US Senator Visits Abrego Garcia, Florida State University Shooting, Fed Independence

0:02A U.S. senator traveled to El Salvador to visit the man illegally deported by the Trump administration. My mission today was simply to see how his health is, what his condition is. Is he any closer to returning to the U.S.? I'm A Martinez with Leila Faddle, and this is Up First from NPR News. Students at Florida State University locked themselves in basements and bathrooms to escape an active shooter on campus. We have no idea what's going on, and they said we can go back, but like, how do I know that campus is safe? The alleged gunman is the son of a local sheriff's deputy. And President Trump is pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates, and it's got economists worried.

0:42Just look around the world at places where there isn't independence. The inflation rate is higher, the unemployment and the job market are worse. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day.

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2:27Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen held a face-to-face meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia yesterday. He's the Salvadoran citizen who lived in Maryland for about 15 years before the administration illegally deported him last month. Now he's being held in a notorious mega prison in El Salvador where the administration is sending people deported from the U.S. Now the White House insists he will not be returning to the U.S. despite a federal judge's order to facilitate his return. Joining us with the latest is NPR's Ryland Barton. Good morning, Ryland. Hi, Leila. Okay, so Senator Van Hollen says Salvadoran officials initially refused to let him meet with Abrego Garcia, and then we see a meeting happened.

3:07What changed? Yeah, so we know very little about how exactly the meeting happened. But in an interview yesterday on All Things Considered, Van Hollen said soldiers had initially prevented him from reaching the prison. I was stopped by soldiers about three kilometers out who said they'd been ordered not to allow me to go see him. My mission today was simply to see how his health is, what his condition is. So later in the day, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, tweeted that Van Hollen had met with Abrego Garcia and said that since Abrego Garcia had been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador's custody.

3:46The senator then tweeted out a picture of the two of them sitting at a table and said he had called Abrego Garcia's wife to pass along a message of love. In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the meeting showed Democrats were prioritizing the welfare of what he called an illegal alien MS-13 terrorist. The Trump administration has repeatedly said Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, which is a transnational gang. But Abrego Garcia's lawyers dispute that, pointing to the fact that he doesn't even have a criminal record in the U.S. Now, there was yet another court ruling against the Trump administration's handling of Abrego Garcia yesterday.

4:25What did it say? Yeah, so the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals tore into the administration, saying they are, quote, asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process. Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Reagan, headed up that three-judge panel. He noted that the Justice Department had already admitted it deported Abrego Garcia mistakenly and asked, quote, why then should it not make what was wrong right? Earlier this week, a judge had ruled Abrego Garcia's lawyers should be able to question administration officials, but the Department of Justice argues that that was untenable and said the government had no powers to return Abrego Garcia.

5:05But with this latest ruling, they have lost that argument. So now officials must explain what they're doing, if anything, to bring him back. Or they could appeal again, this time to the Supreme Court. And what did the court say about the administration's refusal to comply with these orders? Yeah, so Judge Wilkinson said this is a slippery slope. In his order, he imagined a future in which there would be no assurances that the executive branch would not deport American citizens or train its powers on political enemies. He said we're in a moment where the executive and judicial branches are close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.

5:43But he also said there is an opportunity here, saying, quote, We yet cling to the hope that it is not naive to believe our good brethren in the executive branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This ruling follows a decision from U.S. District Judge James Boesberg earlier this week where he said he might hold Trump officials in contempt for disregarding his order to stop sending deportees to that same Salvadoran prison. That's NPR's Ryland Barton. Thank you, Ryland. Thank you.

6:19In Florida, police have a 20-year-old man in custody after a shooting at Florida State University that left two dead and six people injured, one critically. The person arrested was a student at the school and the son of a sheriff's deputy. He allegedly used his mother's gun in the shooting. NPR's Greg Allen is following the events in Tallahassee and joins us now. Good morning, Greg. Hi, Layla. Sadly, this kind of violence feels familiar in the U.S. What happened on this campus? Well, it began around noon yesterday on Florida State University's campus in the center of Tallahassee, the Florida state capital.

6:56A campus-wide alert went out that an active shooter was reported near the Student Union building. Police responded quickly and began evacuating students. It set the whole campus into lockdown. Students locked themselves in basements and bathrooms while they heard gunshots being fired outside. Here's FSU freshman Craig Jacobson. So I was like barricaded in a room and then there was police knocking everywhere. And we got brought into another room. I mean, still everything's going crazy and we still don't know what's going on. We have no idea what's going on. And they said we can go back. But like, how do I know the campus is safe?

7:30By 3 p.m. yesterday, law enforcement said the campus had been secured and the threat was over. But it left two people dead, several others wounded. Police say the shooter didn't surrender when they confronted him and he was shot and wounded before being arrested. And the man arrested is the son of the sheriff's deputy? Yeah, that's right. Police identified him as 20-year-old Phoenix Eichner. His mother is an 18-year veteran of the Leon County Sheriff's Department. Leon County Sheriff Walter McNeil spoke at a news conference yesterday. Unfortunately, her son had access to one of her weapons, and that was one of the weapons that was found at the scene.

8:03And we will continue that investigation into how that weapon was used and what other weapons perhaps he may have had access to. Police also recovered a shotgun at the scene, but they don't believe it was used in the shooting. McNeil said Phoenix Eichner was a member of the Sheriff's Department Youth Advisory Board, and he'd gone through extensive training with the Sheriff's Department. This event is tragic in more ways than you people in the audience could ever phantom from a law enforcement perspective. But I will tell you this, we will make sure that we do everything we can to prosecute. We don't have a motive at this point.

8:39Police say that he wouldn't talk to them after his arrest. Now, this campus is very close to Florida's state capitol. What's the reaction been? In Washington, President Trump said he was briefed on the shootings and called them horrible. When asked about stricter gun laws, he said he would always protect the Second Amendment. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis said, we are all Seminoles today, which is, of course, the school mascot. Florida State University President Richard McCullough visited some of the shooting victims at the hospital and said counseling was available for students and faculty.

9:07We're a strong and united community. We're family. And so we'll take care of all of you and we'll get through this together. Now, this isn't the first shooting on the FSU campus, of course. In 2014, a gunman fired into a crowded library there, wounding three people before he was killed by police. And following that shooting, and just about every year since, Republican lawmakers have filed bills to allow concealed weapons on campuses in Florida. This shooting will probably revive that debate. But some of the FSU students who were evacuated during the shooting yesterday were high school students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, where there was that horrific shooting seven years ago.

9:43So I think that will also be something to be considered. That's NPR's Greg Allen. Thank you, Greg. You're welcome.

9:55President Trump is bashing the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates, even as his own tariffs make that more difficult. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Trump suggested without evidence that there's a groundswell of people demanding lower rates from Fed Chair Jerome Powell. He's going to have a lot of political pressure. You know, they are political also. And I think there's a lot of political pressure for him to lower interest rates. So far, most of that pressure is coming from the president himself. Trump said in a social media post that Powell's termination, quote, cannot come fast enough.

10:30NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now. Not the first time President Trump, Scott, has tried to politically pressure the central bank about lowering interest rates. So what's he unhappy about? Trump complains that over in Europe, the central bank has been cutting interest rates. But here in this country, the Fed has been sitting on its hands, keeping rates relatively high. The president is also unhappy about a speech that Powell gave this week in which the Fed chairman warned that Trump's tariffs are likely to push inflation higher, at least temporarily. Trump stopped short of telling Powell, you're fired, but he made it clear he wouldn't be sorry to see the Fed chairman go.

11:02Oh, he'll leave if I ask him to. He'll be out of there. But I don't think he's doing the job. He's too late, always too late, a little slow, and I'm not happy with him. Powell insists he plans to serve out the remainder of his term as Fed chairman, which runs through May of next year. He also says Trump doesn't have the legal authority to fire him over a disagreement about interest rates. Now, Powell has Supreme Court precedent on his side, but the White House seems willing to test that by firing board members from other independent agencies. Now, the president accuses Powell of playing politics.

11:38Is he? No. Powell and his colleagues are doing their best to respond to what's happening in the economy, not buckling to political pressure. In fact, the Fed is designed to be insulated from politics. Economist Austin Goolsbee, who also takes part in these interest rate decisions, is head of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, says that works better than letting politicians call the shots. Economists are virtually unanimous on the importance of central bank independence. Just look around the world at places where there isn't independence. The inflation rate is higher. The growth rate is lower. The unemployment and the job market are worse.

12:15We saw that in this country during the Richard Nixon era when the Fed did bow to White House pressure to lower interest rates. And the result was stubbornly high inflation that lasted the better part of a decade. And how did that change? Ultimately, it took another stubborn Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, to wrestle inflation under control using very high interest rates. Now, that was not popular at the time. Construction workers famously sent Volcker protest messages scrawled on two-by-fours. But it worked. And eventually, Volcker was remembered as a hero. Goolsby told the Economic Club of New York that Volcker's widow later gave him a piece of one of those two-by-fours as a reminder.

12:54I keep that on the shelf in my office, right by my desk, for two reasons. One, this is not just a game. This is not just the markets. What the central bank does, what the Fed does, affects real people. And two, sometimes the Fed has to do the hard job. Now, today, that job of fighting inflation is made even harder by Trump's tariffs, which are pushing up prices and making everything the U.S. imports more expensive. That's a big reason interest rates are staying high for now. You can see the ripple effects of that in the mortgage market, where this week the average rate on a 30-year home loan jumped to 6.8%.

13:32If it's any consolation, though, mortgages in Paul Volcker's day sort of size 16%. Yeah, send someone a 2x4, you know it's serious. It's NPR's Scott Horsley. Scott, thanks. You're welcome.

13:50Before Roe v. Wade, there was a period from 1943 to 1973 when many unmarried women and girls were forced to give birth and put their babies up for adoption in places called maternity homes. Acclaimed horror writer Grady Hendrix made this shadowy history the setting for his new novel. The fact that millions of kids were born in these homes and that these were kids, you know, these were girls, and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old, and we were telling them, give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do. This weekend on the Sunday story from Up First, Hendricks talks about his new book, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.

14:34That's this Sunday right here in the Up First podcast feed.

14:42And that's Up First for Friday, April 18th. I'm Leila Faldin. And Ami Martinez. Just a reminder, Up First airs on Saturday, too. Ayesha Roscoe and Scott Simon have all the news, and look for it wherever you get those podcasts. This episode of Up First was edited by Bill Marks, Susanna Capilouto, Rafael Nam, Mohamedad Bardisi, and Jenea Williams. It was produced by Ziad Bunch, Nia Dumas, and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Damian Herring and our technical director is Zach Coleman. Our executive producer is Jay Shaler. Join us again next time.

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