Governor Ron DeSantis announced the appointment of Barbara Lagoa, 52, the first Cuban American female to the Florida Supreme Court. The governor needs to fill two more vacant seats and is expected to create a solid conservative majority with no black justices. WLRN reporter Danny Rivero was at the announcement held at the Freedom Tower and joined Sundial to give more details on Lagoa and on potential nominees.
President Trump called upon Congress to take action in approving $5.7 billion for border security in an Oval Office address on Tuesday night. The funding is controversial among the Florida congressional delegation. For example, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a senior member of the South Florida delegation, has argued that the president has “a border wall fetish.” Fernand Amandi, managing partner of political communications and strategy firm Bendixen & Amandi, joined Sundial to talk about the role this delegation will play in the federal shutdown.
Florida International University’s (FIU) “State of the World” conference is a series of conversations tackling some of the major questions surrounding U.S. foreign policy. Anne Richard, Centennial Fellow at Georgetown University and former Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration during the Obama Administration, and Luis Guillermo Solis Rivera, former president of Costa Rica and Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Kimberly Green Latin America and Caribbean Center at FIU, joined Sundial to discuss how the world views immigrants fleeing Central America, as well as the controversy surrounding the border wall.