Carney wins Canada's election, riding Canadian anger at Trump to victory | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: What does Canada's election mean for relations between the two countries? It's been 100 days in office for President Donald Trump. Plus, he gets some rough polling news. Paste BN National Correspondent Trevor Hughes talks about civil liberties concerns as plainclothed ICE agents make detentions. President Trump signs an executive order highlighting sanctuary cities fighting immigration enforcement. Russian President Vladimir Putin declares a 3-day ceasefire with Ukraine in May. Trump says that's not good enough. Paste BN Supreme Court Correspondent Maureen Groppe says the high court appears likely to side with a student in a disability discrimination case.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Tuesday, April 29th, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, results are in on an election north of the border, plus Trump marks a hundred days in office. And we discuss civil liberties concerns over plain-clothed, ICE agents and detentions.
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Mark Carney has won Canada's election to continue his term as Prime Minister, both CBC and Canada and the Associated Press projected Carney as the winner. His win marked a repudiation of President Donald Trump's threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. That rhetoric, along with punishing tariffs on Canadian goods, has sparked an unprecedented wave of Canadian nationalism and overturned years of stability between the typically friendly neighbors.
Mark Carney:
Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration is over.
Taylor Wilson:
Carney's win means liberals retained power, but fell short of a majority government. You could read more with a link in today's show notes.
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Today marks President Donald Trump's 100th day in office, and he said that he runs the world. In an interview with the Atlantic, Trump told the magazine "The first time I had two things to do, run the country and survive. I had all these crooked guys, and the second time I run the country and the world." Trump has pushed the boundaries of the presidency during his first hundred days back in the White House, signing more than 140 executive orders to unilaterally achieve his policy aims and seek retribution against political adversaries. But his approval rating has taken a hit falling to 39% in a new poll from the Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos. In particular, Americans are concerned about the economy and his recent use of tariffs. And in an NBC poll, 45% approved of Trump's job in office, while 55% disapproved.
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Recent video showing unidentified men detaining a suspect in a Virginia court is raising concerns about civil liberties, and a practice that immigration and customs enforcement has been engaged with for years using agents in plain clothes to make detentions. I spoke with Paste BN National Correspondent Trevor Hughes for more on what we're hearing about some of these recent detentions under a Trump administration that has prioritized immigration enforcement. Trevor, hello, sir.
Trevor Hughes:
Hey, good to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
Good to have you as always. So would you just start by telling us about Teodoro Dominguez Rodriguez and this video from a Virginia courthouse?
Trevor Hughes:
This is one of those situations we're starting to see more and more of. In this particular case, a defendant, a criminal defendant in a relatively small local matter, was approached by three or four men inside a courthouse in Virginia. And they basically said, we're taking you into custody. And essentially marched him out the door, refused to show identification, refused to show a warrant to his attorneys who were standing right there. And it raises a lot of questions about whether federal agents are not appropriately identifying themselves as they conduct the President's promised strict enforcement.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, as you mentioned, we've heard about and even seen on video other similar detentions. Is that correct?
Trevor Hughes:
Yeah. We've seen it a number of times, especially with college students where a group of men in plain clothes, sometimes in ballistic vests, sometimes not, sort of surround a person on the street and take them into custody. Now the issue is that when we see a police officer, the uniform, the hat, the badge, the gun belt, those are all symbols of authority, right? That's what we do in this country, we recognize those folks as symbols of authority, right? That's why we have marked police cars. In these cases, what we're seeing is people being bundled into unmarked cars. Now, the President's supporters would say immigration agents are doing their jobs, they're taking people into custody as necessary. But in other parts of the world, this idea that men in body armor or men in plain clothes are just grabbing people off the street and bundling them off to somewhere, that raises a lot of civil liberties concerns.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, I mean, specifically, what are civil rights experts saying and what recourse do these folks have? Is the ACLU getting involved directly here? I mean, what are we hearing on that front?
Trevor Hughes:
There's not a lot of recourse at the moment because the immigration system is not the court system, right? We're accustomed in this country to having open court, people appear in court, there's defense attorneys, there's prosecutors, anyone can go. Immigration court is very different than that. This is how it's operated for years and years and years. But I think many Americans are discovering that the immigration courts, which are actually part of the Justice Department are completely different. So there have been a number of lawsuits, including by the ACLU who has concerns about the way these things are being conducted. But it really raises this question of, how do you know that the person who shows up on the street surrounds you and says, "We're taking you into custody." How do you know that they're a government agent? And we saw a case in Florida the other week where a woman was accused of kidnapping her ex-boyfriend's wife by showing up to her workplace in an ICE t-shirt with a radio and saying, "I'm with ice. You have to come with me." And the woman did.
Taylor Wilson:
So Trevor, I mean, we've previously seen ICE use tactics that civil libertarians have had concerns about. What can you tell us about that?
Trevor Hughes:
During the first Trump administration, the ACLU actually sued over essentially deceptive traffic stops. ICE agents don't do traffic enforcement, but what they were doing was pulling people over, coming up to them, and then using that as a pretext to take them into custody for detention. The Biden administration actually settled that lawsuit and sort of ended the practice. And there are concerns by civil liberties groups about how ICE will sometimes show up at a building, show a picture and say, we need to go through this building and make sure that no one who looks like this is in this building, which is not a warrant. And so there is this great concern that government agents are violating people's constitutional rights.
Now, ICE would tell you that they're doing this because the folks who are living here without permission, they've already broken the law, that they are at risk of fleeing, and that in many cases they are violent offenders. And because they don't get cooperation from a lot of local governments, those sanctuary city policies we've heard about, the ICE agents would say, we have to do things this way to make it safe for everybody.
Taylor Wilson:
And I guess essentially that's the perspective from the Trump administration from the top down as well?
Trevor Hughes:
Oh, absolutely. The Trump administration would argue that almost anything these days is warranted to repel what they consider an invasion of gang members and people from Venezuela and other countries like that.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
Good to be here.
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Taylor Wilson:
In other immigration news, President Trump yesterday signed two executive orders to bolster immigration enforcement and threaten jurisdictions that restrict cooperation with federal law enforcement, with the loss of federal funding. The orders look to bolster state and local law enforcement with better pay, cast off military equipment and free legal support, while also punishing so-called sanctuary states and cities with criminal investigations and the threat and loss of funding. The administration's conflict with sanctuary cities and states is being fought in court. And FBI agents arrested a local Wisconsin judge earlier this month for allegedly interfering with federal authorities, trying to arrest an immigrant who did not have legal authorization to be in the country. White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt said such sanctuary locations obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a three-day Ukraine war ceasefire to take place next month. While the White House said, that's not good enough. President Trump wants a permanent end to Russia's war on Ukraine, according to the administration, and he's losing patience with both Putin and Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin announced the ceasefire in Moscow to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies in World War II. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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The Supreme Court appears likely to side with a student in a disability discrimination case. The student's family said the standard for when a disabled student can sue for discrimination comes up frequently and should be resolved by the high court. I spoke with Paste BN Supreme Court correspondent Maureen Groppe who joined me from the D.C Bureau for more. Thanks for hopping on, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Hey, happy to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
So let's start by talking about the Tharpe family and their story.
Maureen Groppe:
So the Tharpes have a daughter named Ava who has a rare form of epilepsy and severe cognitive disabilities. Because of her epilepsy, she has frequent seizures in the morning that make it difficult for her to attend school in the morning. So she was receiving accommodations at a school in Tennessee for that disability. She was able to start the school day midday and then receive instruction at home in the evening to give her a school day, enough hours similar to what other students receive. Mr. Tharp got a job in Minnesota and they moved to Minnesota. The school there didn't offer the same arrangement and the parents tried for years to get something similar and were not able to get that.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so how has their story and their case moved through the courts so far? And can you just help us understand who the main players have shaken out to be in the courts?
Maureen Groppe:
So after years of disagreements between the Tharpes and the school about what accommodations the school could provide, the family went to an administrative law judge under a federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And in that situation, the judge said that the school district hadn't done enough and instructed the school to give her a longer school day. But that law has some limits on it. The family also wanted to use two other federal laws that protect people with disabilities from discrimination, that would've allowed them to ask the school for some damages to compensate them for some of the private instruction, private assistance that they had to pay for themselves because they weren't getting what they thought that they should get from the school.
But when the family tried to use these two other federal laws, the court said that they couldn't do that because they hadn't shown that the school had acted in bad faith or gross misjudgment in their negotiations with the family. And that's a tougher standard than the courts use for other kinds of discrimination claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So that's what the family wanted the Supreme Courts to decide, whether there should be one standard for families in their situation that are trying to get accommodations for their child's educational needs, and whether that should be a higher bar to bring those kinds of cases than other kinds of disability discrimination cases.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so good explainer. What are we now hearing from the high court justice this morning?
Maureen Groppe:
Well, it was quite an interesting argument because the school district had been saying that it made sense that these cases, situations are treated differently. But then they later changed that position and said that students like Ava should have the same playing field as other kinds of discrimination cases. But they said that the bar, instead of lowering the bar for suits like hers, it should be raised for other types of discrimination suits. And that didn't go over well with the justices who thought that was not the broad question that they were being asked to decide. They were just being asked to decide whether there should be the same standard, not should the standard be higher or lower, and what that standard should be. And they don't like to have to make big decisions like that without having every aspect of this sort of already hashed out in the lower courts so that they can think about what all the arguments have been made and are not surprised by anything.
Taylor Wilson:
Why exactly is this case being so closely watched by disability rights groups, and I guess just generally what are some of the broader implications here?
Maureen Groppe:
The disability rights groups were watching it because they said that there was this impossibly high standard being set by some of the courts for these suits and that that's not a standard that every court uses, but enough courts were using that standard that it was affecting lots of cases where families weren't able to use the law to hold schools accountable. But then they got even more concerned when it looked like the Supreme Court was being asked to make a ruling that it would affect not just the standard for cases like this one, but other kinds of disability discrimination cases.
Taylor Wilson:
And on the school district kind of side of the coin here, Maureen, what are their concerns?
Maureen Groppe:
Well, they're worried that if you make these lawsuits easier to file, easier to win, that that's going to create a more adversarial relationship between the parents and the schools and what are already difficult negotiations about what the student's needs are versus a school, what resources they have to meet those needs. Schools have limited budgets, they have a lot of competing needs, and they're concerned that not only will it make these negotiations more difficult, but if the lawsuits become successful, then they're going to have to pay out money in damages and that's going to shrink their resources further, which will just continue to exacerbate the problem.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, Maureen Groppe covers the Supreme Court for Paste BN. Thanks, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.