As Vice President JD Vance leads negotiations aimed at ending the war against Iran and delivering on the administration’s promise that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon, one major question looms over the whole process. Can we trust Iran? The U.S. negotiating team has signaled that Iran’s team has shown itself to be much more pragmatic than Iranian negotiators in the past. Little attention, however, has been paid to who exactly these more pragmatic Iranians are. Iran’s delegation is not composed solely of career diplomats. The team includes former Revolutionary Guard commanders, officials tied to violent crackdowns on protesters, figures accused of human rights violations, and regime insiders linked to corruption scandals and political repression. Their records offer a revealing look at the team helping shape the Iranian regime’s approach to the West and its response to dissent at home. Here are the three top men representing Tehran in negotiations with the United States. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (Photo by Iranian Parliament Speaker Office / Handout / Anadolu via Getty Images) As speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has emerged as one of the key figures representing Tehran in negotiations with the Trump administration. A veteran of the U.S.-designated terror organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ghalibaf has spent more than four decades in some of the regime’s most powerful positions, including commander of the IRGC Air Force, chief of Iran’s national police, mayor of Tehran, and, since 2020, speaker of parliament. Across that span, Ghalibaf has faced repeated allegations of corruption and human rights abuses while earning a reputation as one of the Islamic Republic’s most prominent enforcers of violent suppression of civilian protests. During the July 1999 student protests, he was one of 24 senior IRGC commanders who signed a letter warning then-President Mohammad Khatami that the military would intervene if his government failed to crush the demonstrations.  In a leaked 2013 audio recording, he allegedly boasted about personally assaulting student protesters, saying photographs showed him riding on the back of a motorcycle “beating them with wooden sticks,” before adding, “I was among those carrying out beatings on the street level and I am proud of that. I didn’t care I was a high ranking commander.” He went on to describe his role in later efforts to suppress dissent, including the 2003 student demonstrations, claiming he pressured officials to authorize security forces to enter university campuses and use force against protesters.  “I went to the National Security Council meeting and raised hell, spoke very harshly. Didn’t observe proper protocol and I told them as head of the Police, I will demolish anyone who would show up tonight on the campus to protest,” he said.  Discussing the mass protests that followed Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, Ghalibaf boasted that Tehran’s municipality played such a significant role in suppressing the unrest that officials ranked it among the government’s top-performing institutions in responding to the protests. “Although the Mayoralty is not a security agency, we were ranked third in how well we responded… and this is amongst intelligence-security organs, not all state organs,” he said. The death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died after being detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s mandatory hijab law, sparked nationwide anti-regime protests in 2022. Ghalibaf dismissed the demonstrations as an effort to overthrow the Islamic Republic and called for those he accused of threatening public order to be dealt with harshly. As the regime carried out a sweeping crackdown on anti-government protests in late 2025 and early 2026, with some estimates placing the death toll as high as 32,000, Ghalibaf defended the government’s response at a state-organized “Iranian Uprising Against American-Zionist Terrorism” rally. Speaking to the crowd, he portrayed the unrest as foreign-backed terrorism, arguing Iran was fighting a “war against terrorism.” Ghalibaf has also faced repeated corruption allegations, including during his tenure as Tehran’s mayor, when his administration was accused of improperly transferring valuable municipal properties to politically connected insiders.  Years later, as Iran struggled with inflation topping 40%, he was engulfed by the 2022 “Sismonigate” scandal after members of his family were photographed returning from Turkey with luxury baby goods and nearly 20 pieces of luggage. The scandal sparked calls for his resignation. It deepened further after reports that members of his family had also purchased two luxury apartments in Istanbul worth roughly $1.6 million. Despite four unsuccessful presidential campaigns, repeated corruption allegations, and more recent attacks from hardline lawmakers over negotiations with the United States, Ghalibaf has remained one of the Islamic Republic’s most influential political figures. His critics have accused him of shielding the negotiations from parliamentary scrutiny and crossing Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s red lines, reported Iran International. Abbas Araghchi Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images) As Iran’s foreign minister and one of the regime’s longest-serving nuclear negotiators, Abbas Araghchi has become the face of Tehran’s diplomacy with the West.  Araghchi has spent more than two decades climbing the ranks in the Islamic regime. After earning a Ph.D. from England’s University of Kent, he served as Iran’s ambassador to Finland and Japan, Foreign Ministry spokesman, deputy foreign minister, chief nuclear negotiator, and, in 2024, foreign minister. To Western audiences, Araghchi is often viewed as a seasoned diplomat. But before entering the Foreign Ministry, he spent nine years serving in the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War. The IRGC remains one of the most powerful pillars of the Islamic Republic and has long been accused of supporting terrorism abroad and brutally suppressing dissent at home. Araghchi has consistently defended the regime’s hardline positions toward the United States and its allies. Following U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025, he accused Washington of committing “a grave violation of the UN Charter, international law and the NPT” and warned the attacks would have “everlasting consequences.” Araghchi has also brushed off Western criticism of the regime’s human rights record. In 2023, amid global demonstrations supporting Iran’s protest movement following the death of Mahsa Amini, Araghchi urged Iranian officials to prevent demonstrations against the Islamic Republic from taking place abroad. He argued the protests were fueling an effort to “defame and delegitimize” the regime and warned the campaign was “very dangerous” because it was harming Iran’s relationships with other countries. During the regime’s squashing of the protests in January 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz accused Tehran of using “disproportionate and brutal violence” against demonstrators. Araghchi dismissed the criticism, arguing Germany had forfeited its credibility on human rights because of its support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Ali Bagheri Kani Ali Bagheri Kani (Photo by Marwan Naamani/picture alliance via Getty Images) Another key figure in Iran’s delegation is Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a longtime regime insider whose career has taken him through Iran’s security establishment, judiciary, and nuclear negotiating team. Bagheri Kani’s rise through the Islamic Republic has been closely intertwined with one of the regime’s most influential political families. His father, Mohammad-Bagher Bagheri Kani, is a prominent cleric and former member of parliament and the Assembly of Experts. His uncle, Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, served as acting prime minister, interior minister, and later chaired the Assembly of Experts. His brother is married to a daughter of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Al Jazeera. He served as deputy foreign minister for political affairs and briefly as acting foreign minister after Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was killed in a 2024 helicopter crash. He also held senior positions in Iran’s judiciary, serving as deputy for international affairs and secretary of the regime’s Human Rights Headquarters, which is responsible for defending Iran’s human rights record on the international stage. He also worked under hardline negotiator Saeed Jalili from 2007 to 2013, when the Supreme National Security Council handled the country’s nuclear file. Bagheri Kani managed Jalili’s 2013 presidential campaign, defending his confrontational approach to negotiations while opposing then-candidate Hassan Rouhani’s push for a nuclear agreement with the West. He later defended Iran’s strategy of stalling negotiations, saying Tehran deliberately sought to “buy time” so work at the Fordow and Arak nuclear facilities could continue. After Rouhani took office and pursued President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Bagheri Kani became one of its most outspoken critics. He repeatedly attacked the negotiations in parliament, wrote op-eds condemning the agreement, and argued it was a Western trap that surrendered Iran’s sovereignty. He later described Iran’s negotiations with the United States as “a bitter historical experience.” In 2021, he became Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator and led the Vienna talks aimed at reviving the very agreement he had spent years opposing. Bagheri Kani has consistently taken a hard line against the United States. He denounced what he called Washington’s “unlawful and inhumane sanctions,” argued in July 2024 that the U.S. “cannot be part of the solution” in the Middle East but is instead “the main obstacle,” and, in June, he accused Washington of seeking to “destroy Iran’s civilisation, capabilities, and self-confidence.” Leona Salinas contributed to this report.

“Death to America.” The only words Tim Sheehy needs to hear to understand what motivates the Iranian regime. The senator from Montana and former Navy SEAL understands this threat and doesn’t hesitate to speak plainly about what is at stake for America and the broader Middle East. In this weekend’s Punch interview, DW talks with Sheehy about the importance of the fight with Iran to the future of the region and American interests, the rise of radicals within our borders, and his views on the Trump administration’s foreign policy strategy. *** Ben Domenech: Why do you think that what you had to say about this current situation with Iran hit a nerve with a lot of people? Tim Sheehy: I don’t have any problem with us trying to come to an agreement with Iran. That’s not the issue. My issue’s not with the administration or the negotiating teams. The issue is with Iran. And as one of the few people on the Hill who actually fought the Iranians directly, and their proxies, who spent years of my life — and my wife’s a combat veteran and all my friends — fighting against the Iranian influence. I think it gives us a very clear-eyed realization of how insidious the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and their proxy groups really are and how brutal and barbaric they actually are. Their designs on the world don’t end with Israel in the Persian Gulf or with Azerbaijan. They want a global caliphate, and they will literally kill everybody to get that caliphate. And they don’t want to kill them in a lethal injection snap of a finger. They want to brutally wipe us off the face of the earth, like what happened on October 7. They want us to be in pain. They want us to be burned alive and destroyed. So I think we have to keep that in mind, and trust cannot be a component of our negotiations. We cannot have them say something, and we say something, and we trust that they’re going to carry it out. And I support President Trump and his team’s campaign. I think it was way overdue — the first president ever to do this. And I support getting a resolution to the conflict that truly has structural limits around it because we don’t want to invade Iran. We don’t want 500,000 troops there. But I simply feel propelled as someone who fought there and who lost friends to Iran, to remind our side of this negotiation that we need to not forget who we are dealing with. We need to remember what they’re capable of and what they want because we don’t have to think or assume what they want; they tell us that every single day, and they act on it every single day. And that is death to America, death to Israel. BD: Do you think that there is an attitude of naiveté about the Iranians that has perhaps seeped in over the last couple of years, just given the fact that people are so tired of foreign wars, but particularly of Middle East wars, that they perhaps downgrade that threat mentally? TS: I think that is the wrong answer. I think it’s just general non-awareness of the threat. I mean, the average American, the average politician, the average person who works in government is not aware of what Iran has done, does every day, and is capable of. They’re just not. And that’s a good thing, Ben. That’s the whole point of these forever wars that everyone hates, and I get it. I fought them, too. I don’t like forever wars, but we’ve been able to keep this terrible threat at bay thousands of miles away for the last 50 years. And that’s a good thing. As a result, the average American, luckily, doesn’t have a personal experience with radical Muslim psychopaths who want to murder them and their family. And as a result, they’re like, “What’s the big deal? Why do we care about Iran? I don’t want six-dollar-a-gallon gasoline; this is unpopular. Let’s get back to bringing inflation down, housing prices down, and immigration under control.” All very valid points, and they’re not wrong, but they’re also just not aware that because we’ve kept these savages at bay, they actually still exist. And not only do they exist, but they also want to come kill us. And I don’t want it to be another 9/11. I don’t want it to be another October 7. And I certainly don’t want to funnel billions of dollars, as Obama did, into a terrorist regime that wants to kill all of us in any way possible. So I don’t think it’s naive today. It’s generally not awareness of the reality of it. And I think the vice president and his team are cheering on the president’s directive to try to bring an orderly close to this. And I think it’s very important. I’ve expressed skepticism about our ability to get a deal. I have not expressed skepticism about the president and his team at all. I’m simply reminding everyone that our counterpart here is not trustworthy. And our counterpart will say and do anything to create time and space to rebuild themselves and come at us. They have a very long view on this; they’re not in a hurry. They say, “You know what? Fine. This guy Trump, he’s pretty tough on us. Let’s just play nice. Let’s get a few hundred billion dollars of revenue. We’ll act like nice people for a couple of years until he’s gone, and hopefully we’ll get another Biden or Kamala or Mamdani for Christ’s sake. That would be a dream come true.” And then they’re like, “Great, we’re back, baby.” And then, with all the money we give them access to, they’ve rebuilt a whole new infrastructure. One thing we did learn from this is that a lot of people underestimated how many drones and missiles these dudes really built. They had them buried everywhere, like squirrels with acorns. And on every mountain, they had a goddamn cave full of missiles. And we’re like, “Where did those come from? Oh, they came from the American taxpayer when we gave them the money to build them.” And I’ll be goddamned if we let that happen again. BD: You talk about radical Muslim psychopaths. I think that you could be talking about them or you could be talking about the latest round of Democrats who ran and won in New York this week. Why do you think the Democratic Party is tolerating this degree of psychopathy on its side? And do you think it’s actually a more serious problem than perhaps Republicans have been paying attention to? As much as they talk about it, I feel like they didn’t take it seriously. TS: I don’t think they did. And once again, I try not to be a history professor, but sometimes you have to remind people where these issues come from. As you well know, the Red Green Alliance goes back a long way. Radical Islam and Marxist communist ideology have been interwoven for the last 60 years. This is nothing new. The IRGC is really the most virulent example of that. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise in 1979 was very much a Red-Green alliance. So this collectivist, Marxist-revolutionary mindset is interwoven with radical Islamic ideology in many ways. And it’s always been there. Hell, even the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther Movement were very tied in with that. Muhammad Ali changed his name because of that. So there’s always been that tie. But I think what’s happened lately is there’s been a very targeted investment into our media markets by Muslim influencers who don’t like us. They’re paying off people to say things specifically to incite opinions and events that are obviously, number one, antisemitic and number two, anti-American. It’s a very engineered attempt to undermine the fabric of our society. And the Democratic Party, of course, traditionally the home base for the American Jewish voter, shockingly became their vessel to do this. I shouldn’t say shockingly because, actually, it makes perfect logical sense, because the Democratic Party has drifted more and more into the Marxist direction of the past couple of decades, which again, is a natural home for radical Islamic ideology. So I’m not surprised by this per se, but I am disappointed that the establishment hasn’t made a stronger effort to clarify their moral positioning. Because at this point, as you know, the Democrats for the last 30 years, anytime there’s a policy disagreement with Republicans, we’re racist, we’re Nazis, we’re homophobes, we’re transphobes, and we’re sexist. Pick your name, and they call us that. Well, now they’ve embraced an ideology that literally murders gay people, that stones women to death, that condones the rape and murder of innocent families on October 7, and then condones terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of Americans. In a terrible way, it’s politically good for Republicans because they have removed any moral high ground, if they ever had any, to accuse us of being anti-women, anti-minority, or racist. They don’t have a soapbox anymore because their flagship candidate – the leader of the Democrat Party today – is Zohran Mamdani. That is who leads the Democrat Party. That is their mascot, and that is their messaging platform. BD: You mentioned that this has been something that’s been fomented. There’s an interesting piece that ran in New York magazine recently called “Your Feed Is Fake,” which dug into the number of essentially AstroTurfed campaigns designed to help things go viral. They were looking at it in the context of mostly Hollywood, but also other things. Just to give one example, there were firms that were hired around the Sydney Sweeney Jeans ad that were fomenting and pushing both sides of that argument, meaning the negative and the positive at the same time, to gin up more activity. Do you think there needs to be some kind of transparency requirement, or more government attention, to the number of people out there who are paid influencers advocating for these DSA plans because they are everywhere? TS: There absolutely should be. And to your point, I do think, though, the podcast-social media influencer world has reached its peak because I think in the 2024 election, we saw that the podcasters were a game changer, the influencers were a game changer, and that’s because it was legitimate. And I think it’s been so saturated now. There are so many podcasts, and so many fake influencers with AstroTurf content, that the average person is now starting to just not believe any of it, and they don’t have the bandwidth to absorb it all. So I think we’re going to start to see the influence wane. I think it already is waning, but I do believe, just like in TV commercials, there should be a requirement to disclose who’s paying for this. You can’t run a political ad without saying who’s paying for this and this is no different. So that would obviously fall within my purview as a member of the Commerce committee. And I think there’s already been discussions about that to say, listen, you should be forced to disclose who’s paying you for this podcast. If a foreign government gave you $20 million to buy your podcast, well, you need to say that because if you’re going to pretend like you’re in your basement in the heartland with your Coors Lite beer and a rifle on the wall and act like you’re a red-necked hillbilly, but in fact, you’ve been bought by the Chinese Communist Party, well, we should know that. BD: The issues related to Iran obviously flow into other foreign conflicts. And one of the big open questions is what does this mean for China – particularly their interest in Taiwan? Do you think that, given the way this played out, it makes China’s attempt to take Taiwan and absorb it more or less likely? TS: I think on the whole, this whole campaign makes it less likely. Number one, we had a tremendously successful military campaign, and despite the media just looking for any reason to bash the president, despite the Democrats being abjectly un-American during this process by going after our troops. It was disgusting how the internal backstabbing was happening here against our campaign, against the country that’s been working after 47 years. So I think we displayed a level of precision and ferocity in those strikes all the way from Midnight Hammer through the latest campaign that China said, “That’s oppressive. They can’t do that.” But let’s not forget that China has not fought a war since the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. So they have a big paper-tiger military that should not be underestimated but is not combat-tested, unlike ours. So we showed extreme capability and ferocity in our targeting. That’s going to give them a good bit of pause. At the same time, look at Ukraine and say wow, Russia – big, giant, big bear Russia – they’ve been beaten back and essentially knocked into a stairway now by little old Ukraine with a bunch of off-the-shelf drones and scrappy fighters and trenches. So China will realize it’s a lot harder to project military power, especially across a body of water, than you think. It has really only been one time in history where military power has been successfully projected amphibiously over a body of water. That’s America during World War II with our island-hopping campaign and the Normandy invasion. It’s really hard to quickly and effectively move thousands of people across a body of water without getting your ass kicked. So I think that will be a tale of caution. At the same time, though, if China is able to hack this deal in some way on the backend and recognize revenue from a very dependent Iran. China is always dependent on cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil. That’s been a superpower for their economies. They get oil for cents on the dollar. With Iran being weaker than ever, they’re going to be more and more desperate to make a deal with China, and they may even give them cheaper oil, and China can take more of it for cheaper. Additionally, sanctions-dodging will continue. No matter what we do, they aren’t going to follow any sort of sanctions regime. So they’re going to want to try to find a way to continue to use the Chinese yuan as their exchange currency for oil, and that’s, of course, good for China and bad for us. So on the whole, this is going to be worse for China and the designs on Taiwan, but in the end, they might have better access to Iranian oil. BD: I’m just going to ask a question on behalf of one of our younger staffers. She said, “Why didn’t we just keep bombing, and why didn’t we bomb the IRGC?” TS: Well, that’s obviously a question for the executive branch. I’m not in the chain of command, so I can’t give you specific reasoning why. The reality is probably that a full collapse of the government would have required the follow-on commitment of ground forces, be they American, allied, Kurdish, or others, which I think would have required a broad alliance to support. And my assumption is that at the time, nobody wanted that. The American people have made it very clear they’re tired of ground wars in the Middle East. They don’t want it. And I think that the president said, “Listen, we’ll do what we have to do, but I think we can probably get this done without that.” And I think that’s where it ended up. However, I’ll say the president is absolutely locked and loaded and ready to go back in again for another round should they welch on these talks and resume their bad behavior. ***

The Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro weighed in late on Friday after the United States launched retaliatory strikes on Iran, saying that President Donald Trump’s latest move was proof that the “peace through strength” foreign policy was back. Shapiro responded to the news that American forces had targeted “Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites” on Friday afternoon, responding to an Iranian attack on a Singapore-flagged ship in the Strait of Hormuz that took place one day prior. Shapiro laid out what exactly had transpired in the hours leading up the the the U.S. response, and noted the Trump had quickly made it clear he “couldn’t allow” Tehran to violate the agreement. He went on to say that the president’s reaction was proof of a “shift” in the thinking within the administration, and that the “peace through strength” foreign policy — often touted by the late President Ronald Reagan — was back: “A President Trump 1.0 foreign policy.” United States Central Command (CENTCOM) issued a statement at the time, saying that American forces would remain in the area to make sure that Iran obeyed the terms laid out by the ceasefire agreement. “CENTCOM forces continue to provide safe passage coordination and support to commercial vessels transiting the strait,” the command said. “The U.S. military remains present and vigilant to ensure all aspects of the agreement with Iran are adhered to, obeyed, and in full force and effect.” Vice President JD Vance also responded to news of the retaliatory strike, saying that the United States had every intention of holding to the terms of the ceasefire agreement, but would not stand down if Iran moved in violation of the deal. “Violence will be met with violence,” he said.  

Joe Biden opened the border. Donald Trump closed the border, and the Supreme Court just ruled that is okay. The Left and the legacy media are going insanely crazy. They say the Supreme Court is now a Right-wing tool as an evil stand-in for vicious racism. Yesterday, two Supreme Court decisions came down, both 6-3. It was the Republican appointees on the Court versus the Democratic appointees. The first decision concerned people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border. The other had to do with the Trump administration labeling countries like Syria and Haiti as dangerous for the purposes of deporting people here on temporary protected status. Before we get to the content of these decisions, we first need to understand what the Supreme Court does. Why is that important? Because the Left wants the Supreme Court to be a thing it is not. They yell at the Supreme Court when it doesn’t do what they want. What is the Court supposed to do? It does not make policy, good or bad. It does not decide what the policy is, good or bad. That’s why we elect a Congress and a president. It’s why the Supreme Court is an unelected branch of government: its job is to interpret what the law means and decide what the law says. It doesn’t get to say, “We read the law. That was bad. Now we’re overturning the law and putting a new law in its place.” Going back to the 1930s, the Left decided the Supreme Court ought to act as a super-legislature, a group of really smart people who can simply rewrite policy they don’t like into good Left-wing policy. In fact, what they want is for the Supreme Court to say that when the president or Congress does Left-wing things, that’s legal. When the president or Congress does Right-wing things, that’s illegal. But that’s not the job of the Supreme Court. And yesterday, the Supreme Court did its job. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with what the Trump administration actually did at the US-Mexico border or with Haitian migrants. It is not the job of the Supreme Court to agree or disagree with such action. The question is, under our Constitution, who has the authority to do what? The Supreme Court said that the Trump administration acted within its legally defined purview and that it could not simply overrule it based on whether it liked it or not. If you don’t like the policy, elect a different Congress or a different president. These things became Supreme Court cases because of a long history of bad legislation. And then presidents take advantage of bad legislation, which is the story of congressional-presidential relations since Woodrow Wilson. Congress would pass vague laws. Presidents would take advantage of that in order to maximize their own power. Let’s start with the first decision. It was called Mullin v. Al Otro Lado. In 2016, the Obama administration set up a process called metering. There was heavy migration at the southern border, as you recall, and until 2016, if you were a non-citizen seeking asylum at a port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border, you crossed into U.S. soil and then had to wait in line for inspection. At that point, we had a legal duty to listen to you. And most people would come and claim asylum. They would claim they couldn’t return to their home country due to a specific threat. That is a different thing from temporary protected status; asylum requires you to show that you face a specific threat. You can’t just say, “I want to come here because my home country sucks.” In order for that to be adjudicated, you would come, wait in line for inspection at a port of entry, and once you were on American soil, we had a duty to actually listen to your asylum claim. Toward the end of the Obama administration, there were so many people arriving at the border trying to get in that the government approved something called a metering policy, under which border agents would basically stand at the border and say, “Don’t come in. You don’t have travel documents or a visa. The port of entry is full. Come back later. You stay there.” Why did they do that? Because the law says you only have to process people who are in the country. If you don’t come in, we have no legal duty to process you. The first Trump administration expanded and formalized the metering policy, and then the Biden administration rescinded it. And then they went even further. They said, “Welcome to the border. Claim asylum and say the magic words, ‘I fear for my life, and I can’t go back to my home country,’ and we’ll let you basically run around in the United States and stay forever.” So the Trump administration, Part II came in and said, “No, no. No metering policy back in place. You’re going to wait over there, and we will not process you. The border is closed. It’s not a matter of whether the ports of entry are full. You’re not coming in. Period. And if you’re not on American soil, we have no duty to you. “ If you don’t like that policy, you can vote for Democrats to go back to the Biden way of passing laws. Or you could rewrite the law so that people who apply for citizenship have to remain in Mexico, the Trump “Remain in Mexico” policy. Or theoretically, you could rewrite the law so that everyone who applies for citizenship, no matter where they are, has to be given an asylum hearing, even if they don’t come into the United States, and we don’t have a duty to house them. There are a bunch of ways you could do this. But that’s what Congress exists for. The role of the various branches of government is important. You elect people to change the policy. The Supreme Court is here to interpret what the law currently says, not what it should say or who should be elected. The plaintiffs in this case are a group of non-citizens. They were trying to get into the United States, and they say that their rights were violated because their asylum cases were never heard, because they were in line, and that is as good as being in the country. They never entered the United States. They were turned away at the border. In a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court said, “No. ‘In the United States’ means in the United States. You’re not in the United States if you’re waiting on the other side of the border.” Justice Thomas wrote a concurrence, which said something further: that Congress has no power to force the president to bring aliens into the country. He said the Constitution allows Congress the power to regulate who doesn’t get to come in. But the Constitution does not specify a certain number of people who must be allowed into the country. Also, said Thomas, the people in this case are neither naturalized nor on the path to naturalization. You have no rights under the U.S. Constitution if you do not live in the country, if you are not on the path to naturalization, or if you’ve never entered the country. In the more controversial case involving Haitian migrants, the only reason it reached the Supreme Court is that Congress passed an incredibly vague law that handed tremendous authority to the president. And then various presidents deliberately abused the law in various ways. In 1990, Congress passed something called the Immigration Act. One of the provisions of the Immigration Act is something called Temporary Protected Status. The idea is, you come to the United States on a travel visa, you’re tooling around, and suddenly your home country goes nuts. There’s a coup, terrorists take over; you could be given temporary protected status by the executive branch. At the time, Congress designated one country and one country only, El Salvador, as a country where things were so dangerous that you didn’t have to be deported back to your home country, even if you were, for example, overstaying your visa. So what happened? Over the course of decades, the list of countries that became dangerous expanded, and the borders opened. The Obama and Biden administrations used TPS to radically change immigration law. They would open the borders, bring in a bunch of people from crappy countries, label all those home countries dangerous, and now those people could stay forever. The average temporary protected status holder in the United States has been here for 20 years. So the Trump administration said, “It’s supposed to be temporary. It’s in the word temporary.” Democrats are saying, “No, no, no, the focus should be on ‘protected.’’’ There are now 17 countries from which people are protected from going home. The Trump administration came in and they declared that a bunch of these countries are no longer dangerous for the purpose of deporting people. Those countries include places like Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Yemen, South Sudan, Haiti, Syria, Somalia, and Ethiopia. I want to be clear about what’s factual and what’s not factual. Many of these countries are wildly dangerous; Haiti is one. It is the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere by a long shot. Five thousand and five hundred people were murdered in Haiti last year alone. Sex trafficking is rampant. Gangs basically run the place. It is now a hellhole. But here’s what happened. Democrats are claiming that temporary protected status is a one-way ratchet; a president can legalize vast swaths of illegal immigration by labeling a country dangerous. But then a subsequent president cannot relabel that country unless there’s a showing that the country is not dangerous. The question is what tools did the Trump administration have under the law? According to stats from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS as well as the Congressional Research Service), in 2010, there were between 50,000 and 70,000 Haitian TPS holders. Sixteen years later, there were between 330,000 and 350,000 Haitian TPS holders. And remember, all these people have kids, and those kids are natural-born citizens of the United States. So the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not the president can label Syria and Haiti non-dangerous for purposes of deportation. So Justice Alito wrote, “In these cases, we consider whether respondents who challenge the termination of temporary protected status for aliens from Syria and Haiti are entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation. We hold they are not. The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims and allows ‘no judicial review’ of any determination with respect to the termination of a TPS designation.” You might not like how the Trump administration is using the law, but the law says what the law says. If Congress wishes to designate Haiti as a country covered by TPS in law, it can do so. They can define how long people can stay; they can define how people are deported. But that’s not what they did. In this law, Justice Thomas said that Congress barred all judicial review of TPS termination decisions, including constitutional claims. Courts are obliged to simply give effect to the ordinary meaning of the law. Democrats are going to call Republicans cruel. Republicans are going to say, “We should not be taking in hundreds of thousands of people illegally and then backfilling that with a TPS designation.” The Court isn’t the problem here. If you don’t like the law, change the law. Attacking the Court for simply interpreting the law as written is ugly stuff.

On Thursday, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) interrogated nutrition awareness advocate Gina Plata-Nino about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars covering sugary drinks and her organization’s conflicts of interest with food companies. Plata-Nino is the SNAP director at the Food Research and Action Center, according to the organization’s website, and her job is to “wield her expertise to raise awareness about the importance of SNAP in helping tens of millions of families put food on the table.” At a hearing for the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Gill asked Plata-Nino whether taxpayer dollars should be used to buy sodas. She replied, “Taxpayers’ money should be utilized to ensure that individuals have access to the food that they need to survive.” “Do they need sugary sodas to survive?” Gill asked. “Some of them do, who have low blood [sugar] issues, who may have kidney issues,” Plata-Nino responded. “Is that right? You think they need Coca-Cola to survive? … Do you think that’s the most appropriate use of our tax dollars?” he asked. “I am not a physician but medical records and expertise do show that in some circumstances,” Plata-Nino said. “You were just citing the health needs, apparently, of the American people,” Gill said. “So, do the American people need Coca-Cola to survive?” After a brief pause, she responded, “I did not say that,” adding, “I will not answer for individuals and their choices.” He pressed Plata-Nino again, “I think most people can rationally say you don’t need Coca-Cola to survive. Wouldn’t you agree?” She dodged Gill’s question, saying, “I agree that we have a hunger crisis and that we need to address it, ensuring that individuals have the food resource that they need.” Gill then had Plata-Nino state what SNAP stands for: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and then asked what is nutritional about Coca-Cola. “I am not a nutritionist,” she replied. “I am a food security expert in ensuring that individuals have the food resources that they need.” He denied the need for expertise, saying, “This is a common sense question, and all of these have been common sense questions. I’m just asking you — is there a nutritional value to sugary sodas? It’s a yes or no question.” “I’m not an expert. I will have to look at the dietary guidelines,” Plata-Nino said. “Are you that ideologically dug in that you want our tax dollars paying for sugary sodas, that you will not, in a straightforward way, admit that sugary sodas are not healthful for the American people?” Gill said. “A lot of our tax dollars are spent on soda, which is why I’m asking about it … Do you believe that perhaps drinking sodas every day is healthy?” “The worst health outcome is hunger,” Plata-Nino declared.  “Do you satiate hunger with Coca-Cola?” he asked. “I did not say that,” she said. He then moved his questioning to asking about her Food Research and Action Center’s funding. “Is your organization funded by soft drink makers?” Gill asked. “I am not in charge of development, but no,” Plata-Nino said. “Is your organization funded by organizations that make money from food stamps?” Gill questioned. “I can’t comment to that,” she replied. “Does General Mills fund your organization?” he said. “I don’t have access to that information,” Plata-Nino replied.  “I do, it’s right here,” Gill stated, holding up a paper from FRAC’s website listing General Mills, along with major soda retailers such as  Amazon, Instacart, National Co-op Grocers, Albertsons Companies Foundation, and the Walmart Foundation, as their sponsors. “They do fund your organization. Do they profit off of food stamps?” “Retailers are the major beneficiaries of [our organization],” she confessed. “Do you think that’s a conflict of interest? … They’re profiting off of your advocacy,” Gill declared. Plata-Nino remained visibly silent, refusing to affirm whether funding of General Mills was a “conflict of interest.” The congressman smiled and concluded his time, saying, “I think that most people think that’s a conflict of interest. I know you don’t want to answer.” The subcommittee later said in a statement that the hearing had found that “SNAP integrity is undermined by waste, fraud, and abuse.” The Trump administration has recently been focused on preventing abuse of SNAP dollars to fund unhealthy lifestyles. Citing evidence from the Economic Policy Innovation Center that soda is the #1 product bought with SNAP dollars, the Trump administration has allowed five states to block SNAP money from buying candy and sugary drinks, a policy that an Obama-appointed judge ruled unconstitutional Tuesday.