The Virginia General Assembly has now passed legislation regulating how public schools may teach about the events of January 6, 2021. If the bill becomes law, teachers discussing the topic will be required to present the events in a very specific way and prohibited from presenting certain viewpoints about the 2020 election. Regardless of where one falls politically on those issues, the constitutional problem should be obvious. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent the government from dictating what citizens must believe or say about matters of public debate. The government may adopt curriculum standards and decide what subjects are taught in public schools, but there is a significant difference between setting a curriculum and mandating a particular political or historical conclusion. Specifically, the legislation provides that if a Virginia public school chooses to teach about the events of January 6, 2021, the instruction may not portray those events as a “peaceful protest.” It also prohibits teachers from presenting as credible any statement suggesting that there was widespread election fraud that could have changed the results of the 2020 presidential election. The statute goes even further by directing that the events must be described as an “unprecedented, violent attack on United States democratic institutions…for the purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.” In practical terms, the law does two things at once. First, it prohibits certain viewpoints from being discussed as credible in the classroom. Second, it compels teachers to affirm a specific government-approved description of the event. That distinction matters constitutionally. The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that the government cannot compel individuals to speak a government-approved message. From West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943 to more modern cases involving compelled speech, the Court has consistently held that the First Amendment protects citizens from being forced to adopt or express ideological viewpoints mandated by the state.  This principle is not about whether one agrees with the government’s position. In fact, the entire point of the First Amendment is to protect speech that the government — or even the majority — dislikes. Once the government is permitted to mandate the “correct” interpretation of a political event, the precedent is dangerous. Today it may be January 6. Tomorrow it could be any number of controversial historical topics. Ask yourself this – if you think HB333 is good – how would you feel if President Trump ordered the Department of Education to mandate all K-12 education that ICE never made mistakes and anyone protesting them were domestic terrorists? Or that Joe Biden was a puppet president lacking mental capability to make any legitimate decisions. No alternatives – just those narratives – in every school in America – no negotiation. I suspect if you are left of center that would make your blood boil – and it’s for these reasons that the Constitution does not allow the government to decide which political narratives are permitted and which must be suppressed. It is also worth remembering that the role of education is not to enforce political consensus but to encourage critical thinking. Students should be exposed to evidence, debate, and competing interpretations of historical events. That is how a free society educates its citizens. A law that restricts discussion to one approved narrative does the opposite. To be clear, none of this means schools must endorse every viewpoint or conspiracy theory. Teachers can and should teach facts supported by evidence. But that is different from a legislature commanding that one political interpretation must be presented and others may not even be discussed as credible. When the government crosses that line, the courts exist to review whether the Constitution has been violated. If this bill becomes law, there is a strong argument that it raises serious First Amendment concerns involving compelled speech and viewpoint discrimination. Those issues deserve careful consideration by the judiciary rather than being resolved through legislative decree. The debate about January 6 will continue for many years, as debates about major historical events always do. But in a constitutional republic, those debates should occur through free discussion and scholarship — not through laws that attempt to enforce a single government-approved narrative. The Constitution protects the right of Americans to disagree about politics, history, and public affairs. That protection applies even — and perhaps especially — when the government would prefer that disagreement disappear.  * * *  Timothy V. Anderson is an attorney and a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Illegal immigrants have found a new way to get released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, throwing a massive wrench into the Trump administration’s deportation plan. Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, illegal immigrants have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions challenging their detention in federal courts, ProPublica reported last month. It’s more than the number of such challenges filed over the last three administrations put together. “It’s kind of a perfect storm,” Scott Mechkowski, former ICE deputy field office director in New York, told The Daily Wire. “You have increased enforcement, increased mandatory detention, and an increased perception of judicial bias that’s driving the habeas rates out the window.” In Arizona, United States Attorney Timothy Courchaine said his office went from receiving 10 habeas petitions in immigration cases to “nearly a thousand” since Trump returned to the White House. Border states like Arizona are inundated right now because they have a larger share of illegal immigrants in ICE detention. “It is definitely a new trend … Now, those aren’t all just the bond hearings, but that’s the vast, vast, vast majority,” Courchaine told The Daily Wire. “In most of them, they are [granting bond] … so we’ve been losing almost all of these and the folks will be released,” he added. The habeas petitions move detainees’ cases out of the immigration court system and into the district court docket, where judges have “a lot more remedies to give them than an immigration judge,” Courchaine said. “They can get a whole lot more relief than they would ever be due in immigration court,” he said, adding that “district court judges … have their own ways of running their courts, and they can issue their own orders.” Mechkowski described district courts as “favorable” venues for illegal immigrants “because … they don’t necessarily understand immigration law.” It also buys illegal immigrants more time in the United States, according to Mechkowski. “In a detained hearing, you usually get a hearing within a month or two and in a non-detained setting in New York, we were scheduling hearings out four years. So that’s why they fight tooth and nail to get out of a detained docket and to get on a non-detained docket because it buys them years of time before their hearing comes up,” Mechkowski said. “And in those years, you can accrue all kinds of equities that influence your court proceedings,” he continued. “You can have kids, you can clean your record … you can put four years between you and a crime.” Dallas-based attorney Dan Gividen has shifted his practice from fighting removal cases before immigration judges to solely arguing for his clients’ release in district courts. Roughly 40% of new habeas cases are being filed in Texas, according to ProPublica. Since Gividen began his practice in 2019, he had roughly “three or four” habeas cases, he told The Daily Wire. Since July, he’s had “close to 100.” Gividen said the tactic “has been absolutely successful” in freeing his clients from ICE detention centers “particularly in places like the Western District of Texas, the Southern District of Texas … in Oklahoma and New Mexico, Colorado.” “We’re having constant success in those cases. It’s literally the only way to get someone out of ICE detention it feels like these days,” Gividen, who previously served as ICE’s assistant chief counsel, said. Immigration lawyers often file habeas petitions after it becomes clear their clients either have no chance of getting bond from immigration judges or have been denied a bond already. In doing so, they’re taking “two bites of the apple,” Mechkowski said, adding “because you essentially have the immigration judges already rendered that that person’s on bond eligible or not going to give them a bond.” “And so it gives them a second bite to ask a different judicial body to release them,” he said, adding that he’s often fighting for the release of his clients who are “not a danger” or “flight risk,” but who nevertheless don’t have “a snowball’s chance in hell” to make bond. Gividen said there was one federal judge who did not grant their habeas petitions, so he has looked to other jurisdictions to fight for his clients’ release. Mechkowski said the”forum shop” is all too common in such cases. Courchaine described the surge in habeas petitions as a “systemic burden” on his office, which has been forced to divert criminal prosecutors to work habeas immigration cases. “We’ve had to pull criminal prosecutors off of their caseloads and put them into civil [cases]. We’ve had to shift around criminal prosecutors’ workloads and investigations, so they could take this on. Even my criminal chief, who’s in charge of more than 60 federal prosecutors up in Phoenix, Arizona, has had to volunteer to take cases,” Courchaine said. The same goes for Minnesota, where a government attorney was recently let go after candidly ranting to a federal judge that “the system sucks, this job sucks,” according to the Associated Press. The lawyer was reportedly brought in to help with the influx of habeas petitions. A Justice Department spokesman said “there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload” “if rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the government’s obligation to properly prepare cases.” The Trump administration ordered federal immigration authorities to institute a policy of mandatory detention “for the duration of their removal proceedings” and to deny bond hearings to illegal immigrants in July. “They made millions of people mandatory detention, which is not how we ever operated … and I think that’s driving a lot of this in addition to criminal alien enforcement,” Mechkowski said. Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit handed the Trump administration a victory in a challenge to that policy. “We’re gonna see what that does, but we’ve already had a judge or two follow that 5th Circuit decision. So I’m hopeful if that will start to change hearts and minds, but even still, even if it does, we’ll be left with the crush of responding to all of these,” Courchaine said. “I don’t think it’s gonna go anywhere particularly soon until the Supreme Court speaks on it,” Courchaine said. While the illegal immigrants still must fight deportation in immigration cases despite being released, it buys them more time in the United States than if they were locked up. It can prolong their cases from weeks to years, according to Mechkowski. “There’s a lot more time,” Gividen said. “You’re able to get your own documents, you’re able to call people. Here’s all sorts of advantages to preparing for your final case out of detention versus in.”

For years, the abortion debate has been framed almost exclusively around law and ideology. But behind the slogans are women making deeply personal decisions often under intense financial pressure. National research consistently shows that the cost of raising children, especially childcare, weighs heavily on those decisions. March 12 is National Working Moms Day. At Human Coalition, we are taking this moment to celebrate the hardworking moms we serve as the nation’s most trusted life-affirming alternative to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Every day, we serve pregnant women who are already working to support their other children and fearing that they can’t possibly welcome another child in their current circumstances. But if we’re serious about honoring working moms, we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: childcare is one of the most consequential factors shaping decisions about work, family, and even abortion.  According to Human Coalition, a national pro-life organization that serves thousands of pregnant women each year, 76% of women seeking abortion say they would prefer to parent if circumstances were different, and financial reasons figure prominently in many of those decisions. Nearly 40% cite economic concerns overall, and more than one in four say they “can’t afford a baby and childcare.”  These are not abstract statistics. They represent women staring at bank accounts, calculating rent, daycare, groceries, and gas, and concluding they have no room left for a new baby. Consider “Cindy.“ When she first came to Human Coalition, pregnant with her second child, Cindy was overwhelmed and unsure whether she could choose life. With practical support, she completed her GED, secured childcare vouchers, and started working. Stability seemed within reach. Then her employer changed her hours. She lost childcare. Without childcare, she lost her job. One scheduling shift unraveled everything. Human Coalition walked with her again, helping her regain stability. But Cindy’s story illustrates a broader reality: for many working-class mothers, childcare access is fragile. One disruption can mean lost income, lost opportunity, and a life thrown off track. That’s why recent reforms in the Working Families Tax Cut deserve real attention. The legislation included meaningful steps to strengthen childcare access and expand flexibility for working- and middle-class parents. Lawmakers reinforced funding streams by increasing the Child & Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), expanding dependent care assistance program (DCAP) limits to $7,500, and boosting the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit (Section 45F) to encourage business-supported care. The bill also modernized certain eligibility pathways and acknowledged something working mothers have long understood: that affordable childcare isn’t a subsidy for working parents; it’s a foundation for a culture that makes room for new life. And without accessible childcare, financial stability slips away for some of the most vulnerable moms in our nation. These reforms matter because the cost burden is staggering. In 2024, parents reported spending roughly 22% of their income on childcare and nearly 30% of their savings just to maintain it. A new 2025 American Family Survey showed that the average annual price of center-based child care is $15,570, rivaling mortgage payments in many communities. And even when families can afford care, they often can’t find it. More than half of Americans live in a “childcare desert,” where there are at least three children for every licensed childcare slot. This isn’t just an affordability crisis. It’s an access crisis. The cultural conversation often assumes Americans don’t want families anymore. The data tell a different story. A 2024 peer-reviewed paper from scholars Lyman Stone and Clara Piano found that states with less restrictive childcare regulations have meaningfully smaller “fertility gaps,” which represent the gap between how many children women say they want and how many they actually have. In the state with the most burdensome regulations, simply adopting the regulatory environment of the least restrictive state would increase fertility rates by roughly 13%.  Strikingly, in every state, the average desired family size remains above the replacement level of 2.1 children. Women want children. They need the structural support that makes those children economically possible. The goal here isn’t to replace immediate family or community support with government. It’s to remove unnecessary barriers that make family formation financially perilous. Smart childcare reform can expand options for those who need them most. If we want stronger families, a healthier economy, and a culture where moms don’t feel forced into abortion by their circumstances, we cannot ignore the role childcare plays in all three. National Working Moms Day shouldn’t be reduced to social media tributes and corporate platitudes. It should prompt serious reflection about the policies shaping women’s real-life experiences. For many women standing at the edge of a decision between life and death for their unborn child, it can be an undeniably pro-life policy. We’ve made meaningful progress. But until no woman feels cornered into a permanent decision because of a temporary economic barrier, our work isn’t done. * * * Clare Ath is the senior policy analyst at Human Coalition, one of the largest pro-life organizations in the nation, which operates a network of telecare and brick-and-mortar women’s care clinics across the country. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

President Donald Trump blamed former President Joe Biden and his lax immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border for any Iranian “sleeper cells” that may have made it into the United States. Trump said on Wednesday that his administration had “eyes on” a number of suspicious people who he said had crossed the border during the Biden administration, adding, “We know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.” WATCH: .@pdoocy: “Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the US right now?” PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I have been and a lot of people came in through Biden with his stupid open border. But we know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them,… pic.twitter.com/VrAqcXgfkr — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 12, 2026 Fox News Senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Trump about an alert — sent by the federal government to law enforcement offices all across the country — indicating that an encrypted message appeared to originate in Iran shortly after the launch of Operation Epic Fury and may have been designed to activate “sleeper cells” already in the United States and other parts of the world. “Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the US right now?” Doocy asked. “I have been and a lot of people came in through Biden with his stupid open border. But we know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them, I think,” Trump replied. “Is it dozens?” Doocy pressed, looking for clarification. “They came in through the open border policies of ‘sleepy ‘Joe Biden. One of the worst…the worst president in the history of our country and we’ve got our eyes on all of them,” he added. “But the war itself is being prosecuted at a level that nobody’s seen before. It’s pretty — it’s pretty amazing to watch.” President Trump has taken every opportunity to tout his administration’s actions and the accomplishments of the United States military — alongside the Israeli Defense Forces — in Operation Epic Fury’s first ten days, telling Republican members at a recent conference, “No other president could do some of the sh*t I’m doing.”

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz joins the growing list of billionaires moving to Florida — a move that is quickly becoming a trend. In past two months alone, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sergey Brin, former Google CEO Larry Page, and now Howard Schultz have announced their migration to Miami.  Schultz has lived in Seattle since 1979, where he built Starbucks into a global brand. The billionaire says he’s making the move in order to pursue his next adventure. “We [Schultz and his wife, Sheri Schultz] have moved to Miami for our next adventure together. We are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and its allure to our kids on the East Coast as they raise families of their own,” he explained. After 44 years in Seattle, Schultz — worth $6.6 billion — will settle into a $44 million penthouse at the Surf Club, Four Seasons Private Residences in Surfside, about fifteen miles from Miami. The five bedroom penthouse is 5,500 square feet and has a rooftop terrace. While his nonprofit, the Schultz Family Foundation, will remain in Seattle, his family office will relocate with him.  Schultz’s announced his decision on the same day that the Washington State House of Representatives approved a new millionaire tax. The measure passed 52-46 on Wednesday and advanced to the Senate. If it passes, Washington will lose its status as one of the nine states without an income tax. The legislation would impose  a 9.9% tax on income for earners making above $1 million. Washington policymakers argue that only 0.5% of tax payers would be subject to the new levy.  State Rep. Ed Orcutt, one of the 46 legislators who voted against the bill said, “The problem is overspending. There is no tax or combination of taxes that can keep up with a legislature that continually overspends revenue.” Schultz did not mention the tax in his announcement, much like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos did not mention the Washington State 7% capital gains tax — on sales of stocks and bonds exceeding $250,000 — when he decided in 2023 to leave Seattle for Miami. Like Schultz, Bezos cited only personal reasons. In recent years, a growing number of CEOS have relocated from blue to red states. But while Schultz is moving to a red state, his political views lean left. In 2019, during a media tour for a potential 2020 Presidential run, Schultz said, “I should be paying more taxes. And more people who make this kind of revenue, and are of means, should be paying more taxes.” That same night, Schultz also said, “No one wants to see him [Donald Trump] fired more than me.” Starbucks is also relocating to the south — and to a red state as well. The company announced the move to Nashville, Tennessee, in the beginning of March describing it as part of a broader plan to expand across North America and “establish a strategic presence in the Southeast region of the United States.”  Justin Owen, the President & CEO of the think tank, Beacon Center of Tennessee, welcomed the decision.  “We welcome all businesses to the free state of Tennessee. We encourage them to remember and embrace why they came here: our low tax, low regulation, pro-worker freedom environment,” Owen said.