Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Monday sued the Biden administration over new federal nondiscrimination protections for transgender students.
The Education Department this month finalized a set of sweeping changes to Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools and education programs that receive federal funding, after more than a year of delays. The new regulations, which are slated to take effect Aug. 1, cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, a clause that has angered some conservatives.
“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” Paxton said Monday in a news release announcing the lawsuit. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality.”
The Education Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, will almost certainly be heard by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who hears 95 percent of the cases filed in Amarillo. Kacsmaryk, the division’s only federal judge, has vocally opposed laws that protect LGBTQ people, including the Equality Act, which aims to make sexual orientation and gender identity protected classes.
Kacsmaryk in 2016 — before he was appointed to the federal bench by former President Trump in 2019 — filed a brief in support of the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia, which had been sued by a 16-year-old transgender boy after he was denied access to the boys’ restroom at his school. The student, Gavin Grimm, argued that the school discriminated against him in violation of Title IX.
Kacsmaryk in the brief, which was submitted on behalf of eight religious colleges and universities and nonprofit organizations, wrote that “the term ‘sex’ in Title IX must not be read to include gender identity.”
Paxton in Monday’s lawsuit called the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations “vague” and “overbroad” and said they rely on a misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that employees are protected from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Biden administration has frequently used the landmark 2020 Supreme Court ruling as a foundation on which to build policies that strengthen federal protections for transgender people. A rule finalized Friday by the Health Department that bolsters the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition of sex discrimination also relies on the decision.
“The [final Title IX rule] wrongly equates discrimination on account of sexual orientation and gender identity with ‘sex’ discrimination,” Paxton wrote in Monday’s lawsuit, which was filed jointly with America First Legal.
Republican-led states across the country have pledged to reject the administration’s new Title IX rules, arguing that expanding the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity will harm women and girls and punish individuals who refuse to use a transgender person’s chosen name or pronouns.
Louisiana also sued the administration on Monday over the new regulations, which the state’s Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill said “eviscerates Title IX.” Louisiana is joined by Montana, Idaho and Mississippi in filing the lawsuit, Murrill told reporters Monday.
All federally funded schools are obligated to comply with the final regulations as a condition of receiving government funds.
The Biden administration has yet to finalize a separate rule governing athletics eligibility. The proposal unveiled by the Education Department last April would prohibit schools from adopting policies that categorically ban transgender student-athletes from sports teams that match their gender identity.
... pleased to have reached resolution of our patent infringement litigation related to Sandoz's denosumab biosimilar products. By court order issued today (April 29), the asserted claims of Amgen's U.S. Patent No. 7,364,736 are valid, enforceable and infringed by Sandoz's denosumab biosimilars in the United States. In addition, Amgen and Sandoz have reached a confidential settlement that resolves the remaining patent disputes in the lawsuit and allows Sandoz to launch its biosimilar products on May 31, 2025, or earlier under certain limited conditions. Specific financial terms remain confidential.
This settlement and court decision affirm the strength of Amgen's patent rights for denosumab. Amgen remains confident in the proven benefits of Prolia® (denosumab) for millions of patients worldwide with osteoporosis and other bone loss conditions and XGEVA® (denosumab) for patients with multiple myeloma or bone metastases from certain types of cancer. We are committed to continuing to provide and maintain access for these important medicines, while vigorously defending our patent rights.
Yemen's Houthis said they targeted the MSC Orion container ship in a drone attack in the Indian Ocean as part of their ongoing campaign against international shipping in solidarity with Palestinians against Israel's military actions in Gaza.
Portugal-flagged MSC Orion was sailing between the ports in Sines, Portugal and Salalah, Oman and its registered owner is Zodiac Maritime, according to LSEG data.
Zodiac is partly owned by Israeli businessman Eyal Ofer. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iran-aligned Houthi militants have launched repeated drone and missile strikes in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab Strait and Gulf of Aden since November, forcing shippers to re-route cargo to longer and more expensive journeys around Southern Africa and stoking fears that the Israel-Hamas war could spread and destabilise the Middle East.
In March, the group's leader said the group was expanding its attack area to prevent Israel-linked ships from passing through the Indian Ocean toward the Cape of Good Hope.
The Iran-affiliated group also targeted the Cyclades commercial vessel as well as two U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea, its spokesman said in a televised address early on Tuesday.
British maritime security firm Ambrey reported earlier that a Malta-flagged container ship on Monday said it was targeted by three missiles while en route from Djibouti to the Saudi city of Jeddah. The Houthis said the Cyclades was on that route when they attacked the vessel.
Ambrey assessed that the ship was targeted due to its listed operator's ongoing trade with Israel, it said in an advisory note.
The United States and Britain have carried out strikes against Houthi targets in retaliation for their attacks on vessels.
The United States is about to experience a resurgence in nuclear energy. The federal government is expected to continue restarting shuttered nuclear power plants in the coming years to meet the increasing demand for clean, dependable energy essential for powering the economy of tommorrow.
"There are a couple of nuclear power plants that we probably should, and can, turn back on," Jigar Shah, director of the US Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, told Bloomberg in an interview.
In March, Shah's office approved a loan to Holtec International Corp. to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. This was a historical shift, and it was the first nuclear power plant to be reopened in the US, setting a precedent for atomic energy to make a triumphal comeback. The plant could begin producing power as early as the second half of 2025.
Shah said, "A lot of the other players that have a nuclear power plant that has recently shut down and could be turned back on are gaining that confidence to try." He declined to give specifics about which plants were slated to reopen.
Nuclear power is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity. Given onshoring trends, electrification of transportation and buildings, and, of course, as we've noted in "The Next AI Trade," the proliferation of AI data centers will overload power grids nationwide unless a significant upgrade is seen.
We again highlighted the enormous investment opportunity early Monday titled "Everyone Is Piling Into The "Next AI Trade"", which lists companies powering up America for the digital age.
Nearly 3.5 years ago, we provided readers with a straightforward investment thesis: "Buy Uranium: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze." Back then, it became apparent to us that the resurrection of the nuclear power industry was imminent.
And the trend is only gaining steam as the revival of nuclear power plants will continue benefiting some of the largest uranium producers, such as Cameco. We told readers to buy uranium stocks, such as Cameco around the $10 handle - now it's nearing $50 a share.
As a whole, uranium stocks have soared...
We'll leave readers with recent comments from Patti Poppe, the chief executive officer of Pacific Gas & Electric.
Poppe told a Stanford University forum that nuclear power should continue to be part of California's power generation mix as efforts to decarbonize the grid.
"Nuclear should be part of the future," she said, noting that the state's only nuclear power plant - Diablo Canyon - could be granted a license extension through the 2030s by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So there it is: Nuclear is being revived at a time when the nation's grid is nearing a major upgrade due to rising power demand.
It can happen to anyone. A bad tweet, viral video, or something you say (or text, post, e-mail, or Slack) gets blown out of proportion. Then comes a public pile-on or an official investigation, followed by punishment or ostracism. Cancel culture—the mob-like desire to punish politically incorrect speech—has made modern life into a minefield.
Those who deny the existence of cancel culture argue that the term is a smoke screen to excuse bad behavior from people who don’t want to accept the consequences of their actions. But the mere articulation of an unpopular opinion or uncomfortable truth shouldn’t make it impossible for ordinary people to live their lives. As the writer Jonathan Rauch has observed, criticism, or “expressing an argument or opinion with the idea of rationally influencing public opinion through public persuasion,” can be distinguished from canceling, which is “organizing or manipulating a social environment or a media environment with a goal or predictable effect of isolating, deplatforming, or intimidating an ideological opponent.”
If you find yourself the target of a cancellation campaign, as I did two years ago (about which more anon), you’ll understand the difference. What follows is a guide for what to do if it happens to you.
The most important task when facing a cancellation campaign is to define your goals. Obviously, you want the mobbing to stop and for things to return to “normal.” But ask yourself what, specifically, that means. Do you want to keep your job? Get the position on the law review that you deserve? Become famous? Deter further publicity? Make money off an unexpected opportunity? Retain your reputation for integrity, intelligence, and friendliness? Your strategy will follow from your ultimate aim.
Locking down your message means articulating a cohesive and consistent response to the charges against you and providing the context that the mob maliciously ignores. Once you know your goals, you can form a plan for achieving them and think through contingencies based on different ways in which the cancellation attempt unfolds. Those aims will also determine the answer to such key questions as, “Should I apologize?” Any strategy needs to adapt as events develop, but an anti-cancellation plan should always maintain a focus on your goals.
Each cancellation is different, but some general lessons apply. Professors and students should concentrate on refusing to be silenced and on finding their true audience. Nobody has the power to silence you—that’s the mob’s goal—so you must keep talking, keep speaking the truth. Early on, you’ll need to craft a message that you’ll stick to throughout, something simple that flows logically from the strategy you’re pursuing. But while you’re talking, you must know your audience—and it’s not the extremist rabble-rouser. It’s the onlooker silently watching. It’s the administrator who would rather resolve the whole thing with minimum fuss.
Some pushback on collegiate cancel culture has been successful. In September 2021, after University of Texas student Sterling Mosley defended his school’s fight song, “The Eyes of Texas,” against complaints that it created a “hostile environment for students of color,” the student government rescinded his appointment to a university-wide representative position. Mosley refused to back down, stating that he wouldn’t apologize and campaigning to serve as a voice for conservatives and others whose views are silenced on campus. His refusal garnered national media attention, and he ultimately won election to the same position.
Meantime, in December 2022, Oberlin College paid nearby Gibson’s Bakery over $36 million for falsely branding the business as racist and thereby destroying it. When a bakery employee had chased and tackled a black shoplifter six years earlier, Oberlin students, supported and joined by the dean of students, handed out flyers, protested, and boycotted the bakery. Oberlin also e-mailed a condemnatory resolution to all students and ordered its campus food provider to stop buying from Gibson’s.
These cases reinforce the value of not backing down from a defensible position.
For attorneys, it’s important to record conversations with firm administrators and human resources. Lawyers love writing “memos to file” because contemporaneous written records are strong evidence in court. So even beyond audio recordings of meetings, take notes on every aspect of your experience. And lawyers obviously should keep copies of all relevant e-mails, social-media posts, and other documentary evidence—and do so on devices and servers, and in physical locations, outside your employer’s control, because you could lose access to your firm’s computer system or office at any time. If you’re threatened with termination or internal investigation, you should get your own legal counsel involved in meetings with management. Depending on the size and nature of the organization, remaining there may become untenable, so these things can soon evolve into negotiations about the terms of departure.
In business, employees, particularly younger ones, may engage in forms of cancellation when they don’t like something that their coworker or boss is doing. What used to be kvetching in a bar after work has degenerated into orchestrated social-media and Slack-channel campaigns that throw around critical-theory jargon about “systems of oppression” and “privilege hierarchies.” Accusations of “causing harm” get made, escalating to lists of demands with thinly veiled threats of bad publicity, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, and litigation for mistreating queer or BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) employees. People facing this kind of cancellation should, as lawyers do, record everything and refuse to attend meetings that are thinly veiled struggle sessions where the mob shames its target into submission. Whenever “harms” or “violence” get invoked, require specific evidence and insist on shared definitions of key terms before engaging in discussion. You must not accept the opponent’s terms of debate.
Public pressure can be a useful countervailing force. For example, when Department of Labor lawyer Leif Olson was pressured to resign after Bloomberg News reporter Ben Penn alerted his bosses to an allegedly anti-Semitic Facebook post, his friends (me included) turned the tables. Soon after Olson’s arrival at DOL in August 2019, Penn unearthed an obviously satirical post that Olson had written several years earlier and inquired whether the agency found “comments that are disparaging to Jews acceptable for a senior appointee.” The disingenuous accusation ironically came on the eve of the Labor Day weekend, which no doubt jammed the decision-making process. Tweets and media reports pushing back on the false claim got Olson reinstated the following week. Penn then went silent, before being moved to a different beat.
Anyone facing cancellation will need friends, both to maintain perspective and sanity and to push back on the overwhelming wave of negativity that tends to materialize. Victims of higher-profile cancellations will need allies with public platforms: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Academic Freedom Alliance, or notable people who have faced similar circumstances. I was able to connect Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Gerber—under fire from his school, purportedly for lack of collegiality but, more realistically, for his critical stance toward DEI—to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, whose publication of his op-ed spurred further publicity and froze ONU’s persecution of him in its tracks.
Publicity, in other words, can be worth seeking. The news cycle is head-spinningly short, as is the public’s attention span, so a social-media hiatus may allow time for the circus to move on to the next shiny thing. On the other hand, for a public figure to reenter the public sphere after such a blackout risks reigniting the controversy. For nonpublic figures, there’s safety in numbers: you don’t need to martyr yourself over every bit of craziness; just remember that you’re not alone. Banding together with like-minded others can be more effective in changing the narrative.
Other lessons are less obvious or are situational and can’t be generalized. You’ll have to consider whether you need to spend money to combat cancellation and weigh the pros and cons of litigation. Especially for lawyers and would-be lawyers, your first instinct indeed may be to sue. That can certainly work: Gibson’s Bakery recovered a nice sum from Oberlin, while MAGA-hat-wearing high school student Nick Sandmann got settlements from CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post after they insisted that he had insulted an American Indian activist, despite evidence to the contrary. But litigation has drawbacks: it’s costly, it consumes mental bandwidth, and the legal claims can be messy—the applicable torts, from defamation to tortious interference with contract or business relationships to intentional infliction of emotional distress, are notoriously hard to prove and win. The immediacy of today’s cancel culture, with developments unfolding on a near-instant basis, renders slow-moving traditional legal options, such as injunctions, less appealing. Fundamentally, lawsuits are a secondary consideration—for some later point when the dust settles and the damage has been done.
Should you apologize? The answer to this fraught question depends on your specific circumstances and, again, on your goal. If you Google “Should I apologize if I’m being canceled,” the overwhelming advice is not to do so; it makes you look weak, the thinking goes, and the sorts of people who cancel others will seize on any admission of wrongdoing to escalate their attack. Apologies can thus add fuel to the cancellation campaign. Conversely, refusing to apologize might win you support, as silent observers see that it’s your persecutors who are wrong. Sterling Mosley’s refusal to apologize for his defense of “The Eyes of Texas” won him the respect of his fellow students. Comedian Dave Chappelle kept making jokes about the excesses of the LGBTQ movement, which brought him only greater acclaim. “To the transgender community,” he said, “I am more than willing to give you an audience, but you will not summon me. I am not bending to anyone’s demands.” Netflix never pulled his 2021 special The Closer, which ended up being nominated for two Emmys.
The best rule to follow, then, is contingent: if you did nothing wrong, don’t apologize. If your apology is perceived as disingenuous, it will lead to accusations of hypocrisy, as well as alienate your supporters. One apology could invite more attacks, as your accusers might keep dredging up items from your past to use against you. If you do decide that you need to apologize because you’ve actually wronged someone—not just “offended” an overly sensitive soul—make the apology short, heartfelt, and specific. And be sure to avoid New Age language about needing to “do the work,” “educate myself,” or “be better,” which feeds into critical-theory therapizing. (Make no citations to “my truth,” either.)
Following the resolution of my own cancellation case (more on that, shortly), federal judge Stephanos Bibas published a thorough disquisition on “the corruption of apology” in our cancel-culture age. “Apology was once a cornerstone of our everyday moral practice, helping us to make amends and reconcile with those whom we have wronged,” he explained. “But today’s public practice of scripted apologies looks very different. These days, universities and corporations compel robotic confessions. . . . They want to save their skins by stifling scandal. But Twitter mobs are not sated by performative groveling or even sincere apologies.”
True apologies, or what Bibas calls “Apology 1.0,” are a “secular process of remediation” that heals the bond between wrongdoer and wronged. They also “presuppose that there is some sort of moral community that shares a sense of right and wrong,” such that apologizing lets us make amends—preferably in person—and move on with our lives. But today’s apologies, or “Apology 2.0,” care nothing about sincerity and carry no hope of forgiveness or redemption. Far from healing, they can sow discord. And they lack the elements needed for a successful apology: the violation of an agreed-upon wrong or norm against a specific person, who can accept the apology and let bygones be bygones. The intolerance of political disagreement absent a concrete victim provides no fertile field for reconciliation.
Apologies under such circumstances aren’t just pointless; they degrade self-respect. “The problem with going along with being told to bend the knee,” the writer Douglas Murray has observed, “is that it demoralizes you and it makes you a smaller person inside. You will be demoralized because you will know that you shouldn’t have done that and at some level you will think badly of yourself for having done it. You’ll feel regretful. You’ll feel cowardly.” True apologies are supposed to bring us together. But the now-common demands for apology tear us apart. They’re designed not to reintegrate wrongdoers into the community but to solidify their exile. They’re not a path to reconciliation but a kind of forced confession leading to permanent ostracism.
When someone tries to force you to apologize, without first convincing you that you made a mistake, don’t do it. People may convince you that you were wrong, but don’t let them bully you into caving in and denying what you still believe. To quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, live not by lies.
The author, who endured a cancellation campaign at Georgetown University (Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Redux)
What about my own case? In January 2022, the Georgetown University Law Center hired me to serve as executive director of its Center for the Constitution. A week later, which was four days before I was to assume my new position, in response to the news that Justice Stephen Breyer was retiring from the Supreme Court, I posted a tweet that criticized President Biden for limiting his pool of replacements by race and sex. In a ham-handed hot take on racial preferences, I wrote that a merit-first approach “doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy,” such that the result would be a “lesser black woman.” The backlash was swift. Georgetown conducted a four-month investigation. Ultimately, I was reinstated on the technicality that I wasn’t yet an employee when I tweeted, so the harassment and antidiscrimination policies under which I was investigated didn’t apply. But after reviewing the report that I received from the university’s diversity office, and upon consulting with counsel and trusted advisors, I concluded that remaining in the job would be untenable.
Between the incident and the conclusion, my media strategy was deliberate. I went off Twitter for some time after my “scandal” broke—going public only with opinion pieces on the Olympics and local politics and a P. J. O’Rourke obituary—and then gradually started commenting on legal news before returning more fully with my dad-joke personality. I also declined all TV and radio requests for the first month, before easing back in once it became clear that there wouldn’t be a quick resolution. It was the right thing to do, though if my goal had been to spur Georgetown to fire me and glory in my martyrdom, I would have acted differently.
I was fortunate not to have to expend any financial resources. I leveraged friends and networks to get all the crisis management, public relations, and legal support that I needed. But then, I was also enough of a public figure, and became even more of one, that search-engine-optimization strategies, which can cost as much as lawyers, would have been pointless. In other words, even if I had spent a tidy sum on reputation restoration—paying writers to write good stories about me, promote positive hashtags, and otherwise manipulate Google search results—it wouldn’t have mattered for anyone whom I cared about, regarding my future career prospects.
In the event, I did apologize. I took down my “lesser black woman” tweet, conceding that it was “inartful” and acknowledging that I regretted “my poor choice of words, which undermine my message that no one should be discriminated against for his or her gender or skin color.” That evening, I sent a statement to the Georgetown community on the faculty Listserv, again expressing regret for my communication failure. I reiterated that message during a Zoom with Dean William Treanor a few days later. This clearly wasn’t enough for some—a denunciatory letter penned by the school’s black law students’ association was ultimately signed by more than 1,000 people—but it was too much for others. The writer Bari Weiss suggested that I had erred even in saying what I did. “The tragic reality here,” she wrote, “is that there is no reward for being decent or admitting regret or apologizing. In our increasingly graceless culture, decency can be a one-way ticket to exile.”
Should I have refrained from apologizing altogether because it showed weakness and fed the online mob? Or should I have said more, with greater contrition? I don’t regret my approach. I had indeed poorly phrased my tweet and thus undermined my message. I was sorry about that, and still am. But that doesn’t mean that I needed to go any further or accept future entreaties to prostrate myself. The social-media mob can never be sated. Nor can social-justice activists. Besides, who hasn’t phrased a tweet poorly?
As Weiss said to me (and later wrote), “These days, sincere apologies do not function as expressions of regret but as confessions of guilt.” Fair enough. But I was indeed guilty of inartful phrasing. And while I wasn’t trying to placate the mob, I wanted to keep my job—such that my audience was limited to the dean and anyone who could influence him. If this episode had happened when I was still safely employed at the Cato Institute, where I spent nearly 15 years, it wouldn’t have amounted to much. Twitter trolls would have had their fun decrying another right-wing racist, I’d have ignored them, and there wouldn’t have been any media attention. But I was in the vulnerable position of changing jobs, moving into an institution of higher education: hallowed progressive ground, where heterodox views aren’t tolerated.
Keeping that job, then, was my immediate goal. To achieve it, I had to show that I understood my error and to promise to be a better professional in future. It was a double standard, to be sure, but I knew what I was getting myself into. This was the advice I was getting from most trusted confidantes, including Georgetown insiders, ideological fellow-travelers, and savvy operators. Again, if my goal was to become executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, I had to give the dean, directly and personally, something to work with.
Perhaps the biggest crisis-management lesson I learned is that the goal that you set determines the steps that you take. Had I just wanted to become a poster boy for cancel culture and monetize the moment, I would have gone on the offensive. Had I wanted to abandon the public-intellectual side of my work and just become a quiet academic, I would have pursued a strategy of abnegation. But I wanted to hold on to the job that I’d been hired to do, to move into this next phase of professional life with as little disruption as was now possible. Everything else was secondary. In that context, and for that specific purpose, the limited apologies I issued were necessary.
Knowing what I know now about how things turned out, with the technical reinstatement that was a setup for eventual dismissal, I would have pursued the same course—because I’m better off now, having faced down the four months of farcical “investigation,” than had I gone scorched-earth and been fired right away. And I’d certainly be no better off had I gone on an apology tour, bending the knee to progressive tropes involving “white privilege” and “structures of oppression.” There is no conceivable world where the diversity office would have fully absolved me. I still ended up a martyr of sorts, but with my reputation and dignity intact.
It was only “four days of hell” for me, and then that weird purgatory that became a farce and garnered me support for weathering the storm, but I still feel uncomfortable reflecting on that period. Luckily, I never felt isolated and don’t suffer panic attacks or anxiety in thinking about it. But many people don’t have my support networks. It is for them that I offer this advice.
“Everything you say upsets somebody,” says comedian Dave Chappelle. “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it.” (PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
Everything you say upsets somebody,” says Dave Chappelle. “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it.” Instead of operating from a position of weakness or fear, Chappelle addresses cancel culture directly, as part of his comedy routines. You may not be a celebrity, but there are plenty of lessons to learn from his experience, ones that are common to all cancellation campaigns. Set those goals. Have a flexible strategy that can adjust to new developments. Get a team of advisors, both professional and personal, so that you’re not just living in the frenzied echo chamber of your mind. Figure out whether you need a media strategy, and, if so, identify the people and platforms that can help with that. Consider whether you’ve done anything wrong and, if so, whether a true apology would help. Persistence and steadfastness pay off.
Facing down a cancellation will test your fortitude and force you to clarify your values, priorities, and aspirations. Even the most relentless cancellation can be overcome if you respond with authenticity and resolve. Getting away from lawyers, PR firms, and advocacy groups, remember your own humanity. Lean on family and friends, take a breather from the rat race, extricate yourself from a poisonous environment, and gain a change of scenery. Believe it or not, this, too, shall pass.
Ilya Shapiro is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of the forthcoming Lawless.
As the extent of America’s illegal immigration problem under President Biden has become clearer, so has the role played by many of the country’sbest-known nonprofits, including Catholic Charities, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the Red Cross, and United Way. While ostensibly funded to help overwhelmed personnel at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) process the influx of self-declared asylum seekers, these and scores of lesser-known charities have instead worked to increase the number of illegal border-crossers dramatically.
We nowknow, for example, that as far back as 2019 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was using the messaging service WhatsApp to update Central American migrants on the safest routes through Mexico to the U.S., the best places to obtain food and water, and how to contact their families. The ICRC was also identifying shelters and help centers along the way to the southern border.
More recently, it has been revealed that few of the charities funded to help legally screened migrants reach their desired destinations in the U.S. ever bother to determine whether the people they transport have actually been processed. “Let’s face it,”saidformer Department of Homeland Security advisor Charles Marino, “they [the nonprofits] help whoever they encounter. And that includes those that are gotaways, where there are no records of them with CBP [Customs and Border Protection] at all.”
By March 2023, even the Department of Homeland Security had toadmitthat many of its nonprofit subcontractors were giving just as much assistance to illegal immigrants as they were to those who had been vetted at the border. Two months later, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, and Rep. Jake LaTurner of Kansas jointlycondemnedthe degree to which taxpayer funded charities had become responsible for so many “overwhelmed American communities, from Yuma and El Paso to Martha’s Vineyard and New York City.”
To be clear, there is no problem with any nonprofit expressing sympathy for foreign nationals who want to come to the U.S. or for policies which would help them realize their desire. Under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which clarifies what tax-exempt organizations are legally permitted to do, educating the public on the pros and cons of almost any policy is considered a legitimate activity, no matter which side of the argument the nonprofit itself comes down on.
Nor, interestingly, does the U.S. tax code prevent a nonprofit from violating the laws of another nation. It has long been recognized that a charity which seeks, say, to care for children in a war-torn or impoverished country might have to bribe certain officials in order to fulfill its mission.
At the same time, there is no special exemption which allows an employee of an American tax-exempt organization willfully to ignore his own country’s laws, as increasing numbers have been doing since Biden’s election. This is true no matter how well-intentioned that nonprofit staffer might imagine himself to be. Or even if, as appears to be the case, that staffer has been collaborating with other nonprofit workers who share the same progressive justification for their illicit behavior—namely, that an open border compensates foreigners whose ancestors were once oppressed by American colonialism.
There is also nothing in the tax code which grants charities the right to perform what they believe to be a humanitarian service, if by doing so they inflict serious pain or loss on third parties who have not agreed to the sacrifice. Much has already been written about the drug smuggling, human trafficking, and crime which accompany the current migrant influx, but this is only part of the unwanted suffering American citizens are being forced to endure.
According to a January 11reportto the Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, the net cost of assimilating the average illegal immigrant—welfare, education, and medical care minus whatever he or she may ultimately give back in taxes—is $68,390. Multiply that number by just the1.7 million gotawaysknown to have entered the country during Biden’s presidency, plus the 2.7 million “inadmissible aliens” who have nevertheless been released over the same period, and the fiscal burden on U.S. taxpayers is over $300 billion. Adjust further forICE’s estimateof all gotaways, and the country’s involuntarily assumed liability (at a time when both Social Security and Medicare desperately need more funding) jumps to half a trillion.
If the U.S. government cannot bring itself to stop charities from subverting immigration law, it should at least provide citizens with a clear enough picture of what is really happening at the border to make better informed decisions about their personal giving. As Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, hasobserved, “A lot of people who donate to these organizations don’t full well know what their money's going towards.” Many “do a lot of good in certain places,” he adds, “but this is a big bad.”
And yet the Biden administration has gone out of its way to keep such information as hidden from the public as possible. According to Howell, the billions which the charities facilitating illegal immigration get from Washington are filtered through so many federal agencies that an accurate accounting of what each does and how much it spends is almost impossible. Indeed,says Marino, it’s difficult to know even how many are operating along the southwest border.
The role of nonprofits in fostering illegal immigration is further obscured by channeling their funding through various United Nations agencies under the guise of “foreign aid.” Thelatestof these UN-camouflaged schemes, as reported by Center for Immigration Studies, aims to “dole out $1.6 billion in cash, debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and [transportation]” to millions of U.S.-bound immigrants in 2024 alone.
It is only because of the IRS requirement that all tax-exempt groups make public their annual income statements that we have any idea of the extent to which many have become a part of what the Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries hasdubbedthe “illegal immigration industrial complex.” A recent analysis by Forbes, for example, shows that Catholic Charities gets as much in government support as it does from private donations. In 2022, the $182.6 million in grants Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Servicereceivedfrom the Department of Health and Human Services accounted for more than 80% of its total support. And in that same year, 40 percent of the income reported by Church World Services also came from government agencies.
Ever since President Biden took office in 2021, as many as6.2 million migrants have entered the U.S. illegally, a development which could never have happened without the coordinated assistance of thousands of America’s charity workers. And while it may not be possible to prosecute everyone “who deliberately and repeatedly broke the law to facilitate illegal immigration,” as Elon Musk has advocated, the nonprofits which clearly know what their employees are doing should at least be deprived of any special tax treatment going forward.
Lewis M. Andrews, Ph.D., is president of the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation. He is author of the new book Living Spiritually in the Material World(Fidelis Books)
The Biden Administration is considering giving favorable treatment in flights to and from China to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. This is at a time when China has been discriminating against U.S. airlines and engaging in anti-competitive practices which impact American commerce in general. It makes no sense to allow such treatment, especially with the Presidential election only a few months away. If this issue bubbles up in the political discourse, it could be a breaking issue which determines which party will occupy the White House in 2025.
Being tough on China is a popular political stance for members of both parties, but this issue is fairly opaque and affects U.S. carriers. Chinese airlines have a competitive advantage because China can fly over Russian airspace while American flights cannot. Permitting China to expand capacity without mutual reciprocity would be rewarding China for maintaining ties with Russia when the Biden Administration has imposed tough sanctions on Russia. Any meaningful sanctions regime should not reward nations doing business as usual with a Russian government at war with an American ally.
Both U.S. commercial airlines and employee unions are urging the Biden Administration to block more flights to the U.S. by Chinese airlines. Reuters reported on April 11, 2024, “in February, the U.S. Transportation Department said Chinese passenger airlines could boost weekly round-trip U.S. flights to 50 starting on March 31, up from the current 35, about a third of pre-pandemic levels.” Reuters cited a letter writing by Airlines for America that includes American, United, Delta and other airlines, in addition to pilots’ unions where they argued that it was unfair because of the "advantage Chinese airlines receive by continuing to access Russian airspace, while U.S. carriers stopped flying through Russian airspace at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022." The airlines, pilots, and flight attendants requested Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to stop new flights between the U.S. and China until China guarantees equal access to China’s market for American workers and businesses.
Fairness is important in this negotiation, and under normal circumstances it would be beneficial to increase capacity to the Chinese market. However, the current situation is anything but normal. It would violate the concept of fairness to increase Chinese flights to and from the United States while American airlines and workers lack the same opportunity. Because our government has sanctioned Russia, U.S. based companies are limited in what they can do. In addition, there are many trade related issues which continue to make our relationship with China fraught, including illegal Chinese government subsidies for domestic practice, unfair trade practices and dumping, and strong protectionism of the domestic market from the Chinese government.
A bipartisan coalition in Congress is also taking issue with the potential of the Biden Administration enacting favorable policy to Chinese airlines. Retiring Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), the Chair and Ranking Member of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, urged the Biden Administration to halt the expansion of Chinese flights. The April 11, 2024 letter to the Biden Administration argues that the results of restrictions arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in Chinese government discrimination “against U.S. aviation through slot constraints at China’s major airports in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.” The Congressmen argue that after the Covid-19 outbreak, China suspended the bilateral air service agreement with the U.S. government that shut down China’s market to U.S. carriers. That was unfair and the results of those decisions continue to negatively impact American aviation workers, travelers, and airlines today.
While there is increased demand for passenger flights to and from China, expansion should not solely benefit Chinese airlines. A one-sided deal is unfair to American companies and workers. The system worked pretty well back before Covid-19 with a bilateral agreement which was fairer than the current proposal by the Biden Administration to just give away flights to Chinese airlines, especially with the commercial advantages Chinese carriers have in utilizing Russian airspace and a long history of unfair trade practices.
The Biden Administration should not increase Chinese flights to and from the United States until fairness is restored.
Peter Mihalick is former legislative director and counsel to former Reps. Barbara Comstock, Virginia Republican, and Rodney Blum, Iowa Republican
