WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 15

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about a Supreme Court case defining what reasonable suspicion means for immigration stops, a bill that would codify cash bail in Washington, DC, a Supreme Court case that will decide whether Trump’s tariffs are legal, and more.

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 case defining what reasonable suspicion means for immigration stops, a bill that would codify cash bail in Washington, D.C., a Supreme Court case that will decide whether Trump's tariffs are legal, 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. First piece of news I have for you this week is another Supreme Court case, this one also on the emergency docket, that was decided on Monday when the Supreme Court paused a ruling by a federal judge in Los Angeles that restricted the ability of federal agents to make immigration stops.

In the Los Angeles area, immigration raids have been going on since June as part of the Trump administration's deportation efforts. As we've seen, the response to that has not been good in that area. L.A. had riots that happened, as a response to that. And actually so many people were frustrated with not only that immigration raids were taking place, but also the way that they were happening, that there's been this group mostly made of U.S. citizens. A few undocumented immigrants are in this group as well that has brought forth a case to the courts that essentially sued the federal government saying that they did not

have reasonable suspicion to be making these immigration stops. A U.S. District Court Judge for the Central California area, and I'm going to butcher this name, but the name is Ma'amai Iwousi Mensa Frimpong, barred federal agents in that area from making immigration stops without reasonable suspicion. Essentially, it's redefining what reasonable suspicion means, at least differing in definition from what ICE has, from what the federal government has. The judge said that for these federal agents, reasonable suspicion cannot rest solely on any combination of four factors. First, apparent race or ethnicity. Second, speaking in Spanish or accented English. Third, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants are known to

gather, such as pick up spots for day laborers, fourth working at specific jobs such as landscaping or construction. So those four things that this district court judge, Frimpong, said, cannot be the basis for reasonable suspicion for ICE to make a stop. The plaintiff group is claiming that these ICE stops are violating the Fourth Amendments, ban on unreasonable search and seizure. They're claiming that throughout history, a legal stop and search must be based on specific articulable facts rather than broad profiles. So that's the case that they're bringing forward. This district court judge in California issued an order on July 11th that prohibited federal agents for making immigration stops unless they had articulable, reasonable suspicion beyond that.

So essentially they had to have a name and have already confirmed that they were in the country illegally. And then you have to find them. So it made it very, very difficult for these deportation efforts to keep taking place or at least to take place at a meaningful level. That decision was, of course, appealed. It's right now in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. So far, they've kind of left the order in place, but litigation is still going on there. And U.S. Solicitor General, John Sauer, came to the Supreme Court, putting this on the emergency docket, asking the justices to step in and at least pause the order for now, claiming that this district court judge has completely blocked federal law enforcement efforts. The other big issue here, which the Solicitor General

brings up, is whether the challengers actually have a legal right to sue, whether they actually have standing in this case given that most of them are U.S. citizens, are legal U.S. citizens, and they're not the ones who they claim to have been hurt by this policy. So generally speaking, standing requires that you have been the recipient of the violation of the law that you're suing over. And it is worth noting before we go any further that at least as it stands right now, illegal immigrants in the United States do have a right to sue. So it's not saying that because some of the people in the group are illegal immigrants, they don't have a right to sue. That's not how it works here. Illegal immigrants do have a right to sue. However, if the group is made up of people

who have not been hurt by the policy, then there's questions to whether they have legal standing to bring this case forward in the first place. And that's what Justice Kavanaugh said in his majority opinion about pausing the district court order. He made a few important points saying that the challengers likely don't have the legal right to sue because they have, quote, unquote, no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors. Kevinall also gave the court's reasoning for the decision in the first place saying that apparent ethnicity or race alone does not make up reasonable suspicion for an immigration stop, but it can rest on the totality of those circumstances, including places where there's an extremely high number or

percentage of illegal immigrants. The fact that undocumented immigrants often gather in certain locations and they have made deported illegal immigrants from those areas before. And the third one that they often work certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, kinds of jobs that are easier to get without having citizenship documentation. And so Kavanaugh was essentially saying that reasonable suspicion can't be based off of race alone, but the totality of the circumstances can make up for it. He said that the Trump administration met both of the critical factors that the court considers when talking about temporary relief, emergency relief, like the Solicitor General was seeking. He said that the significance of the issue to the

government's immigration enforcement policy was high enough and that this case will likely be coming to the Supreme Court soon from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And, and And he said that the Supreme Court is likely to reverse that the original district court judge is ruling anyway. So that meets the qualifications that the Supreme Court looks for for granting emergency relief. Now, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented to this decision. She wrote, a set of facts cannot constitute reasonable suspicion if it describes a very

large category of presumably innocent people, which is the argument against this. And it's certainly worth bringing up the fact that there are people who are legal immigrants who would meet all of those qualifications for. reasonable suspicion that ICE currently uses. And so that's essentially what the plaintiffs are arguing in the first place, too, is you're going to scoop up a lot of innocent people along with the guilty ones. That brings a problem under the Fourth Amendment. However, at least for now, the Supreme Court is seeming to say that it would be impossible for immigration enforcement officials to actually do their job if they had to operate under the strict guidelines that the district court judge was

laying out for reasonable suspicion, saying that essentially you would have to go on individual cases and already have proven that they're here illegally and know exactly where they are, who they are, how long they've been in the country. And that's just really, really hard to do, especially on any kind of meaningful level. So that's what the Supreme Court is seeming to say for now. They've granted this emergency relief to allow the federal government to keep making immigration stops based on their current definition of reasonable suspicion. But that definition is going to come up to the Supreme Court soon from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. So be looking out for that case as well. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that

was brought before the House of Representatives called the District of Columbia Cash Bail Reform Act. It was introduced by Representative Elise Stefonic, who at one point was being considered for vice president and later was being considered for UN ambassador, among other things. The purpose of the bill is to require mandatory pretrial and post-conviction detention for crimes of violence and dangerous crimes, as well as requiring mandatory cash bail for certain offenses that pose a threat to public safety or order in the District of Columbia. So last week on the show, it talked about an executive order that was aimed at reforming or prohibiting cashless bail in the District of Columbia. There's only so much that a presidential executive order can do there. The executive order was kind

of requiring the Attorney General to work with the District of Columbia and their government to reform the cashless bail policy that D.C. currently has. This bill would codify that to put a little bit more congressional control over that, as is specified in the Constitution that they have the responsibility to do. This bill has not been passed yet, but it would take the next step beyond what the executive order from last week was mentioning do it. So the key things about this bill, first it's saying that courts must detain individuals both before trial and after conviction if they're charged with a crime of violence or a dangerous crime. That includes burglary or robbery involving weapons. They must be detained. Judges no longer have the discretion

to release those individuals pre-trial. Like I was saying before, the current system is cashless bail, and that gives judges the discretion to say whether they need to be detained or not based off of whether the judge believes that they're a flight risk. What this bill would do is take that discretion away from judges and say, if you've committed a dangerous or violent crime, then you have to be detained until your trial and after you're convicted. The next thing that the bill would do is to completely eliminate pretrial release as an option for murder, firearms violations, threats or intimidation of officials,

of law enforcement or witnesses. And third, it requires mandatory cash bail for what it calls public safety and order offenses. So crimes like failure to appear, for a law enforcement official. Obstruction of justice, fleeing the police, rioting or inciting a riot, stalking, burglary, robbery, those kinds of things. Burglary and robbery are not violent forms, not with a weapon because that fits into the violent crimes mentioned earlier, but burglary robbery without a weapon. Those things would now be mandatory cash bail. So the judge would not have the discretion to just release the person. They would have to actually set a cash bail,

and they're only allowed to be released pretrial with the cash bail or secured bond. So the purpose for doing something like this would be to keep violent criminals or potential repeat offenders, threats to public safety and orders, as the bill describes, from going out and doing those crimes again while they have still yet to be punished for the original crime. What this is not saying is people who have been repeat offenders or violent criminals in the past, who are now out, who have served their sentences and are now free. This bill is not saying that those people can be prematurely arrested. What it is saying is, if you have been charged with a crime, particularly a violent crime and you have not gone to trial yet or you have already been convicted. You cannot be

released on cashless bail because we've seen too many times those people going out and committing those same crimes again or committing other crimes. It's gotten to the point where those people are a public safety risk if they're released. Again, this is a step forward on top of that executive order from last week that President Trump signed. Elise Stefanik is one of the bigger names in the, in the Republican House of Representatives. And so if she's bringing this bill forward, she's got Republican support behind her. The bill has just been introduced to this point. It will likely be assigned to committees in the next week or two. And just to give a little perspective about the bill's chances, there have been, in this Congress, in the 119th Congress, there have been about 9,500 bills

introduced. Only 829 of those have gone to committee considerations, which this one will likely do with the amount of Republican support that it has behind it, and the big name Republican who's bringing the bill up in the first place. Of those 829 that have gone to committee consideration, about 75, 80% of those get to floor consideration, so they pass through their committee. And of those 605 that have gotten to floor consideration, 580 of those have passed the chamber, have passed the House of Representatives, which is where most bills originate. So if a bill gets through committees, the odds of it passing at least through the House of Representatives are extremely high. So I think this bill has a very good chance of doing that, especially with presidential support behind it,

clearly which it'll have because of the executive order that was signed last week. This is a hot button mainstream issue right now, particularly with the surge in violent crime that we're seeing with the high profile violent criminal cases that we're seeing right now. So I think this bill is going to get pushed forward pretty quickly. 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 Supreme Court case which will potentially decide the fate of Trump's tariffs that he has tried to pass executively over the last several months. Now, the Supreme Court is out of session right now. They're not actually meeting and hearing cases. The cases that I've been talking about the last couple weeks are

ones that have made the emergency docket, and the emergency docket cases can be presented to the court even when they're out of session. So that's why those have been happening. But in November is when the court will reconvene, we'll come back into session and start hearing cases. And they have essentially announced that the first case that they're going to hear is one about Trump's tariff policies. Cases are set for argument the very first week of the November 2025 session. So the Supreme Court is hearing out two cases that have been brought by small businesses against the Trump administration, claiming that the Trump tariffs, the tariffs that he's tried to institute since the beginning of his second administration, are illegal and have done irreparable damage to their businesses. So let's look at the foundation for the Trump tariffs that he's tried to institute over the last several months.

Now, generally speaking, tariffs cannot be passed executively. They're not a power that's given to the president in the Constitution. They're a power that's given to Congress. But when Trump has been trying to do this, he's been citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which is a law that allows the president to take action to deal with any quote unquote unusual or extraordinary threats, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States. And the president has to declare a national emergency with respect to that threat. There's two different ways that Trump has tried to do this. His first set of tariffs, which he's called the trafficking tariffs, have applied to goods from Canada, China, and Mexico. And he's declared a national emergency saying that these countries are supplying the flow of fentanyl into

the United States, which is an illegal drug, which he is called an epidemic of fentanyl deaths that we've had in the United States. He's blaming those three countries, primarily at least. And so he's called a state of national emergency, and so he can impose tariffs on them in order to prompt them to do more to halt the flow of fentanyl into the United States. The second way that Trump has tried to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for this is what he calls the reciprocal tariffs, which is basically tried to impose a minimum tariff of 10%, escalating up to 50% depending on the nation, based off of a national emergency in trade deficit. So saying that our economy is in a state of national emergency because we're in trade deficits to many other countries, these reciprocal tariffs are to kind of

even things out. At least that's what he's trying to do and why he's saying that he can use emergency economic powers given to him under that 1977 law. So the two small businesses that have brought cases against the Trump administration for this are called learning resources and hand to mind. They're claiming that the tariffs in 2025 will cost them $100 million, which is nearly 45 times as much as they paid in 2024. Now, I don't know if that math is correct. The case is not contingent upon how much the tariffs are actually costing them. They're just doing that to bring in standing to say they have a legal right to sue because the Trump administration is surpassing their legal powers and it's costing them. That's what they're arguing. In a decision in May,

U.S. District Judge Randolph Contreras ruled that those tariffs were illegal and barred the Trump administration from enforcing them. And that case has been appealed now up to the Supreme Court, which will be heard in November. In the Trump, administration's petition for review, they argued that tariffs and the ensuing trade negotiations with all of our major trading partners are pulling America back from the precipice of disaster, essentially stating that they're necessary, that we are actually in this national state of emergency, particularly in regards to those trade deficits, that these unfair and asymmetric trade policies that we have with other nations have gutted our manufacturing capacity and military readiness.

And so President Trump has legal reason under the Emergency Economic Powers Act to instate those tariffs on his own. From what I've read, every circuit court that these two individual cases have gone through have cited against the Trump administration's right to use these tariffs. So the Supreme Court is now going to hear both of those cases kind of together in the first week of November. It seems likely that they're going to rule against the Trump tariffs. But the fact that they moved it up to the very front of the docket for when they come back into session indicates that they're taking this seriously, that they realize that on both sides, the tariff issue

really affects people. It really affects the economic state of the country. It really affects small businesses, it affects big businesses, it affects our trade relations. And so the Supreme Court is showing that they recognize the importance of these cases and that something needs to be decided because every time new tariffs are announced, the stock market goes crazy, every time a judge puts a pause on them that goes crazy in the other direction in a positive way. And so there's a lot of economic uncertainty in regards to these tariffs. And the Supreme Court is moving this up to the forefront and saying we need some economic certainty about which way this is going to go, whatever way it does, with the consistency of what the circuit

courts have said it seems like they're going to side against the Trump administration, though. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by President Trump on September 5th entitled strengthening efforts to protect U.S. nationals from wrongful detention abroad. The executive order states that wrongful detentions are an affront to the rule of law and aim to undermine our leadership on the world's stage. The United States will not tolerate these attacks on our sovereignty and on U.S. nationals. So what the executive order does, the Secretary of State can designate a country as a state sponsor of wrongful detention. if a U.S. national is wrongfully detained there and the government refuses to release them or, and it doesn't have to be a government, it can be a terrorist organization or a private militia or anything like that. If they wrongfully detain a U.S. citizen, as defined by the Levinson Act, which is for political reasons, any other kinds of unlawful reasons like terrorism or kidnapping, those kinds of things. If a foreign state actor or a foreign terrorist group does that, if they wrongfully detain a U.S. national and refuse to release them, the U.S. can impose economic or individual sanctions, visa-based,

and travel restrictions, limitations on foreign aid, export controls, and restrictions on U.S. passport travel to that country. The designation of that country as a state sponsor of wrongful detention can be removed if they release or help facilitate the release of the wrongfully detained Americans, but it does not preclude them from being punished by sanctions or export controls or things like that in the future. There aren't actual instances of wrongful detainment mentioned in the executive order, but one's mind has to go to the instances where Hamasen has a lot of terrorists have taken hostages in foreign countries, some of whom have been American citizens. This is just another way for the U.S. federal government to punish governments or terrorist organizations

who try to use those kind of things against the United States and offer some kind of non-military punishment that you can go to first before having to take military action. It also allows the U.S. government to put economic pressure on governments where they have a non-governmental terrorist organization within their borders doing these kind of things so as to incentivize that government not to support or enable the terrorist organization within their borders, but to actually work with the United States to help those kind of instances not happen in the first place. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another emergency docket Supreme Court case, this time allowing President Trump to fire, at least for the time being, a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Trade Commission is a bureaucratic board of the United States government that protects consumers from false advertising, fraudulent schemes. It enforces the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It does antitrust, things like that.

There's a very famous case, Humphrey's Executor v. the United States in 1935, which ruled that the president could only fire one of these FTC commissioners or one of these other regulatory commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. President Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter in March 2025, saying that her continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration's priorities. In July, District Judge Lauren Ali Khan ordered the Trump administration to reinstate slaughter, saying that the Humphrey's executor precedent means that the president can't fire someone from one of these regulatory boards for such a partisan reason. Last week, the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court with a case to be put on the emergency docket, asking the Supreme Court to intervene and pause Judge Ali Khan's order, saying that the D.C. Circuit Court had applied an overly expansive reading of Humphrey's executor, that the Supreme Court has since repudiated with a couple of other cases,

referring to a case that the Supreme Court decided in May that had allowed President Trump to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The district court judge said that even if the Supreme Court is deciding to overrule Humphrey's executor with those two smaller cases, it would be, quote unquote, an act of judicial hubris for the district court to do so prematurely. And she said that the case has to go to the Supreme Court because it would actually overrule Humphrey's executor, which applied specifically to the Federal Trade Commission. So this is exactly the same sort of case as was decided in 1935. The Supreme Court has allowed for the firing to remain in place as of now while those appeals worked their way up to the Supreme Court.

But this really could set an interesting precedent if they do overrule Humphrey's executor by the end of this because a lot of those boards like the FTC, like the National Labor Relations Board, are made up of unelected officials who don't really have a level of accountability to the president who are appointed for long terms. And there has certainly been an argument emerging, particularly on the right for a long time now to overturn Humphrey's executor and allow the current administration, whoever it is, to put in place officials who would agree or comply with or at least accountable to the current elected administration. For now at least, the Supreme Court is saying that

President Trump does have the authority to fire those executive regulatory board members or commissioners under the label of inconsistent priorities with the current administration, which is clearly a purely partisan reason. So we'll see if the Supreme Court upholds that in the future and overturns Humphrey's executor, or whether they agree with the Supreme Courts of the past that presidents cannot fire those federal officials for partisan reasons. So to recap this week, we had three Supreme Court cases, one which will define whether immigration raids are violating the Fourth Amendment, one which will decide whether President Trump's tariffs are legal, and another which may allow the president to fire executive regulatory board members. We had an executive order that establishes

economic consequences for wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens abroad, and we had a bill that aims to codify cash bail in Washington, D.C. 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.