime defines category one missile systems as unmanned aerial vehicles, so drones, that have a range of 300 kilometers and the ability to carry a payload of

500 kilograms. So that's the biggest kind of military drones that exist unmanned that are not like actual planes. And what the executive order does is it reevaluates who we can, give these massive military drones too. So these are our technology. These are our weapons. And they're the most powerful ones that we have that aren't actual planes. The executive order is considering giving them to particular allied partners, which would probably include Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, places like that. So a couple thoughts about that. First of all, for the America First crowd that voted for Trump, this is not particularly what they voted for. So if you wanted the United States to slowly dwindle away the amount of money that we're spending on international aid, which is something that the Trump administration has talked a big talk about, there was a big deal in the first month of the Trump administration about cutting USAID, which is a lot of foreign aid to other countries.

If you were one of the America first crowd that wanted the Trump administration to continue cutting those things, this executive order is kind of doing the opposite of that. We're actually opening the doorway for the military industrial complex in the United States to give more ways. weapons, bigger weapons, and more U.S. drone technology to other countries, and that doesn't really seem to be what most Trump voters signed up for. However, here's the other side of that coin. So Trump, while campaigning in 2024, made a lot of claims that he was going to make Ukraine pay us back for all the weapons that we've given to them. We've given them over $100 billion in aid at this point, and he claimed that we were going to try to get that back. He has not done that yet, but there's a part of this executive order that kind of falls along that same thought process.

the executive order says that ensuring the transfer of priority end items to priority partners would advance the administration's goal of strengthening allied burden sharing, both by sharing the cost of production and by increasing our allies' capacity to meet targets independently without sustained support from the United States. So what that means is that we're going to give means of production to some of these other countries as a part of this deal. Countries that we feel are sufficiently allied with the United States and the the United States foreign policy interests, that it would be worth giving them some technology and some means of production so that they can produce weapons and military technology themselves

and pay for it from the United States without the U.S. having to continually be a charity for a lot of other countries. So you could look at this executive order and say, wow, the Trump administration is not really following through on its America First promises, or you could look at it and say they're actually weaning other countries off of the welfare system that is United States international aid. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a case that is going up to the Supreme Court, which is an appeal from the Trump administration about their right to fire heads of independent government agencies. So since Trump came into office, one of his main priorities this term has been restructuring the way that the executive branch operates.

Through institutions like Doge, he's trying to fire a lot of federal employees to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy. That's been a big priority for him. One way that he's tried to do that is by limiting the, scope of the independent government agencies and commissions, like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, things like that that are quote-unquote independent government agencies, which is a silly term if you really think about it. They're not actually independent. The only way in which they're independent is that they're not necessarily fireable by the president. But the only power that they have is by backing from the federal

government, which means that they're not actually independent. The only money that they have comes from the federal government, which means that they're not actually independent. So let's start with the fact that independent government agencies is a silly term. Now we'll get to the fact that Trump has fired a couple of the heads of these different independent government agencies, namely Kathy Harris, who was the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwen Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. They were both fired in February by the Trump administration without really giving much of a cause. Probably the cause was that Trump felt that these people did not align with the goals

of his administration, likely. because they had engaged in some kind of DEI practices at one time or another. And so he wanted people in there that would be more in line with his administration, which makes a lot of sense. However, the problem with that is a pesky Supreme Court case from 1935 called Humphreys Executor. A lot of people know about this case. Essentially, the Supreme Court ruled that Franklin Roosevelt could not fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission just because he was a Republican. So the decision protects the heads of these independent agencies from quote-unquote unjustified removal. the standard for them being removed is, quote, malfeasance in office, which is very vague, as most of

these standards are. So what's going on now is Kathy Harris and Gwen Wilcox, who were fired by President Trump, are suing and that case is now working its way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court just decided to take it to determine whether they were actually illegally removed without showing that they committed malfeasance in office, which is the standard that was set by the Humphreys executor case. Now, the thing that makes this lawsuit particularly interesting is the fact that we're that Humphrey's executor has not been challenged pretty much ever.

There hasn't been a president that has blatantly and openly violated the precedent of the Humphrey's executor case like President Trump is doing. And President Trump knows he's doing that too. The reason he didn't offer a case for why he was firing these people means that he actually wanted to challenge the precedent from Humphrey's executor in this, which is something that I'm glad is going to the Supreme Court. This needs to be ruled upon. The thing that will be decided by this case is whether the president has the authority,

to run all agencies within the executive branch, even those that are classified as technically independent, even though, again, I already said that I think that that's a silly term. Now, here's where the problem comes in. Most of these independent agencies were created by FDR as a way of getting around the checks and balances of the other two branches of government. These regulatory commissions did not require legislation to pass them, and they didn't require presidential action. They could just operate on their own for the purposes of regulation with the backing of

executive power. The problem is, most people now believe that those act as a check on the power of the president, which is true to some extent, but that's supposed to be the job of the other two branches of government. And so we really ran into this problem when we put agencies within the executive branch of government, which is supposed to be run by the president, which are not accountable to the president. That's where the problem is created. If it's supposed to be a check on the power of the president, you shouldn't have put it within the branch of government that the president runs. The only argument I see for not overturning Humphrey's executor is the fact that if you have too much turnover within these agencies, you're not going to be able to get as much stuff done. But that's a

part of the system. That's a part of the Democratic Republic system. That's not necessarily a bug. But this precedent has stood for 90 years now pretty much unchallenged. So it'll be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides about this and see whether President Trump has the authority to determine who he wants to put at the head of these independent government agencies. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another executive order signed by the president, entitled Extending the TikTok Enforcement Delay. So on January 20th, President Trump signed an executive order that would ban TikTok in the United States unless it split away from its Chinese owner bite dance. The U.S. National Security Council had labeled some concerns about TikTok taking American information,

that it being owned by a Beijing-based company would be a threat to national security, and so Trump signed this executive order. However, it would have been delayed because, because the Americans were trying to cut a deal with Bight Dance that would require the company to move its ownership out of Beijing, where the Americans feared that it could be controlled by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. However, this week, President Trump extended the delay on the ban yet again, so now it's 75 more days before the ban would hypothetically go into place. That ban has been extended until June 19th. The reason for this seems to be that a deal that was supposed to be announced this week, there was some supposed to be a deal announced between the U.S. and Bight Dance that came out this past week. However, the members of the Chinese government that were working on making the deal happen between

the U.S. and the Chinese-based company, we're not too happy about the tariffs that the United States just slapped on China. And so they said, nope, we're not going to sign the deal. That's why this extension happened. It's also worth noting that Trump fired a member of the National Security Council this week who was supposed to be helping on the deal. So the deal just kind of completely fell through. It seems like the 75-day period is meant to convey that President Trump thinks that it's going to take about that long for us to get through the tariff war that's happening at this point. And hopefully that is the case. Hopefully it's only a couple of months before that whole thing is balanced out. But the newsworthy thing here is that the deal fell through, which means that the negotiation for the TikTok company in China is going to cost this government five months of negotiating time by the time this whole thing is said and done.

so clearly they see it as enough of a national security threat to invest all that time in it. But the ban has been delayed for another 75 days as of this week. So to recap this week, we had two Supreme Court cases, one which ruled the Trump administration's deportation efforts violated due process, and one which will challenge the unfireability of the members of independent government agencies. We also had three executive orders, one which set expiration dates on major environmental regulations, one which changed the rules around foreign military sales, and one which extended the delay on the TikTok ban. 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.