WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar - Episode 25

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about this year's official National Security Strategy document, the Supreme Court case allowing Texas' redistricting effort, another Supreme Court case challenging the asylum system, 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 this year's official national security strategy document, the Supreme Court case allowing Texas's redistricting effort, another Supreme Court case challenging the asylum system, 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 the 2025 National Security Strategy document, or the NSS. The document was released on December 4th, and it outlines the United States public national security and foreign policy strategy.

for the upcoming year. This is an interesting tradition that goes back to 1986, and it required the president to submit to Congress every year a comprehensive report on national security strategy. Now, before I get into the document, I'll preface this by saying, President Trump gave a speech at the United Nations not very long ago, where he outlined a lot of these principles that are in the document, and they're outlined a little bit more structurally in this kind of document. It's not all that long. It's about 33 pages, and it's written in a very Trumpian kind of style, which is very easy to read. So if it's something that's appealing to you, it's something that's interesting. It's on the White House website. It's publicly released. So I'll just highlight some of the

main contentions made by the document. First is the assertion of something they call the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. So just a quick summary of the history of the Monroe Doctrine. In the early United States, George Washington and his ilk pursued a non-interventionist foreign policy. They did not want the United States to be entangled in foreign nations, foreign wars, foreign treaties, anything of that nature. They did not want to meddle with Europe and they didn't want Europe to meddle with them. The Monroe Doctrine expands on that just a little bit by saying that we're not going to meddle in Europe if you don't meddle with us and we can stop you from meddling in the Western Hemisphere. It was basically a contention that the United States had sovereignty over the

Western Hemisphere to prevent European expansion and intervention that might threaten U.S. national security. It also signified that the United States was not going to interfere in European affairs, European wars, it wasn't going to take sides in matters across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, it's obviously the case that the United States has somewhat abandoned the modern doctrine since then. We relatively frequently intervene in foreign nations across the Atlantic Ocean throughout Europe. We make treaties with everybody. We make alliances, defensive alliances, security alliances, energy alliances, all that kind of stuff. And it really hasn't been a major priority of American foreign policy in the last 80 years to respect the sovereignty of European nations.

But as I come to this Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, I'll point out that in his speech to the United Nations recently, President Trump somewhat defended that case that we should recognize the sovereignty of separate nations in Europe. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't intervene in Europe and make deals in Europe. Trump is, of course, in favor of those things. But he also pointed out that he doesn't think that the United States and United States led international organizations,

the United Nations and NATO should really be intervening in the domestic policy of European nations. The European nations should be allowed to close their borders, to fix their immigration crises, to make oil deals with Russia and with other countries, and that it's really not the business of the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of those nations, at least militarily. He's still plenty willing to impose sanctions upon other nations to do those kind of things. But what he means in this national security document by the Trump corollary to the modern doctrine is that the United States does have some sort of responsibility and right to intervene in nations in the Western Hemisphere for its own national security.

For example, the situation in Venezuela right now. Trump says in the document, we want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States. We want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations. organizations. We want a hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains. And we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine. Things like mass migration and the drug trafficking problem are a huge deal to Trump. And so

he sees a role extended from the Monroe Doctrine for the United States to intervene, to stop these kind of things from coming to the borders of the United States, to stop mass migration from coming to the United States borders to create conditions where people won't need to migrate so much from those countries, and to intervene like they're doing in Venezuela, blowing up drug trafficking boats so that those drugs don't come across the border of the United States. That's the first and most important thing that President Trump presents in this national security strategy document. The rest of the document presents issues that are gradually growing further and further away from the United States geographically. For example, after the issue with the Western Hemisphere,

He addresses supply chains in the Indo-Pacific, so keeping open supply chains with countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and many others over there, where we're getting a lot of our important technological and industrial products from. A lot of our important energy and defense products and minerals are coming from over there, too, which is why that's next on the list. The third thing the document presents is that we want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe's civilizational self-confidence and Western identity. He talks about wanting to bring the Ukraine War to an end, but that if other European powers have other incentives to keep the war going and wouldn't work with the Trump administration to get this war to an end, then the Trump administration would leave Europe to its own ends, basically saying, if you're not going to show that you will work with us, particularly talking to the NATO nations in Europe, who have rejected most peace deals that have been put on the table between Russia and Ukraine, Trump is saying to them, if you're not willing to work with us to make peace between Russia and Ukraine, which is his main priority there in Europe, that it will be up to them to fund Ukraine.

in the Ukrainian army from now on, if they're not showing that they'll take steps to make peace. Next, he presents that we want to prevent any one power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the choke points through which they pass, while avoiding the forever wars that bogged us down in that region at great cost. So he specifically addresses Iran here, saying that we don't want an adversarial power dominating the Middle East and the economy of the Middle East, but also for peace's sake, we don't want one singular power, whether they're adversarial or not, basically meaning whether they're Iran or Israel, we don't want either one of them dominating the region for pieces

sake. And we don't want to have troops over there forever. And then lastly, Trump concludes the document by saying that the U.S. should lead the world in technology, energy, AI, and all those other things. And so one of the main goals of United States foreign policy and national security will be to secure those things, will be to promote U.S. dominance in the world and U.S. military and energy independence and security. The next piece of news I have for you this week is the Supreme Court's decision on the Texas redistricting efforts and the map that was challenged by different civil rights groups over the last few weeks. I talked about this on the show briefly while it was being brought up through

the circuit courts saying that the Supreme Court was likely to take it up very soon. Looks like they did and understandably so. It's a very important issue, especially given its ramifications for the 2026 midterms, which are coming up very soon. Just as a reminder of the situation that's going on in Texas, President Trump basically asked Texas Republicans to redraw their map, to redistrict the way that the state did their elections, in order to give Republicans more seats in the House of Representatives. Again, this is kind of a bit of a sleazy political move, but it's totally legal. I find it so weird still that it's totally okay to politically gerrymander a state, but it's totally wrong to racially gerrymander a state.

And again, I agree that it's wrong to racially gerrymander a state, but that it also should be wrong to politically gerrymander state. A while back, the Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering was a political issue, that it was not a legal issue for the court to decide. And so gerrymandering remains legal. This can be done. States can redraw their districts to give their desired political party more seats, and that's basically what this new Texas map did.

The challengers claimed that it was basically being redrawn so as to, make less minority majority districts, less districts where there were black or Hispanic majorities. But the Supreme Court overturned the temporary hold that was put on the map, arguing that the state of Texas is likely to succeed in arguing that the lower court made serious errors and that there was no way of really showing or no serious evidence that the map was drawn in such a way as to intentionally discriminate based off of race. So something interesting I found out about this case that I didn't know when I presented the story before was that last July, the Biden Justice Department sent a letter to the state of Texas, claiming that four of its

districts were unconstitutional coalition districts, meaning that they had no single racial majority in the district. I'm not sure exactly why that's unconstitutional, but the Biden DOJ basically warned Texas to fix this. They made Texas redraw their maps, or they would face legal action. They redrew their map then, and now President Trump asked them to basically redraw it again so as to give Republicans a slightly better chance of holding the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections. The new map is projected to give Republicans up to 30 of the 38 Congressional House seats in Texas. Right now, there are 22 Republican seats and 16 Democratic seats. So it means it could flip from five to eight seats from Democrats to Republicans.

Again, the lower court ruled that this was racial discrimination. It was racial gerrymandering and that was thus illegal. The Supreme Court overturned that and basically said there's no evidence of that being the case. There's no evidence that it was an intentional act of racial discrimination. And intent has to be proven in this situation. Again, this will have a big impact on the 26th House of Representatives elections, which are going to be very close that Republicans have a very slim majority in the House right now. And the 26 elections are going to be very important. The Trump administration is doing so much right now because they have Republican control of the House and the Senate. A recent special election in the state of Tennessee showed that Democrats might be gaining some ground on Republicans in these

House races, the district that had this special election. Last time it held an election, the Republican won by 20 plus points. In this special election, the Republican only won by nine points, which again is just another thing that shows why Republicans maybe are rightfully concerned about the 2026 midterms and are taking steps like this to try to help themselves have an advantage in those elections. Again, I don't think that that's necessarily the most upstanding political strategy. And I'm not a fan of Republicans doing this kind of thing in order to win elections at any cost. I don't think that that's a good strategy to have. But the Democrats claiming that the Republicans are undermining democracy by doing this and that they would never

do such a thing. That's just bogus. If you look at states like Connecticut is 42% Republican voters. Republicans have zero seats in their House of Representatives. Maine is 46% Republican, also with zero seats. New Mexico, 46% Republican also with zero seats. New Hampshire, 8% Republican with zero seats. I could go on and on. Again, if a state has 48% Republicans and has zero seats in the House of Representatives being held by Republicans, then that means that they're doing the same thing. They're also doing this political gerrymandering. Again, it's legal. Both sides do it. It's not particularly upstanding, but the Supreme Court has upheld Texas's effort to do so, which is going to have an impact on the 2026 midterms.

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 a Supreme Court case heard on December 2nd, and it's another case about how federal courts should handle asylum appeals. So a couple weeks ago, I talked about another case that had gone to the Supreme Court dealing with the asylum question, that one talking about whether a person getting to a port of entry meant arrival in the United States, where they could see. seek asylum and make an asylum appeal. This case specifically deals with who gets the final say on whether an asylum seeker after they've already submitted a petition for asylum actually was

suffering persecution, because that is the standard of judgment for whether an asylum seeker will be granted asylum in the United States. So the case deals with a man and his family who fled from El Salvador in 2021, claiming that they were being hunted by a hitman who was connected with a local drug lord. Their family was being threatened. The hitman tracked him across the country, repeatedly demanding money and even assaulting him. But the hitman did not make any actual attempts on his life or the lives of his family that remains in El Salvador, which is something that the Board of Immigration Appeals considered when they were looking at this asylum case. Now, this El Salvadorian man and his family applied for asylum at the United States border, arguing that the violence that they had faced amounted to

persecution based on membership in a particular social group, which is the wording of the asylum law, basically suggesting that they have to prove that they were being persecuted based on their membership of a particular social group, that social group being their family. So the first immigration judge that took up this case denied asylum to this man and his family, saying that the threats that they were receiving and one assault didn't rise to the level of persecution that had been the standard precedent for granting asylum in recent years, especially since there members of the family still in El Salvador who were not being harmed or threatened in any way. This implies that he wasn't being persecuted based on membership in his family, and it seems more

like a drug dispute than actual political persecution. He appealed his case and the Board of Immigration Appeals back to the original immigration judge's decision to not grant asylum to Oralana and his family. So the question that the Supreme Court was facing here was not necessarily whether he should have been granted asylum. The way the law exists now, the Board of Immigration Appeals makes a decision, that decision is based on the facts of the case, that determination is a factual question and not necessarily a legal question. So it can't necessarily be appealed to other courts outside of the immigration system because those courts like the Supreme Court can review legal standards, but they can't reevaluate whether the facts of a particular

situation meet those legal standards. So based on that and all indications from the way the case has been transpiring so far, the court is likely to side with the government and say that the Board of Immigration Appeals is actually a final source of determining individual cases, and that if an appeal is going to be made of an individual asylum case, it has to be made based off of the law itself, not the interpretation of the law by the federal agency. That's a complex way of putting the statement that if the Supreme Court sides with the federal government here, which it looks like it's likely to do, then federal judges won't be able to overturn the decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals. The Board of Immigration Appeals as a federal agency has particular

standards and regulations that it uses to judge whether persecution took place and those standards are set within the executive branch of government and are applied internally as part of the law. And so a judge can't just overturn existing regulations, can't just overturn existing law by determining that the Board of Immigration Appeals had just misjudged its own standards in application. It boils down to the fact that federal judges can look at whether a particular law or standard is constitutional or not, but it can't just say that the Board of Immigration Appeals was wrong to apply its own legal standards based on the facts of the case. So the Supreme Court has yet to make its final decision on the case, but if the decision goes like most of the pundits are thinking that it will,

The effect of this case will be that the Trump administration appointed Board of Immigration's Appeals will be able to legally apply its rules and regulations without the threat of being completely overruled by a singular federal judge. And that likely means that they will be able to increase the number of denied asylum claims in accordance with the overall effort by the Trump administration to lower immigration coming into the United States. The last piece of news I have for you this week was a bill proposed in Congress December 3rd entitled The Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. The bill was introduced by Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, and the bill deals with the Department of Homeland Security and ISIS capacity for detaining illegal immigrants,

limiting what they can do and how much ability they have to actually carry out deportation and detainment efforts. Now, the first reaction of many people on the right to this bill being introduced, was to attack Pramila Jayapal because Pramila Jayapal was born in India. And so seeing a foreign-born representative in the United States government advocating for illegal immigrants immediately set people off. But it's worth noting that the bill that was introduced in the House of Representatives three days ago at this point has already 124 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. So this is not something that is unique to the foreign-born members of Congress, although almost all of the foreign-born members of Congress were among the co-sponsors of the bill.

124 Democrats all co-sponsored this bill as well, so it does have a good level of mainstream support in the Democratic Party. So here's what the bill does. The bill, quote, aims to impose new standards on immigration detention, phase out private detention facilities, and change how and when individuals may be held in custody under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. So the main effect that this bill would have is that it would make it extremely, extremely difficult for ICE to be able to detain any illegal immigrants. And And the reason that this is the case is because the bill would eliminate or drastically reduce use of private detention facilities by ICE, which make up anywhere from about 75 to 90% of ICE's capacity.

So again, just to emphasize that, a lot of the facilities that ICE uses to detain illegal immigrants while they're processing them for deportation a lot of the time are not public facilities. Very few of them are actually public facilities. Most of them were built and maintained by private institutions that are under contract with the Department of Homeland Security to give capacity to provide detention facilities for the government to use without the government having to build them themselves. So one of the main things that the bill does is it works to eliminate the private detention facilities. And if that were to happen, ICE would lose about 75 to 90% of its facilities

and would thus not be able to detain very many people at all and would have to actually release a lot of people too. And that leads to another part of the bill, which is reinstituting catch and release. So the bill requires that when ICE or the Department of Homeland Security detain an illegal immigrant, even if they know that they are an illegal immigrant, they have to provide some other grounds in order to keep them in detention. They have to offer and be able to prove a justification for keeping an illegal immigrant in detention. The standard would be to release anyone that they detain if they cannot immediately justify keeping them in detention. Now, another major part of the bill and the one that

most Democrats have chosen to focus on is the fact that the bill would set certain standards for what detention facilities have to look like, the standard of living that has to be maintained within the detention facilities. Now, keeping standards of health and dignity within these detainment facilities is certainly not a bad thing. There's no reason that we should be denying health or human rights to anybody who's in ICE detention. And I think that's a big part of what the bill aims to do. Again, you can look over the last 10 years and see this issue being brought up repeatedly. The famous, they're putting kids in cages argument from a few years back being a primary example of arguing for better conditions of people who are being detained. And I think

if the Trump administration is going to rapidly increase the amount of people that they're detaining for deportation, then it's not unreasonable by any stretch of the imagination to require a set of standards for us to treat people well even while we are maintaining and upholding the law of the United States. However, where the bill goes awry here is by claiming that to uphold that standard of treatment for detained illegal immigrants, we have to only use publicly built detention facilities that we can ensure meet the standards that we're setting through the bill. That eliminates all use of private detention facilities instead of just requiring that private detention facilities live up to the same standards as the bill proposes.

Eliminating use of private detention facilities, again, would reduce the amount of ice capacity for detainment by up to 90%, which would effectively eliminate the ability of of Department of Homeland Security and ICE to carry out the deportation agenda of the Trump administration. So to recap this week, we had the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy. We had two Supreme Court cases, one affirming Texas's heavily gerrymandered election map, and the other seeking to uphold the authority of the Board of Immigration Affairs, and we had a bill that aims to incapacitate the Trump deportation agenda. Tune in next time 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.