The Megyn Kelly Show
Media's False "Maryland Dad" Narrative and Left's Spin on Illegal Gang Members, with Steve Deace, Delano Squires, and Joseph Massey | Ep. 1049
Tue, 15 Apr 2025
Megyn Kelly is joined by Steve Deace of BlazeTV and Delano Squires of the Heritage Foundation to discuss the corporate media pushing the narrative about the illegal immigrant gang member deported to El Salvador that he's just a "Maryland father," the real facts about the case that are being ignored, the Bukele meeting at the White House, why it was such a masterclass in communicating the issues at hand, how news on the story of Rachel Morin relates to our current immigration debate, Karmelo Anthony being released on bond, the forthcoming self-defense argument he'll make in the high school football player stabbing, the shocking push by some lawmakers in Colorado to make it a crime for parents to use the wrong pronouns for their kids, why the push is illegal, absurd and offensive new comments from AOC about Trump, how he could potentially sue her for defamation, and more. Then Joseph Massey, author of "America is the Poem," joins to discuss what led him to change his mind on Trump after the Butler assassination attempt, his inspiring message about America, how he overcame a poetry world "cancelation" and got himself back into his craft, and more. Deace- https://get.blazetv.com/deace/Squires- https://www.heritage.org/staff/delano-squiresMassey- https://www.poetrydispatches.com/ Ground News: Use the link https://groundnews.com/megyn to get 40% off the Vantage subscription to see through mainstream media narratives.Hungryroot: https://Hungryroot.com/MK | Use code MK to Get 40% off your first box PLUS a free item in every box for life!FYSI: https://FYSI.com/Megyn or call 800-877-4000 Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow
Chapter 1: Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia and what is the controversy surrounding his deportation?
Good to be here. Good to be with you, Megan.
Great to see you. OK, so this guy, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is not a U.S. citizen. He is from El Salvador. He was brought here when he was 16 by his parents. He got arrested around, let's see, it was 2019. And He was like 19 or 20 at that time. He was arrested outside of a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, by Prince George County police officers on suspicion of being a gang member.
OK, so that he nobody was bothering him. He was here, brought over. They call him so-called dreamers when it's their parents who bring them. They don't come willingly, but he was no question he entered illegally. But then he was suspected of being a gang member, and that found him in the crosshairs of law enforcement, and they handed him over to ICE. They recognized that he was not here illegally.
The following day, he was served with a notice to appear, and that commenced removal proceedings against him, pursuant to 8 U.S.C. Section 1229A. He was charged as removable. The government was recognizing he was here unlawfully, And on top of that, he appeared to have behaved unlawfully, though they did not need the latter in order to deport him.
Just the fact that you're here illegally subjects you to being deported. That's just the way it is. Then he went through not one, but two court proceedings. The first was a bond hearing on April 29th, 2019, with immigration judge Elizabeth Kessler, who ruled the evidence showed he was a verified member of MS-13. He was afforded a hearing at which he presented evidence and so did the other side.
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Chapter 2: What legal processes were involved in Abrego Garcia's removal case?
The court, quote, first reasoned. that the respondent failed to meet his burden of demonstrating that his release from custody would not pose a danger to others, as the evidence shows he's a verified member of MS-13. On December 19th, 2019, so, you know, some, what, eight months later or so, the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed that finding that he was a member of MS-13, quote,
Notwithstanding the respondent's challenges to the reliability of the Prince George's County Police Department gang field interview sheet, the immigration judge appropriately considered allegations of gang affiliation against the respondent in determining that he has not demonstrated that he's not a danger to property or persons here.
Then, as he realized he was about to be actually kicked out of the country, he had already been deemed not qualified for bond. He applied for asylum, even though it was much too late. You have to apply for asylum within a year of getting here. And then, not coincidentally, also asked for something called withholding from removal from El Salvador in particular, allegedly due to threats from gangs.
It was his safety request. move. Like if you won't give me asylum, then please at least say they can't send me back to El Salvador because there are mean gangs there who want to hurt me and my family.
And on October 10th, 2019, he was granted not asylum, but withholding of removal to El Salvador after the immigration judge agreed he had established it was more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador. ICE did not appeal that grant of relief and plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then promptly released from custody. ICE arrested him.
in Baltimore this past March under the Trump deportation push. So that's his history. He is under an order of removal. And at that moment where the judge found he didn't qualify for bond and that he was removable, just not to El Salvador, he could have been deported to any country in the world.
The only arguably wrong thing that's happened here is that when Trump deported him, he sent him to the man's home country of El Salvador. But even that has two potential hooks out of it for the Trump administration. One, if the circumstance that led to the danger for you in that country you're objecting to go into has been removed. then you can be sent back.
And that gang that was allegedly persecuting him is no more in El Salvador. So that's one. Two, Stephen Miller argued this yesterday, that President Trump has declared MS-13 a terrorist organization. and ordered all these suspected terrorists to be removed, period, which is a different kind of removal and may supersede the withholding of removal order.
That's something they'd have to argue in court and it would have to play out and it hasn't yet. But I did take note of Stephen Miller's emphasis on the he's a terrorist and president Bukele of El Salvador mentioned that word too.
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Chapter 3: How is the corporate media misrepresenting the Maryland father narrative?
know i i long for the days when the president was a russian asset uh russian asset uh that was uh you know uh that was compromise uh because of a of a water sports tape uh and he was engaged in uh quid pro quo with ukraine uh and and all the other great scandals the other side the left is now down to how dare you deport this ms-13 gang member and so i'm reminded of the great prophet sun tzu and his art of war when your opponent is making a fool out of themselves let them
Yeah, it's so well said.
You know, Delano, this Maryland man thing and it's Newsbusters did a good job of showing how it's the exact same language being used on multiple networks is such a lie. It's an obvious lie. They are obfuscating this. And even when they the ones who reference that there was a finding he's part of MS-13 that was upheld on appeal. The next thing they do is attack the finding.
Well, it wasn't much evidence. Well, you weren't there. There was no, there was, it was appealed and it was upheld on appeal. They're the ones who are lecturing us about, you have to respect the courts, respect the courts or we're going to have a constitution. Well, the courts handled this at the time with the Prince George's County gang unit.
And by the way, Prince George's County is not some far right county. It's about as leftist as they come. And now they want us, we're allowed to second guess that court, but no other court that says he was removable or that the Trump administration made an error here.
Yeah, I actually live in Prince George's County, not too far from Hyattsville. So yeah, I'm very familiar sort of with the political climate there. This has been, I think, for people who are not following the news closely, a very confusing case because there are different perspectives going back and forth, right? Aside from the propaganda in terms of him being a Maryland man, right?
Sort of obfuscating his legal status, right? It's okay. Is he a gang member? Is he not a gang member? Has he had his due process or has he not? Is the Supreme Court saying, is there a distinction between facilitating his return and effectuating his return? What I look at are sort of big picture issues. And I think there are ones that apply to each side. One,
On the right, I do think there's an issue of due process. And taking it out of this case, right, we're a nation of laws. People have rights. Citizens, to Steve's point, have sort of the highest class of rights. And non-citizen residents, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to what that set of rights looks like. But I think there are some people who say, look,
If he can be taken off the street and sent back to El Salvador, what happens if that happens to me and my mom or my dad is on a green card? I understand those concerns.
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Chapter 4: What was discussed during El Salvador President Bukele's White House meeting?
And behind Rubio and Bondi was everybody. Stephen Miller was there. Linda McMahon was there. Kristi Noem was there. Everybody was standing. I was like, wow, this is actually very cool. He's brought some into the Oval before, but there was a reason he brought them all in. And he used them. to answer questions from reporters.
And as I hear you talking about this, like park your car on it, I think he was parking the car yesterday. I'll just show you some of what I'm talking about because those cabinet members and Stephen Miller, who's senior advisor to the president, were doing battle in particular with CNN's Caitlin Collins.
Which one is that? Well, let me ask Pam, would you answer that question?
The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if, as El Salvador wants to return him, this is international matters, foreign affairs, if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.
So will you return him? It's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizen, who again is a member of MS-13, which as I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world, and I can promise you if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.
But the Supreme Court is asking to... No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here, because he is a...
How can I return him to the United States? If I smuggle him into the United States, what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it. I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States. Yeah, but I'm not releasing, I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.
That's not going to happen. Well, they'd love to have a criminal, you know, released into our country.
I mean, there's a question. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the political implications of the Abrego Garcia case on immigration debate?
100%. And I mean, what you just tragically described, Megan, was 100% avoidable crime. Not all crime is avoidable. Wrong place, wrong time, circumstances beyond your control. But that was 100% unavoidable, did not have to happen. And it simply happened because the United States federal government under the previous regime aided and abetted it.
And I mean, their fingerprints are on the murder weapon here. These two stories are actually connected in some respects. What we were just discussing and what we're discussing now from a political standpoint. What we have learned on the right in the last few years is that the way we do persuasion in this era is different now.
In previous eras, you used to start with an objective truth claim, and then you would close with a personal testimony and story to cinch the argument with an emotional connection. And the way we do business epistemologically in the West now is different now. And now you have to begin with an emotional appeal.
You have to gain emotional credibility first before people will philosophically listen to you. And the left has beaten us over the head with this for the last couple of decades. And we're beginning to figure out now and do this better on our own. And we're using stories instead of statistics of tragedies of what you just said.
Hey, because ultimately we're dealing with people and souls here, not numbers on a page. And these statistics, they come home to real stories, real tragedies. Someone's daughter isn't coming home for Easter this weekend. Someone's daughter isn't going to be there at Christmas next year or ever again. Why? Why? Why? And then that gets us into the philosophical arguments about what happened here.
They're trying to emulate this now with the case of the MS-13 gang member. In the last election, Trump won Hispanic men overall by 10 points, one of the most astounding pieces of data in all of the exit polling. Did even better with younger Hispanic men. And what you're seeing is a generational changeover.
The original Hispanic voting bloc from the 80s on, one of their primary concerns, if not their primary concern, was I want to bring as many people that are stuck back home with me here. Which means if you put a conservative piece of legislation on the ballot as a referendum, they would often vote for us.
But if you ask them to vote for Republicans, they often would not because of that primary concern. I want to bring more people stuck back in the squalor of home here with me. Well, we've had a changeover, and ironically, some of these so-called dreamers are one of the reasons why. They view themselves as full-blooded Americans. They view themselves as citizens, not immigrants.
And it is vital to see yourself as a nation of citizens and not immigrants. They see themselves as a nation of citizens now. They're living in these suburbs now. They're living in these exurbs now. Those are their schools now with their kids. And they don't want to bring back from home what was left behind. And they're attracted to that Trump message.
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Chapter 6: What tragic case highlights failures in the immigration system related to illegal entry?
as some form of police force uh they didn't just the brown shirts we saw in the a hundred years ago that wasn't a new thing it was just you know a different uniform and so this is what you're seeing here now and this is where this was this stuff was always going to go here the one thing the late great robert bork was wrong about is we don't slouch to gomorrah we sprint and ultimately the reason why they hate slippery slope arguments on the left is because they're undefeated
They're undefeated. I mean, these are the questions we've been asking. How far are we going to go with all of this? By which moral standard will we draw the line? And the answer is none. There is absolutely none at all because whatever grants leftists power and control, that is what they will utilize because that is the foundations of the leftist belief system.
Whatever grants me more power and control and turning your children against you grants me a unique amount of both.
This is so sick. And Delano, I have to tell you, it's illegal. It's unconstitutional. It will be struck down. I mean, we just had a whole case, 303 Creative, not long ago, out of Colorado, where somebody was punished by the Colorado state system for not making websites for certain members of the LGBTQ crowd.
And she said that it does, it's not consistent with my belief to celebrate, you know, to, to post like videos about a trans marriage, et cetera. And, um, The Colorado legislature said, no, you will be punished because that's not consistent with our human rights law. And the U.S.
Supreme Court found in favor of the web designer, saying the state cannot force her to say certain things in support of a certain ideology that she doesn't believe. That is not consistent with the First Amendment. And similarly, the state cannot punish the A father in my hypothetical could be a mother, whatever, for refusing to adopt fake pronouns about his or her own child.
And not only that, but deprive them of custody of it. But separate and apart from all that, morally, just morally, this is deeply wrong. And trying to strong arm parents into supporting a process and an ideology that are extremely dangerous for minors.
Yeah, I think one of the most important things that any conservative legislator, policymaker, politician could do is to stay unequivocally. Whether you start in Genesis or the human genome, there are two sexes, male and female, and switching is not allowed. And all sort of family policy, every issue dealing with this particular subject should flow from that sort of bedrock reality.
I'm not surprised Colorado got here, but I do want to caution listeners and viewers that This is not just a crazy leftist state, crazy blue state issue. Megan, the scenario that you painted was exactly what a man named Jeff Younger went through. This is probably five, six, seven years ago. Jeff ended up running for, he went through this in Texas.
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Chapter 7: What is the latest on Carmelo Anthony's stabbing case and its legal outlook?
So for the audience that hasn't yet heard that story, can you just give us the quick overview of what they tried to do to you?
Yeah, well, I wrote an essay for Quillette that goes into great detail about the whole thing. It's my side of the story. Anyone can check that out for all that for all those details.
But yeah, I was living a decent, clean life after being kind of a drunk in my 20s and being a bit inappropriate at times, as I admitted in the in the essay and various public declarations that when they didn't go anywhere, it was just throwing chum to sharks. But Yeah, it was brutal. It all started with a fake letter.
It was a forged letter written by somebody who claimed they met me at a poetry reading. And then I called her hot. And it was put on a WordPress website. And then this woman that I had been involved in, involved with, posted the link with malicious intent. And it just spread like wildfire through the poetry community and beyond. Into the wider literary world, it was mentioned in Publishers Weekly.
There was a disgusting, defamatory article published about me in some magazine that's defunct now. But at the time, it got a lot of traction. And so I immediately lost jobs. I lost a job I had at the University of Pennsylvania. I lost book deals. I had a book coming out with Wesleyan University Press that was scrapped. And I lost all my friends. I lost all my social networks.
So it took a year, all of 2018 and most of 2019 to kind of just rebuild a sense of self again, which I did through God, through Jesus Christ, and through the Catholic Church specifically. And then I was able to re-engage my poetry in a way that was even more vital and important. I realized that I never wrote poetry to become successful. It was always a survival, kind of a survival skill for me.
Do you wonder why you haven't been welcomed back in? You know, you were reviewed by the New York Times and all these other mainstream so-called publications. And we're seeing many men who were kind of canceled by the Me Too movement given a road back. Why not you? What's to stop you from going that route? Why wouldn't they allow you back?
What's to stop me? Other poets are the ones. You're not allowed back once you've been canceled. And in my case, I'm even more of a boogeyman to them because, well, I published that essay in Quillette, which at that time in 2019, they were all screaming, oh, he's publishing in a fascist publication, Quillette of all things. And then I dared to self-publish and appear on your show.
And I started expressing political opinions on X or then Twitter. And so now I'm not called the things that they were calling me before. Now I'm the fascist. And the funniest thing I was called recently because of the inaugural poem I wrote was the poet laureate of white people. which I thought about including as a blurb on the back of the book, but then I decided against it.
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Chapter 8: How do the guests interpret the racial and legal dynamics in the Carmelo Anthony case?
Even still, even in 2025? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, I know. There's apparently a big cancellation going on right now. I won't say any details, but it's just as ugly as it was in 2018. And so I realized a year or two after the cancellation started that I wasn't going to be allowed back. And I'm going to have to do it myself. And so this book and the prior two books, three books are published under my own imprint.
And so they can't cancel me. They can't pull my book because they think I'm a fascist or the poet laureate of white people.
And it drives them crazy.
It does drive them crazy. Yeah. And I can't say I mind.
You are moving up the ranks already. We have to make sure that Joseph hits number one. We have to make sure in poetry. And who are you bouncing off of the number one spot if we manage to make this happen?
Well, I would like to take the number one spot from Maria Shriver. Maria Shriver has a book of poetry out and it's abysmal. She's not a poet. She's not a poet. She could have not broken the lines up and it would have been probably maybe a better book, but she's not a poet.
This needs to happen.
I should take that spot.
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