San Jose State women’s volleyball star Brooke Slusser warned the NCAA after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the organization over transgender inclusion in women’s sports.
Paxton filed the lawsuit on Sunday, accusing the organization of deceptive marketing practices for allowing transgender women to compete against biological females. Paxton said in a news release the NCAA violated the Texas Trade Practices Act "which exists to protect consumers from businesses attempting to mislead or trick them into purchasing goods or services that are not as advertised."
Slusser, who was a part of a lawsuit against her own school and the NCAA for allowing a transgender woman on the Spartans’ roster this season, posted about Paxton’s suit.
"Hey NCAA, just in case you haven’t realized yet this fight will just keep getting harder for you until you make a change!" Slusser wrote on X.
Slusser and other plaintiffs had asked a judge to grant an injunction to prohibit Blaire Fleming from competing in the Mountain West Conference women’s volleyball tournament last month, but they were denied.
San Jose State made it to the finals of the tournament but lost to Colorado State.
Paxton accused the NCAA of "engaging in false, deceptive, and misleading practices by marketing sporting events as ‘women’s’ competitions only to then provide consumers with mixed sex competitions where biological males compete against biological females."
"The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and well-being of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions," Paxton said in a statement. "When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women – not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports."
Paxton said he was seeking a court to grant a permanent injunction to prohibit the NCAA from allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports in Texas or "involving Texas teams, or alternatively requiring the NCAA to stop marketing events as ‘women’s’ when in fact they are mixed sex competitions," the news release said.
The NCAA released a statement to Fox News Digital later Sunday.
"College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America, and while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships," the organization said.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Sunday and accused the collegiate organization of deceptive marketing practices for including transgender athletes in women’s sports.
Paxton said in a news release the NCAA violated the Texas Trade Practices Act "which exists to protect consumers from businesses attempting to mislead or trick them into purchasing goods or services that are not as advertised."
He accused the NCAA of "engaging in false, deceptive, and misleading practices by marketing sporting events as ‘women’s’ competitions only to then provide consumers with mixed sex competitions where biological males compete against biological females."
"The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions," Paxton said in a statement. "When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women—not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports."
Paxton said he was seeking a court to grant a permanent injunction to prohibit the NCAA from allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports in Texas or "involving Texas teams, or alternatively requiring the NCAA to stop marketing events as "women’s" when in fact they are mixed sex competitions," the news release said.
The NCAA released a statement to Fox News Digital later Sunday.
"College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America, and while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships," the organization said.
NCAA President Charlie Baker was grilled over transgender participation in sports while he was on Capitol Hill last week. He was also asked about it during an appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show."
When McAfee asked Baker how the parents of daughters should feel about trans athletes in women's sports and the NCAA's record on it, Baker downplayed the impact.
"There are 510,000 college athletes playing in the NCAA, there are less than 10 transgender athletes, so it's a small community to begin with," Baker said.
Fox News’ Jackson Thompson contributed to this report.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a new billboard campaign on Thursday to warn potential illegal immigrants about the "horrific" reality of human trafficking, violence and danger facing them if they attempt to illegally enter the U.S.
Abbott said the state is placing dozens of billboards with warnings in several languages throughout Mexico and Central America.
"We’re here to expose the truth to immigrants who are thinking about coming here, the truth about the traffickers who assault so many of the women and children along the way," the governor said. "The message is: Do not risk a dangerous trip just to be arrested and deported."
Abbott, who recently made another trip to the border with the incoming border czar, Tom Homan, also emphasized that the new Trump administration will "prioritize for deportation illegal immigrants who have been arrested."
Billboards will be written in Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, and will be placed along migrant travel routes.
The governor made his announcement at a ranch on the southern border. He was standing by a burned "rape tree," where property owners have said migrant women were routinely raped. Abbott said the billboards "tell the horror stories of human trafficking" and "inform potential illegal immigrants about the reality of what will happen to them if they try to enter Texas illegally."
One billboard written in Spanish depicts a little girl and simply asks: "How much did you pay to have your daughter raped?"
Another depicts a pregnant woman and says: "Your wife and daughter will pay for their trip with their bodies."
Abbott criticized governments and private groups who "make it sound like it may be harmless going into the state of Texas," and said the state is trying to "provide reality facts for immigrants thinking about coming here to save their lives, to save them from sexual assault, save them from being arrested and let them know there are consequences if they take any further steps to come to the state of Texas."
"This is tough medicine, but we want no more rape trees in Texas," said Abbott. "Do not make the dangerous trek to Texas."
The governor went on to lament the historic surge in illegal immigration under the Biden administration, saying: "It's a deadly situation, a horrific situation, a horror that we fully expect to end beginning in about a month when President Trump takes office and shuts down the border and restores safety and normalcy to the immigration process."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a New York-based abortionist for violating Texas law by shipping abortion drugs into the state.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, however, is pushing back, saying a recently passed "shield law" protects abortion providers from prosecution by other states, setting the stage for what some call an abortion "civil war" scenario.
Paxton released a statement saying the out-of-state doctor "caused serious harm" to the Texas woman and explained he was launching the suit because "in Texas, we treasure the health and lives of mothers and babies, and this is why out-of-state doctors may not illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents."
The lawsuit, filed in the federal District Court for Collin County, posits that New York abortionist Dr. Margaret Carpenter violated Texas law and endangered a 20-year-old Texas woman by illegally shipping drugs into the state without first conducting an in-person examination of the woman to determine the gestational age of her baby.
Chemical abortions, which now account for more than 60% of all U.S. abortions, are known to present a risk of severe complications and infection in some cases. Despite this, the Biden administration further rolled back restrictions on chemical abortion, permanently allowing the drugs to be prescribed via telemedicine, shipped through mail and obtained at retail pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens.
Some states, however, including Texas, continue to restrict chemical abortion from being distributed through the mail or without a doctor’s consultation.
The 20-year-old Texas woman who obtained the abortion pills from Carpenter ended up being admitted to a local hospital because of a hemorrhage or severe bleeding as a result of the drugs, according to the Paxton lawsuit.
"Carpenter provided abortion-inducing drugs to the pregnant Collin County woman, which caused an adverse event or abortion complication and resulted in a medical abortion," the suit claims. "Carpenter’s knowing and continuing violations of Texas law places women and unborn children in Texas at risk."
The suit requests civil penalties and a permanent block on Carpenter from sending more abortion drugs to Texas women.
However, New York state has a so-called "shield" law that explicitly protects abortion providers from prosecution for prescribing abortion pills to patients in states where it is illegal. This is the first legal challenge to be launched by a state pitting one set of abortion laws against that of another.
Hochul responded to the Texas lawsuit by saying, "I will do everything in my power to enforce the laws of New York State."
"No doctor should be punished for providing necessary care to their patients," she said, adding, "As Texas attempts to limit women's rights, I'm committed to maintaining New York's status as a safe harbor for all who seek abortion care, and protecting the reproductive freedom of all New Yorkers."
Experts believe the Texas challenge could eventually be bound for the Supreme Court.
Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for the pro-life group Students for Life Action, told Fox News Digital that she is hopeful the Texas lawsuit makes its way to the Supreme Court so that it could re-examine the question of national safeguards on abortion pills.
Hamrick said that though the Supreme Court ruled against re-implementing abortion pill restrictions in a case called AHM v. FDA earlier this year, the court made it clear it was not shutting the door on restoring the safeguards through another case.
"The Supreme Court did not say that everything with the pills was great, they could be sold as they were [and] there were no problems with the pills," she explained. "What the Supreme Court said is you need to go back and start again, you've come to us with the wrong victims, they didn't have what the court called ‘standing.’"
"So, the three states have already joined in saying we have standing, we are a victim because we are paying higher emergency room bills because of these pills," she went on. "The state has a right to defend its laws. So, the state, on the face of it, has a right to defend itself and its laws and the laws of its citizens and its duly elected representatives. So, yeah, they have standing."
Students for Life Action recently launched its own challenge against abortion pills in the form of what is called a "citizen petition." The petition demands the FDA delay its plans to broaden the use of abortion drugs once again, this time to treat miscarriages, until the agency re-examines how the pills are contaminating the nation’s water supply.
"The Biden-Harris administration during COVID essentially created a de facto right to pollute and that pathological medical waste [from abortion pills] is going into the water supply across America, no one is checking on that," she said. "Abortion and miscarriage are not the same. But if you're going to conflate that and then hand out even more of these drugs without any environmental assessment, without any sense of the health and safety risks, that is reckless and dangerous and that is federal."
A State Department agency – which has been chided by conservatives for its alleged blacklisting of Americans and news outlets – is set to be refunded in the continuing resolution (CR) bill currently being hammered out among lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The Global Engagement Center has been included in page 139 of the CR. Although it doesn’t specify its budget allocation, a previous Inspector General report shows the agency’s FY 2020 budget totaled $74.26 million, of which $60 million was appropriated by Congress.
The provision in the CR can be found under "Foreign Affairs Section 301. Global Engagement Center Extension," and comes despite the State Department saying in response to a lawsuit that it intended to shut down the agency by next week.
The GEC, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, "funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer and insidious—and idiotic—new form of blacklisting" during the pandemic.
Taibbi wrote last year when exposing the Twitter Files that the GEC "flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’"
"State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. website ZeroHedge, claiming it 'led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.'" ZeroHedge had made reports speculating that the virus had a lab origin.
Elon Musk previously described the GEC as being the "worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation."
"They are a threat to our democracy," Musk wrote in a subsequent tweet.
The GEC is part of the State Department but also partners with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security. The GEC also funds the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
Taibbi offered various instances in which the DFRLab and the GEC sent Twitter a list of accounts they believed were engaged in "state-backed coordinated manipulation." However, a quick glance from Twitter employees determined that the list was shoddy and included the accounts of multiple American citizens with seemingly no connection to the foreign entity in question.
DFRLab Director Graham Brookie previously denied the claim that they use tax money to track Americans, saying its GEC grants have "an exclusively international focus."
A 2024 report from the Republican-led House Small Business Committee criticized the GEC for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes tracking domestic as well as foreign misinformation and rating the credibility of U.S.-based publishers, according to the Washington Post.
The State Department, in response to a lawsuit, said it intended to shut down the agency on Dec. 23. But the CR provision means, if passed, it will continue to operate.
The lawsuit was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Daily Wire and the Federalist, who sued the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other government officials earlier this month for "engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform and demonetize American media outlets disfavored by the federal government."
The lawsuit stated that the GEC was used as a tool for the defendants to carry out its censorship.
"Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation," the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a press release. "Instead, the agency weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.
The complaint describes the State Department’s project as "one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.’"
The lawsuit argued that The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and other conservative news organizations were branded "unreliable" or "risky" by the agency, "starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech—all as a direct result of [the State Department’s] unlawful censorship scheme."
Meanwhile, America First Legal, headed up by Stephen Miller, President-elect Trump’s pick for deputy chief of staff for policy, revealed that the GEC used taxpayer dollars to create a video game called "Cat Park" to "Inoculate Youth Against Disinformation" abroad.
The game "inoculates players … by showing how sensational headlines, memes, and manipulated media can be used to advance conspiracy theories and incite real-world violence," according to a memo obtained by America First Legal.
Mike Benz, the executive director at the Foundation For Freedom Online, said the game was "anti-populist" and pushed certain political beliefs instead of protecting Americans from foreign disinformation, per the Tennessee Star.
A State Department spokesperson said the agency does not comment on pending legislation when asked for comment by Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reached out to the GEC for comment on its potential refunding but did not immediately receive a response.
Fox News Nikolas Lanum and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
A federal appeals court ruled against Texas doctors who had tried to sue President Biden's administration over its transgender policies this week.
The three judges making up the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals did not rule on the merits of the case, but instead unanimously found that the doctors did not have standing to sue. The court's Monday decision asserted that the doctors had not violated the policy, nor did they face any threat of enforcement.
The Biden policy bans discrimination against transgender people in health care. Monday's ruling overturns a previous favorable decision for the doctors handed down by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Biden's Health and Human Services Department announced a rule change in 2021, choosing to interpret a section of the Affordable Care Act that banned discrimination on the basis of sex to also apply to transgender people. The three Texas doctors argued that interpretation goes beyond the text of the law.
The doctors further argued that the policy could force them to administer treatments they do not support. They cited examples like prostate cancer in a transgender woman, which would require treatment based on the individual's biological sex.
The ruling comes just weeks after the Supreme Court heard arguments in its own case on transgender policy, one relating to whether the Constitution allows for state bans on transgender surgeries for minors.
Conservative justices on the Supreme Court appeared reluctant in oral arguments to overturn the Tennessee law in question in the case. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that state legislatures, rather than courts, are best equipped to regulate medical procedures. The Constitution leaves such questions "to the people's representatives," Roberts noted during arguments, rather than to nine justices on the Supreme Court, "none of whom is a doctor."
Justice Samuel Alito, however, cited "overwhelming evidence" from certain medical studies listing the negative consequences for adolescents that underwent gender transition treatments. Should the justices rule along party lines to uphold the lower court's decision, it will have sweeping implications for more than 20 U.S. states that have moved to implement similar laws.
Petitioners in the case were represented by the Biden administration and the ACLU, which sued to overturn the Tennessee law on behalf of the parents of three transgender adolescents and a Memphis-based doctor.
At issue during Wednesday's oral arguments was the level of scrutiny that courts should use to evaluate the constitutionality of state bans on transgender medical treatment for minors, such as SB1, and whether these laws are considered discriminating on the basis of sex or against a "quasi-suspect class," thus warranting a higher level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Fox News' Breanne Deppisch and Reuters contributed to this report.
EXCLUSIVE – Ahead of President-elect Trump's inauguration, conservatives in the most populous red state in America are launching a new Texas Republican Leadership Fund (TRLF) to elect "true" conservatives to crucial leadership roles.
Despite being led by a strongly conservative Republican governor and having a commanding majority in the legislature, the last four Texas House speakers have been elected through the support of Democrats. The result has been Democrats exercising an outsized level of power and influence in the largest Republican state in the nation. An inside track with the Texas speaker also gives Democrats significant control over some of the most important issues affecting the nation, such as enforcement of Texas’ more than 1,250 miles of border.
Alex Fairly, the TRLF’s principal donor, told Fox News Digital it is time for that to change.
TRLF, which is officially registering with the Texas Ethics Commission Tuesday and launching with $20 million of initial funding, has the support of many of Texas’ most influential leaders who are intent on making the state the definitive leader in conservative politics.
While he hopes that all Republicans in the Texas House will stand with the caucus to elect a conservative leader, Fairly said the $20 million will be available for use in the primaries and upcoming 2026 general election to hold elected officials "accountable" if they side with a Democratic-backed speaker.
According to Fairly, Texas conservatives are fed up with lukewarm Republicans cutting backroom deals with Democrats in the state legislature. And as Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, he said it will be more important than ever for Texas to support the new administration’s agenda through strong conservative leadership at the state level.
"Texas leads the way on many of the biggest conservative issues," he said. "I don't think there's any question that having a Republican majority in the House… has a massive impact on what happens across the country and supporting President Trump and his agenda."
This comes amid an ongoing battle in the Texas legislature over who will be the next speaker of the House. The most recent speaker, Rep. Dade Phelan, who came to power in 2021, dropped out from consideration after facing intense criticism from Republicans for failing to pass key conservative priorities such as school choice and for his role in the unsuccessful impeachment effort against vocal Trump ally Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Now, the Texas House of Representatives is set to elect a new speaker on Jan. 14. There are two frontrunners: Phelan ally Rep. Dustin Burrows and Rep. David Cook, who is backed by more hardline conservatives.
After going to the Democratic side of the aisle to help him secure the necessary 76 votes to win the speakership, Burrows declared the race over.
However, Burrows’ attempt to bargain with Democrats has caused outrage from many conservatives, even including Donald Trump Jr., who said the move was not in line with voters’ election night "mandate" to Republicans.
"It’s unbelievable what is happening in Texas right now," he said on X. "There is a group of so-called Republicans cutting a deal with liberal Democrats to elect a speaker instead of uniting behind the Republican nominee, @DavidCookTexas! Unbelievable! Republicans have a mandate!"
Fairly, who is an entrepreneur and health care executive who has been a vocal supporter of school choice, says the race for the speakership is not set in stone. This time, he believes there is strong resolve among Texas Republicans to stop moderates from handing over control to the Democrats.
"In spite of the progress made in this past election cycle toward… conservative priorities, there may still be work to do in the next primary cycle," he said. "These funds will be available to help expand a true Republican majority."
"Democrats don't give their votes away for free, they want things in return," he went on. "So, we end up with a House that's not really run by the majority, it's co-run by Democrats and a minority of Republicans. It just puts Texas in just such a weak position to accomplish what we could if we really were led by a majority of Republicans."
"This time we're bringing this out into the light."
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is petitioning a county in the Texas Rio Grande Valley to incorporate its launch site into an official town called "Starbase, Texas," to serve as the company’s headquarters and "gateway to Mars."
Months after announcing he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters out of California, Musk exclaimed in an X post last week that "SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas!"
Located within Cameron County in far-south Texas, Starbase is currently an unincorporated community that serves as the hub for much of SpaceX’s rocket manufacturing, launches and operations, including the historic "rocket catch."
The rocket catch is part of SpaceX’s "Starship" program, which is housed in its Starbase facilities and is seeking to make the first fully reusable rocket designed to propel manned missions to establish a human presence on the moon and Mars.
But to get to Mars, SpaceX says it needs Starbase, Texas, to become official.
"To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley," Starbase general manager Kathryn Lueders said in a letter to Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino.
To be incorporated into a city in Texas, a county judge must order a special election in the community.
According to Lueders, incorporating Starbase will streamline the process to make Starbase a "world-class place to live" and enable the Starship program to "fundamentally alter humanity’s access to space."
Musk announced SpaceX was moving its former headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to Starbase in July. The reason for the move cited by Musk was California’s SAFETY Act, which prohibits schools from requiring teachers to notify parents if their child identifies as transgender.
"This is the final straw," Musk said on X. "Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas."
Now, Lueders said that SpaceX is investing billions in infrastructure in Cameron County and generating hundreds of millions in income and taxes for local businesses and government, "all with the goal of making South Texas the gateway to Mars."
In her letter to Trevino, Lueders called Starbase a one-of-a-kind location for SpaceX’s future.
"Starbase is a one-of-a-kind location for manufacturing, testing, and launching the most advanced rocket and spaceships ever conceived – a fully and rapidly reusable system that paves the way for humanity’s return to the Moon and eventual travel to Mars," she said. "We look forward to continuing its transformation into a world-class hub for the men and women working to make life multiplanetary."
SpaceX has submitted a petition requesting an election on incorporating the company's Starbase launch site as a city, according to a letter sent to local officials on Thursday.
Musk has been floating the idea of turning the launch site into a city for several years, with SpaceX first approaching officials in Cameron County, Texas, about the plan in 2021.
Holding an election to incorporate Starbase is the next step. In the letter to local officials, Starbase general manager Kathryn Lueders wrote that the goal of the site was to make South Texas "a gateway to Mars."
She said thousands of SpaceX employees work at the launch facility, with several hundred living on-site.
Reposting the letter on X, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the "city of Starbase" will also be the site of the company's new headquarters.
The billionaire said the move was in response to a California law prohibiting rules requiring teachers to notify parents if a child changes their name, pronouns, or gender identity at school.
Musk has also frequently clashed with local regulators. SpaceX sued the California Coastal Commission after members criticized his political views and denied a request to increase the number of launches in the state.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment, sent outside normal working hours.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, has filed a lawsuit against a New York doctor who allegedly prescribed abortion drugs to a woman in the Lone Star State, violating Texas law.
Paxton accused Dr. Margaret Carpenter of mailing pills from New York to a 20-year-old woman in Collin County, Texas, where the woman allegedly took the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant, according to the lawsuit.
When she began experiencing severe bleeding, she asked the baby's father, who had been unaware she was pregnant, to take her to the hospital.
The filing does not state if the woman successfully terminated her pregnancy or if she experienced any long-term medical complications from taking mifepristone and misoprostol.
Paxton's lawsuit is the first attempt to test legal protections when it comes to states with conflicting abortion laws since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending federal protection on the matter.
Texas has enacted an abortion ban with few exceptions, while New York protects access to the procedure and has a shield law that protects providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, which has been viewed as implicit permission for doctors to mail abortion pills into states with restrictions.
Texas has promised to pursue cases like this regardless of the shield laws, though it is unclear what the courts may decide on this issue, which involves extraterritoriality, interstate commerce and other legal questions. New York’s law allows Carpenter to refuse to comply with Texas' court orders.
It is also unknown whether New York courts would side with protecting Texas' law, which prohibits prescribing abortion-inducing drugs by mail and prohibits treating Texas patients or prescribing medication through telehealth services without a valid Texas medical license.
Texas’ abortion laws prohibit prosecuting a woman for getting an abortion, but do allow for physicians or others who assist a woman in receiving the procedure to be prosecuted.
The lawsuit says Carpenter, the founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, knowingly treated Texas residents despite not being a licensed Texas physician and not being authorized to practice telemedicine in the state. Paxton urged a Collin County court to prohibit Carpenter from violating Texas law and impose civil penalties of at least $100,000 for each violation.
"In this case, an out-of-state doctor violated the law and caused serious harm to this patient," Paxton said in a statement. "This doctor prescribed abortion-inducing drugs — unauthorized, over telemedicine — causing her patient to end up in the hospital with serious complications. In Texas, we treasure the health and lives of mothers and babies, and this is why out-of-state doctors may not illegally and dangerously prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents."
Carpenter also works with AidAccess, an international abortion medication provider, and helped found Hey Jane, a telehealth abortion provider.
EXCLUSIVE: The House Small Business Committee is releasing its year-end interim report on what it found to be the "weaponizing [of] federal resources" for political purposes within the Small Business Administration.
Earlier this year, Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, committee chair, issued a rare subpoena to Small Business Administration officials over their work in connection with an official Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) forged with the Michigan Department of State.
The MOU was in accordance with President Biden’s 2021 executive order "14019: Promoting Access to Voting." However, the committee alleged the SBA had been involved in partisan voter registration outreach in a key swing state – rather than simply aiding voters across the board.
The committee report, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, found Biden's executive order to be an "improper use of executive authority" and that SBA actions in accordance with it thereby "pose unnecessary risks to the integrity of U.S. elections."
"The SBA’s MOU with the State of Michigan and travel patterns of senior SBA officials indicate the conflation of official duty and partisan political activities," the committee found.
"Either intentionally or negligently, the SBA has failed to refute concerns of this MOU’s partisan nature."
The committee’s report also found the SBA "strayed from its core mission" in working with Michigan under the voter registration MOU, and that it "engaged in a protracted campaign to obscure the makeup of its implementation of E.O. 14019 and obfuscate the truth of alleged political activities at the SBA to the committee."
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., praised the work of the committee and its interim report, saying it rightly exposed "not only the improper use of executive authority but also significant concerns about actions taken by an agency that may jeopardize the integrity of U.S. elections."
"The stark contrast between the SBA’s core mission and its involvement in voter registration activities highlights the urgent need for greater transparency and accountability," Johnson said.
Johnson added he and the GOP caucus are looking forward to working with President-elect Trump to end such "abuses."
The 47-page report further alleged the SBA exceeded the requirements of state and federal laws, including the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Anti-Deficiency Act, and the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from politicking in their official capacity.
In May, Williams and his committee, along with Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, demanded travel schedules, official calendars and other documents from the SBA. In addition, at least one Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit was separately launched by the right-leaning Oversight Project for some of the same documents as Congress was being purportedly "stonewalled."
Williams initially accused the SBA and Administrator Isabel Casillas-Guzman of shirking her responsibility to help "Main Street" and instead focusing on registering voters in heavily Democratic parts of Michigan like Detroit and Saginaw – while ignoring committee oversight demands.
Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chair of the House Administration Committee – whose panel has oversight over legislative matters relating to elections – said that while elections are partisan affairs, election administration should not be.
"The Biden-Harris administration partnering with the Michigan Department of State to use your taxpayer dollars for a partisan purpose should never be allowed," he said.
Digging into the executive order that the SBA’s actions aimed to align with, Williams’ report found it changed the way the executive branch enforces the National Voter Registration Act, and uniquely requires agency officials to work with the White House to find ways to support federal employees who wish to volunteer as election workers or watchers.
The report added that the choice of Michigan as the petri dish for the SBA’s work under the executive order caught the committee’s attention early, due to its routine status as a swing state and the fact its top officials were "sympath[etic]" to the Biden-Harris campaign.
"This interim report illustrates how the MOU blurs the line between personal political beliefs and the official duties of SBA and Michigan state employees," the document reads.
The report also included copies of email chains between the White House, SBA and/or outside advocacy organizations.
"The committee discovered that many senior SBA employees have relationships with these left-leaning organizations," it read.
"Notably, the Biden-Harris Administration ‘warmly welcomed’ these relationships between nonpartisan agencies and left-leaning organizations."
In summing up and reacting to the report, Williams said the SBA was created to "aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns."
In previous remarks to Fox News Digital, the top Democrat on Williams' committee expressed dismay at the subpoenas and investigatory practices by Williams in probing the MOU.
In a statement, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., said the committee had long prided itself on "bipartisan cooperation to help American entrepreneurs."
"Unfortunately, with [these] subpoenas, Republicans have rejected these principles to pursue a partisan inquiry," Velazquez said.
Representatives for the SBA have repeatedly denied the allegations made by Congress’ investigation.
In October, a spokesperson for Guzman said the explicit allegations of "stonewalling" the committee’s work were "demonstrably false."
A spokesperson for the SBA told Fox News Digital on Tuesday that any allegations of "stonewalling" are "demonstrably false."
"For nearly two years, the SBA has cooperated with the committee’s inquiry, testifying at multiple hearings, providing the committee staff with briefings, making agency officials available for transcribed interviews, and producing thousands of pages of documents responsive to their inquiry," the spokesperson said, calling the allegations "baseless."
America's 14-year drought of women's figure skating Grand Prix champions ended Saturday when Amber Glenn overcame elite Japanese opponents to take first place.
Glenn won the first women's singles final gold medal for the U.S. since 2010.
She held off Japan's Mone Chiba, Hana Yoshida, Kaori Sakamoto, Rino Matsuike and Wakaba Higuchi, who finished second through sixth in that order. Glenn's victory came by a margin of just 0.69 points over Chiba.
At 25, the Texan is the oldest Grand Prix Final winner since Russia’s Irina Slutskaya won her fourth and final title in December 2004 at 26. It sets Glenn up as a top contender at the world championships in Boston March 23-30, less than a year out from the 2026 Olympics.
There was a time in Glenn's career when it appeared she would achieve a feat like this much sooner. In 2014, she won the U.S. junior championships. But she stepped away from skating in 2015 over issues with depression.
She returned later that year but had one of the worst performances of her career with a sixth-place finish at the 2015 Autumn Classic International. She has since called the experience "a disaster," according to The Washington Post.
She took another leave from the sport after that and has since revealed that, during that time, she was told by doctors to leave the sport "indefinitely." But she returned to training in early 2016. Glenn never quite lived up to her 2014 junior championship form in senior level competitions after that.
In December 2019, Glenn announced she was pansexual, meaning she's romantically attracted to people regardless of gender.
"The fear of not being accepted is a huge struggle for me," she told Dallas Voice. "Being perceived as ‘just a phase’ or ‘indecisive’ is a common thing for bisexual/pansexual women. I don’t want to shove my sexuality in people’s faces, but I also don’t want to hide who I am."
Glenn cited the North Texas-based ice skating team of Ashley Cain-Gribble and her queer partner Timothy LeDuc as "role models" in her accepting her sexuality, according to Dallas Voice.
In an interview with Team USA in 2021, Glenn said her experience growing up as a figure skater introduced her to gay stereotypes. She later said she developed "crushes" on female skaters.
"Growing up in figure skating, the stereotype was always that the men were gay," Glenn said. "At 16, when my friends and training mates were starting to look at the opposite sex, I was crushing on both males and females."
Glenn has only been known to have a romantic relationship with men's figure skater Nathan Chen. The two dated in 2016, expressing their affection through Instagram posts.
"My love for you formed gradually. Your personality, your voice, your hair, your eyes, your humor, everything. You’re the one person I need to talk to when I’m having a bad day, the one person I can rely on to not judge me. You’re my rock, my best friend, and the most amazing boyfriend I could ask for," she wrote to Chen in an Instagram post.
Their relationship is believed to have ended in 2017, and she came out as pansexual two years after that. Glenn said that she was afraid being openly pansexual "would affect her scores" in an interview with NBC Sports in January.
"When I came out initially, I was terrified. I was scared it would affect my scores or something," she told the ouglet.
It didn't affect her scores enough to keep her from winning a historic medal Saturday.
Glenn is now in position to make her first Winter Olympics team.
America's 14-year drought of women's figure skating Grand Prix champions ended Saturday when Amber Glenn overcame elite Japanese opponents to take first place.
Glenn won the first women's singles final gold medal for the U.S. since 2010.
She held off Japan's Mone Chiba, Hana Yoshida, Kaori Sakamoto, Rino Matsuike and Wakaba Higuchi, who finished second through sixth in that order. Glenn's victory came by a margin of just 0.69 points over Chiba.
At 25, the Texan is the oldest Grand Prix Final winner since Russia’s Irina Slutskaya won her fourth and final title in December 2004 at 26. It sets Glenn up as a top contender at the world championships in Boston March 23-30, less than a year out from the 2026 Olympics.
There was a time in Glenn's career when it appeared she would achieve a feat like this much sooner. In 2014, she won the U.S. junior championships. But she stepped away from skating in 2015 over issues with depression.
She returned later that year but had one of the worst performances of her career with a sixth-place finish at the 2015 Autumn Classic International. She has since called the experience "a disaster," according to The Washington Post.
She took another leave from the sport after that and has since revealed that, during that time, she was told by doctors to leave the sport "indefinitely." But she returned to training in early 2016. Glenn never quite lived up to her 2014 junior championship form in senior level competitions after that.
In December 2019, Glenn announced she was pansexual, meaning she's romantically attracted to people regardless of gender.
"The fear of not being accepted is a huge struggle for me," she told Dallas Voice. "Being perceived as ‘just a phase’ or ‘indecisive’ is a common thing for bisexual/pansexual women. I don’t want to shove my sexuality in people’s faces, but I also don’t want to hide who I am."
Glenn cited the North Texas-based ice skating team of Ashley Cain-Gribble and her queer partner Timothy LeDuc as "role models" in her accepting her sexuality, according to Dallas Voice.
In an interview with Team USA in 2021, Glenn said her experience growing up as a figure skater introduced her to gay stereotypes. She later said she developed "crushes" on female skaters.
"Growing up in figure skating, the stereotype was always that the men were gay," Glenn said. "At 16, when my friends and training mates were starting to look at the opposite sex, I was crushing on both males and females."
Glenn has only been known to have a romantic relationship with men's figure skater Nathan Chen. The two dated in 2016, expressing their affection through Instagram posts.
"My love for you formed gradually. Your personality, your voice, your hair, your eyes, your humor, everything. You’re the one person I need to talk to when I’m having a bad day, the one person I can rely on to not judge me. You’re my rock, my best friend, and the most amazing boyfriend I could ask for," she wrote to Chen in an Instagram post.
Their relationship is believed to have ended in 2017, and she came out as pansexual two years after that. Glenn said that she was afraid being openly pansexual "would affect her scores" in an interview with NBC Sports in January.
It didn't affect her scores enough to keep her from winning a historic medal Saturday.
Glenn is now in position to make her first Winter Olympics team.
The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.
The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.
Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container's worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.
Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father's backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company's pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.
But the Seiders brothers didn't create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company's legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.
One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn't receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. "It wasn't like him," Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan's new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.
Roy put down the phone and felt sick to his stomach. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but the future of his new company was now in jeopardy. "We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he recalls.
As the brothers grappled with the fallout from the tragedy, things grew even more dire. Ivan had died without a will, and it wasn't clear who was in charge at the factory, putting the entire production line in jeopardy. Six months after Yeti's launch, it looked as though the cooler would vanish from store shelves just as suddenly as it had arrived.
Today, Yeti is worth $3.5 billion.This is the untold chapter of one of the great success stories in American business, and how it was very nearly stopped in its tracks.
Cold things don't stay cold for long in the Texas Hill Country. Summer here begins in April, when porch thermometers hit the 90s. For the next six months, you could fry a tortilla on your dashboard and dip it in the hot queso in your cup holder. If you're out working in that heat, all you can think about is your next ice-cold drink.
At the Seiders' home in Driftwood, 20 miles southwest of Austin, Roger — the family's 79-year-oldpatriarch— keeps a refrigerator out back stocked with cold drinks for the UPS drivers when they stop by with a delivery. "They can have anything they want, except for beer," Roger tells me one afternoon as we rock in a swinging chair, watching a parched driver make his way to the fridge. That's Texas hospitality for you. It's something Roger always tried to instill in his four kids, including Ryan and Roy.
The brothers were Texans before the state of Texas existed. Eight generations later, their name still means something to old-timers. "When they decide to build something, it's top shelf, the best you can get," says Jay McBride, who runs the fishing department at McBride's Guns, an Austin institution since 1960.
Ryan and Roy Seiders were brought up with the idea that you could build what you couldn't buy. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own, like my dad," Roy recalls.
Anuj Shrestha for BI
Back in 1977, when Roger was working as a high school shop instructor, his search for a flexible epoxy finish that wouldn't crack on his fishing rods led him to start his own business. Today, Flex Coat sells up to $1 million of product each year. "I never dreamed it would be so big," he says.
Just like their old man, Ryan and Roy loved to brainstorm ways to improve the products they depended upon. After Ryan graduated from Texas A&M in 1996 with a degree in wildlife management, he started a specialty fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in Roger's backyard shop. The 10-foot Launcher could fling a line over 100 yards, while the Scrape Rod was tough enough for fishing in thick grass. Fishing celebrities like Flip Pallot, host of "The Walker's Cay Chronicles" on ESPN, would phone Ryan up for gear advice and invite him out turkey hunting.
After Roy completed his degree in management information systems at Texas Tech, he, too, returned to the Austin area determined to follow in his father's footsteps. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own like my dad," he tells me. "I knew I wanted to start my own business." He loved being out on his boat, and he became preoccupied with designing a cooler that could double as a casting platform — one durable enough to withstand his adrenaline-charged style of fishing.
The best coolers on the market came from Australia, where packing up the Land Rover and "going bush" was a national pastime. While American coolers were typically manufactured by injecting melted plastic into a static mold, high-end Australian coolers — "eskies" in Aussi slang — deployed a technique called rotational molding, which produced stronger coolers with more complex designs and fewer material flaws.
The closest approximation to an eskie you could find in American stores was the Icey-Tek. Roy tracked down the man who was importing them from Thailand and suggested they team up. But he wound up being more impressed with the cooler than with his new business partner. So he decided to partner with Ryan and strike his own import deal with the producers of Icey-Tek. Ryan invested $130,000, and the brothers shared an email address and a single desk. To brand their cooler, they looked for a name that would evoke a harsh terrain — and that would look good on a hat or a T-shirt.
Yeti, they would call it — as in the Himalayan ice monster. "We may not have found the Yeti," they wrote on their website, "but we make a really great ice-chest."
And it was a great ice chest. But it was a far cry from perfect. The original Yeti, which the brothers called the Roughneck, was boxy and utilitarian. The sharp corners were no fun to bang a knee on. Some of the coolers had a puzzling red stain on the bottom.
That's when Ivan Brown entered the picture.
In 2006, the Seiders brothers traveled to Thailand to see the production of their coolers up close. The disappointing results suddenly made sense. Production was sloppy and haphazard. Workers at the factory were plopping fresh coolers onto the red dirt floor, which explained the stains.
As the brothers tried to figure out how to fix the problem, the name they kept coming back to was Ivan, an Aussie designer whose work was a cut above everyone else they knew. From his factory in the Philippines, he could manufacture a cooler or a kayak or a truck camper shell at a fraction of what it would cost in America. So Roy and Ryan set up a meeting and hopped on a flight from Bangkok to Manilla. Within hours they were in a car with Ivan, driving south toward his factory in Angeles City.
Ivan "was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," his brother Malcolm recalls. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two."
After the factory tour in Thailand, Ivan's production line was a welcome sight. Cement floors meant no more red stains. Like the Roughneck, Ivan's Downunder coolers were constructed from a single piece of plastic, for strength. But they also had rounded-off corners and other thoughtful features, such as rubber feet to prevent them from sliding on a boat deck and a removable basket to keep food from getting wet.
What's more, Roy and Ryan recognized a kindred spirit. Ivan was the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors, and he wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids. And, like Yeti, his was a family business.
Ivan had been in his 50s when he decamped for the Philippines, seeking a new start. Back in Australia, he had launched a business manufacturing auto accessories, including fiberglass tops for trucks. "He was a risk-taker," recalls his first wife, Suzanne Handley. His self-confidence only grew when he obtained a patent for a flip-up sunroof he had created, which would go on to receive a prestigious Australian design award.
The problem was, Ivan had a habit of living beyond his means. He had a thing for flashy watches and nice restaurants. "The more you earn, the more you need," he liked to tell his eldest daughter, Clare. He ran up so many debts that tax collectors and creditors spent years pursuing him in Queensland courts. "He was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," says Malcolm, Ivan's younger brother.
Like Roy and Ryan, Ivan and Malcolm were tight. Malcolm, who made a small fortune in trucking, supported Ivan through the lean times. The two brothers bought homes facing each other at a marina on the outskirts of Brisbane. "I could look into his kitchen," Malcolm says.
Amid his financial troubles, Ivan's marriage to Suzanne disintegrated, and the separation left a wedge between him and his daughters. The Philippines, which had a thriving Australian expat community and generous tax benefits for foreign entrepreneurs, offered a chance to start over.
But it was also a dangerous place to do business. The murder rate was four times greater than in Australia, and it was said that a killer could be hired for as little as $500. Filipino police and prosecutors tended to favor the well-connected, and many expats opted to live in gated communities under 24-hour security.
Ivan convinced Malcolm to join him. Divorced and bored with life in Queensland, Malcolm jumped at the chance for an adventure — and, perhaps, to make another fortune. In 1999, the brothers signed the papers establishing Outback Five Star. The company's articles of incorporation listed Ivan as president and Malcolm as vice president. Each received an equal share in the venture, splitting 99.2% of the stock.
Malcolm signed the lease on Outback's factory, a long metal building with a peaked roof. It was located at the Clark Freeport, a former US military base in Angeles City that had been transformed into a tax-free zone.
Angeles City, the vice capital of the Philippines, was a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.
But the company struggled to survive. From 2004 to 2006, according to financial records, it lost nearly $150,000. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two," Malcolm recalls. "It got so tight that we were making cello cases to survive." Since Ivan was essentially bankrupt, Malcolm had to tap his personal funds to cover payroll and buy equipment.
By the time the two brothers from Texas showed up on Outback's factory floor, the two brothers from Australia were barely scraping by.
On that initial visit, the straight-laced Seiders brothers weren't exactly taken with Angeles City. As much as Roy enjoyed Ivan's company, he was grateful Ryan was with him. "I was not about to go to the Philippines by myself," he recalls. Angeles City was the Wild East, the vice capital of the Philippines, a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.
Ivan's production line in the Philippines was a welcome sight for the Seiders brothers — a far better option than the factory they'd been working with in Thailand.
Anuj Shrestha for BI
Malcolm could see how uncomfortable Roy and Ryan were one humid evening when Ivan took them out to the Tom Cat, a seedy nightclub Malcolm owned on a neon-lit street known as "Blow Row." Like many expat hangouts, the Tom Cat swarmed with bikini-clad girls and white-haired men. Foreigners looking for sex would pay $20 to escort girls to a more intimate setting, where further transactions might ensue.
Malcolm isn't shy about admitting that profits from the sex trade helped keep Outback afloat. He insists that the girls at his bars were of age and there of their own free will, but stories of sex trafficking are common in the Philippines. "Everybody portrays it as a sleazy business," Malcolm says. "But I looked at it as the matchmaking business."
According to Malcolm and other family members, it was under such circumstances that Ivan met his future wife, Gloria. In October 1998, Malcolm was celebrating his 48th birthday at the Firehouse, a bar in Manila's red-light district. Gloria, then a single mother, was there that night.Ivan bought Gloria a drink and, by Malcolm's telling, took her to Swagman's, an Australian-themed hotel nearby, where they spent the night.
To those who witnessed their courtship, there was no doubt that Ivan was enamored of Gloria. "She was the only girl I ever saw him with," says Bryan Hammer, an American businessman who assisted Ivan and Malcolm in establishing Outback. But Hammer wondered if the feeling was mutual."She was mean to him, even in public."
As Ivan and Gloria's relationship developed, she became increasingly entwined in his business. Under Philippine law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino. By the time Roy and Ryan Seiders showed up, Gloria had taken on that role at Outback, giving her the power to review and sign off on the company's financial records. Her influence expanded further when Ivan decided to buy a home. Since foreigners couldn't buy property, it would need to be in Gloria's name. So Ivan asked Malcolm to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria, effectively padding her assets so she could qualify for a mortgage.
The details of what happened next are murky. Over the next six months, a confusing game of musical chairs ensued. In addition to Gloria's recently acquired shares, three members of her family — her daughter, her future son-in-law, and her half-sister — were awarded positions as dummy shareholders in the company. In the process, Gloria went from owning less than 1% of Outback's stock to controlling a majority of the company.
In 2008, in the midst of all the stock reshuffling, Ivan and Gloria surprised their friends when an ordinary party was revealed to be their nuptials. After nine years together, they were at last husband and wife.
But a few weeks after the wedding, Outback's fortunes took another turn. Ivan evidently hadn't known about the stock transfers until his accountant brought them to his attention — and he wasn't happy about it. On May 2, 2008, he wrote the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission: "This is to inform you that GLORIA F. BROWN has resigned as Corporate Secretary." Malcolm reclaimed his shares in the company and his title as vice president. The remaining dummy shares were transferred to three members of Malcolm's extended family. Gloria was left with nothing in her own name, apart from her joint assets through marriage.
In late 2007, a few months before Ivan and Gloria's wedding, the Seiders brothers had returned to Angeles City, where they spent 10 days at Outback's headquarters. As monsoon rains pounded on the factory roof, Ivan and Roy hustled back and forth between the office and the production floor where the workers would fabricate prototypes out of Bondo putty and fiberglass. "These guys are artists," Roy says. "It was a ton of fun."
Ivan showed them how he had improved the design of his Downunder cooler. He had bulked up the foam insulation, given it a leak-proof drain plug, integrated the hinge to make it more robust, and added a freezer-style gasket for a better seal. Roy and Ryan incorporated those same ideas into the Tundra. They also borrowed the contours from Ivan's line of fiberglass coolers and extended the hinge to stretch the full length of the back of the cooler. "For whatever reason, I just liked that look," Roy says.
Some of the old Icey-Tek features, including the rope handles and tie-down slots on the base of the cooler, also made it into the new design. "That was a big deal," Roy says. "Being able to strap your cooler down and still open and close the lid." All the tinkering reminded him of the projects he had worked on in his father's workshop, but on a much larger scale. "After four years being in the cooler business, I had all these ideas built up in my head about what makes a perfect cooler," Roy recalls. "I saw this opportunity to build a cooler from the ground up."
The collaboration also worked out well for Ivan. By the time the Tundras started popping out of their molds in April 2008, he was on the path to financial success. Outback, which employed some 150 workers, soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets. "He was turning a corner and starting to make money," Malcolm says.
On the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Ivan left work and climbed into his forest green Toyota Land Cruiser. The sky was hazy and rain droplets flecked against the windshield as Ivan crossed the two-lane Friendship Bridge and neared his turn-off to his home. Suddenly, a Honda motorbike zipped up along his left side, as if to pass. There were two men on the bike, their faces hidden by helmets.
The rider in back raised a 45-caliber handgun and fired at least four shots through the window of Ivan's Land Cruiser. The car veered off the road and rear-ended another motorcycle, sending its driver tumbling onto the ground, before slamming into the wall of the Serra Monte Lodge, an establishment that rents rooms by the hour. Ivan slumped in his seat. Blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the fabric of his plaid shirt.
Malcolm, who lived in the same gated community as Ivan and Gloria, was at home when a friend called to say that a green Land Cruiser had been in an accident on the main road. Malcolm rushed over to his brother's house, but no one answered the door. He was getting ready to drive to the scene of the accident when Gloria appeared. Ivan had already been taken to the mortuary, she told him. Together, they drove off to see Ivan's body.
The next morning, Malcolm got to the factory at around seven. As vice president, he felt he had to assume the reins at Outback. He told the employees to go home until Ivan's affairs were sorted, and left.
In the days after Ivan's murder, his widow, Gloria, declared that she was now in charge of Outback. When Malcolm visited the factory, he was ordered to leave by armed guards.
Anuj Shrestha for BI
But within the hour, Gloria arrived and announced that she was in charge. She countermanded Malcolm's decision: The factory, she said, would stay open. "I asked Gloria what gave her the right to say this," Malcolm said in a statement prepared for legal filings. Gloria responded that she was now the president and major shareholder.
That afternoon, after meeting with his lawyer, Malcolm returned to the factory with his son and placed a padlock on the factory's gate. But the next time they came back, the lock had been cut. An armed guard pointed a gun at Malcolm and his son and ordered them to leave.
As Gloria and Malcolm battled for control of the company, production ground to a halt. Outback's accounts were frozen, and employees could not be paid.
Gloria appealed to the bank to grant her full access to the company's funds. "My husband, Ivan Brown, had long speculated on his fate (he was brutally murdered by still unknown assailants)," she wrote. "He indeed made sure that the corporation's papers are in order and that I can easily take charge of its operations. Unfortunately, greed and opportunity prevailed over the mind of Mr. Malcolm Brown and his cohorts." (Gloria and Outback did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Eight thousand miles away in Texas, the Seiders brothers had begun a frantic search for alternative suppliers, hopping on planes and visiting other factories. Their business had just gotten off the ground, and suddenly its entire future was at risk. But given their relationship with Ivan, they were still hoping they could stick with Outback.
"If the factory cannot supply soon, Yeti will lose US market share and it will be almost impossible to recover," they emailed Malcolm. "If this fight continues it will inevitably get tied up in Philippine courts for many more weeks if not months and therefore everybody loses. Could you help us by temporarily allowing the factory to resume production while resolving ownership?"
Malcolm was incensed. "Ivan was murdered for greed," he replied. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do… You guys are more than welcome to find alternative suppliers for your market if you wish to do so."
"We too have a strong feeling for finding justice for Ivan," the brothers wrote back. "But also, continuing the successful manufacturing business that he has started."
"As tragic as Ivan's death was," Roy Seiders said, "all of a sudden we are a much stronger company."
From the start, police considered Ivan's killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But without a murder weapon or any forensic evidence, they had little to go on. The most promising lead came after Malcolm offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
A cigarette vendor came forward, claiming to have seen the trigger man before he put his helmet on. According to police, when the vendor was shown a book of criminals known as the "Rogue's Gallery," he picked out a Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas, suspected to be a member of a "gun-for-hire" gang. That October, the Northern Philippine Times reported that police had filed murder charges against Salas — and Gloria.
"We have circumstantial evidence against somebody whom we suspect to be the mastermind," announced Pierre Bucsit, the local police chief. "The capture of the suspected gunman will complete our investigation toward arresting the author of the crime."
But the case quickly fell apart. When a police investigator named Romeo Amarillo had first showed up at the factory, he found Gloria to be defensive and uncooperative. But any link to her was purely circumstantial. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charges against Gloria due to insufficient evidence. Until the police found Salas, whose connection to the crime was limited to the single eyewitness, they had nothing else to go on. That hope vanished in October 2014, when Salas was killed in a police shootout.
Whoever murdered Ivan, it's clear who benefited the most from his death. Ivan didn't have a will, which under Philippine law meant his estate would likely be shared by Gloria and his two daughters from his first marriage. In a court filing, Gloria wrote that Ivan's shares were being "settled among his heirs." But Ivan's daughter Clare told me that neither she nor her sister received anything from their father's estate. "I got nothing," she says.
Gloria also moved quickly to take control of Ivan's company. A week after he was killed, she submitted a document to the securities commission claiming that an unscheduled meeting of Outback's officers and shareholders had taken place in mid-August, a little over a month before Ivan's murder. Malcolm, who was still listed as a board member, was not notified of the meeting. According to the document, Ivan had given himself control of 80.8% of Outback's stock, and Gloria now owned 18%. That left Malcolm with just 2,000 shares — a fraction of a percent of the company. The new board, composed largely of Gloria's relatives, unanimously named her as president, and her daughter as vice president.
Malcolm filed a complaint against Gloria with the prosecutor's office, claiming she had forged the document. Nathaniel Colobong, Ivan's longtime accountant, is listed in the papers as the company's external auditor. But he tells me that he was unaware of Ivan making any of the stock transfers Gloria claims he made. In fact, he told investigators that Gloria had "started to get angry with her husband" after she had been stripped of her shares earlier that year. But Colobong was unwilling to testify. "I was also afraid for my life," he says.
Regulators accepted Gloria's version of events, and the lead prosecutor in the forgery case ultimately declined to bring the charges against her. The relevant documents, he tells me, were destroyed during a typhoon. According to Outback's subsequent filings, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.
For the first year after Ivan's death, Malcolm remained in the Philippines, protected around the clock by armed guards. Eventually he gave up the fight and returned to Australia. His biggest mistake, he tells me, was putting his faith in the Philippine justice system. "You and I come from countries where you get justice," he says. "If I had to do it over again, I would have had her shot. I'd do the same thing to her that she did to my brother."
After Ivan's murder, some of Outback's clients sided with Malcolm and refused to do business with the company. "We decided not to place any further orders due to the rumors and uncertainty of dealing with Gloria," recalls Terry Tate, a former buyer for Ray's Outdoors, who had visited both Ivan and Gloria in the Philippines.
But the Seiders brothers continued to contract with Outback. Whatever they felt about Ivan's murder, they were focused on doing what it took to keep their company alive. To get the Outback's employees back to work, the brothers even prepaid Gloria for their orders. Soon, brand new Yeti Tundras were once again being unloaded in Texas. "Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy tells me.
Years after Ivan's murder, Yeti continues to contract with Outback — and Gloria travels to Texas to periodically to meet with Yeti's management.
Anuj Shrestha for BI
Other business decisions they made may have been born of crisis, but proved equally shrewd. To make the most of their dwindling inventory, Roy and Ryan bumped up the price on their coolers. Remarkably, none of their buyers balked. Roy came up with a pricing strategy he called "10x" — as in, charging 10 times what their competitors were asking. Like Balenciaga sneakers and Sub-Zero fridges, the eye-popping prices of Yeti's products wound up making them more — not less — desirable.
The brothers also found a US-based supplier to ensure that theirsupply chain could never be held hostage again. "As tragic as Ivan's death was, all of a sudden we are a much stronger company," Roy explained on a hunting podcast.
The success of the Tundra, along with Yeti's viral marketing, helped turn the company into a kind of redneck Patagonia. Yeti Coolers went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan earned hundreds of millions of dollars after selling most of their shares.
Yeti's success has been good for Outback. The year that Ivan was murdered, according to the company's financial statement, it had $1.9 million in sales. Ten years later, thanks in large part to Yeti, its sales were $9 million.
At Yeti's headquarters, a conference room is named for Ivan Brown, to honor his contribution to the company. Every few years, Gloria or her representatives from Outback travel to Texas to meet with Yeti's management. But, in the past, when Gloria has invited the Seiderses to return to the Philippines for a visit, they've politely declined. "They make their employees go," their father Roger tells me. "But they don't go."
Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.
In the past couple of years the Texas National Guard and state authorities have placed over 100 miles of razor wire at some of the most critical migrant crossing points along the southern border. The state, which makes up over 60 percent of the U.S. border with Mexico, has spent well over $10 million erecting and maintaining these border barriers as part of its larger multi-billion-dollar border enforcement campaign "Operation Lonestar."
This week, a federal appeals court ruled against the Biden administration’s attempt to block Texas from continuing to place walls of razor wire – also called concertina or "c-wire" – along the border. This comes after U.S. Border Patrol agents under the Biden administration cut down Texas’ wire on a 26-mile stretch of the border in September 2023.
Earlier this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that "Biden should be thanking Texas, not obstructing our efforts to secure the border."
"Joe Biden completely abandoned his constitutional duty to secure the border. Texas stepped up in his absence to build the wall, repel illegal crossings, and protect our country," said Abbott.
But does razor wire really keep migrants from entering the country illegally, and is it worth the cost?
Andrew Arthur, a law and policy expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, says the answer is an emphatic "Yes."
He pointed to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that shows illegal migrant encounters in Texas’ five border sectors dropped by nearly two-thirds in January after the state finished placing wire.
Arthur told Fox News Digital that Texas began placing wire fortifications in May 2023 after the COVID-era measure Title 42 expired. Then, after the migrant surge in December, Texas deployed additional guard personnel, state troopers and resources to the border.
"Based on the numbers that we're looking at here, it is most definitely effective," he said.
"What the wire did from my reading of this is it shifted that flow west," he explained. "And that's important, because that's a much longer route. You're adding hundreds of miles to that smuggling journey."
While effective, razor wire is not without drawbacks. More than a traditional border wall, wire needs to be constantly monitored. It also requires regular upkeep and additional wire being laid down after old wire is damaged or destroyed.
"It's a temporary solution, because you're going to have to replace the concertina wire that they have and, at some point, they're not going to be able to keep sending wave after wave of troopers, because a lot of those guys are hundreds of miles from their homes, because Texas is a big state," he explained. "When I was embedded with a trooper down there, he was from Abilene, which is nowhere near the border, and he had been there for six weeks."
There are also humanitarian considerations.
Arthur said that by being an effective deterrent, razor wire protects migrants from attempting the dangerous crossing over the Rio Grande.
Meanwhile, Dylan Corbett, who runs an El Paso-based migrant aid and advocacy group called the Hope Border Institute, said that the presence of c-wire along the border has increased migrant injuries and deaths.
Corbett told Fox News Digital that doctors working with the Hope Border Institute have had to treat the wounds of families injured by the wire, as well as "wounds caused by projectiles fired by the National Guard."
"In El Paso, nearly our entire border has been fortified by layers of concertina wire, including part of our border with New Mexico," he explained. "While the numbers of border deaths along the whole border appear to have gone down over the past year, in El Paso they have increased. That increase has been sharp over the past couple years and coincides with the presence of the Guard and the concertina wire, because it is forcing border crossers just to the west of the city, where they die in the desert or crossing the river."
He called for the federal government to finally step in and "assert its supremacy over managing migration at the border and fix our overall system."
"More people are dying here than ever before," he said. "The longer we wait, states will continue to engage in uncoordinated and irresponsible enforcement actions on their own, unnecessarily putting lives at risk and needlessly diverting millions of dollars in taxpayer resources."
Several liberal figures called on conservatives and President-elect Donald Trump supporters to give thanks to illegal immigrants on Thanksgiving, suggesting they acknowledge a large portion of migrants were the ones who harvested and packed their entrées enjoyed on Thursday.
"Everyone at the dinner table today, especially MAGA, please give thanks to the undocumented immigrants that picked and packed the food you’re enjoying," said former Obama Housing & Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.
"They deserve our grace. Happy Thanksgiving," the former San Antonio mayor added.
Castro’s post was lambasted by respondents, who rhetorically asked which crops were being picked by the migrants flooding New York City and Chicago, while others suggested the characterizations were "racist" assumptions about farmworkers.
Others replied by saying this Thanksgiving they are "thankful for Tom Homan" – Trump’s incoming border czar.
Meanwhile, on MSNBC, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., was asked about migrant farmworkers who may not have legal status in the U.S.
Host Jonathan Capehart reported Thanksgiving costs were down 5% over 2023 and that nearly half of farmworkers are noncitizens.
"There's no indication that Donald Trump would exempt agricultural workers from his calls for mass deportation when he takes office," Capehart told Garcia.
"Donald Trump ran a whole campaign centered around denigrating and sometimes outright lying about immigrants… Immigrant labor is a key part of the American economy, and that includes immigrants who pick so much of the food that all of us will eat tomorrow and on Thanksgiving."
Garcia said he "completely agrees" with the pundit, adding that team Trump’s rhetoric has been "frankly un-American and shameful and would harm the economy."
Garcia added that many food service workers also lack legal status and that it would be wrong to ignore their contributions this Thanksgiving.
"So the idea that we're going to have mass-deport all of these workers that we depend on that our families depend on is absolutely crazy. It's inhumane, it is un-American," he said, adding mass deportations of those workers would badly hurt the economy.
"I think it's really quite shameful what's actually happening right now. I hope Americans push back on it, and especially this Thanksgiving, are thinking about all these people that are just asking to be here just so they can work and provide for their families and quite frankly, provide for the country."
Actor and occasional Trump critic John Fugelsang posted on X that when the Wampanoag Native Americans fed the pilgrims who landed in present-day Massachusetts, "they had no idea they'd just invented a social safety net for undocumented immigrants."
In that vein, a meme circulated on X depicting a pilgrim accepting a roasted turkey from a Native American with the caption, "Thanksgiving: Celebrating the day Americans fed undocumented immigrants from Europe."
Texas could implement a plan to bus migrants directly to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an effort to get them processed for deportation, according to media reports.
The move would be a departure from the state's program, part of Operation Lone Star, that has bussed thousands of migrants to sanctuary cities, a source told the New York Post. It has yet to be approved by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Fox News Digital has reached out to Abbott's office and ICE.
"We are always going to be involved in border security so long as we’re a border state," a Texas government source told the newspaper. "We spent a lot of taxpayer money to have the level of deterrent that we have on the border, and we can’t just walk away."
Abbott has been especially aggressive in combating illegal immigration, bussing migrants to blue cities in an effort to bring attention to the border crisis. Under the proposed plan, buses chartered by Texas from border cities will be taken to federal detention centers to help ICE agents process migrants quickly, the Post reported.
Texas has been in a legal fight with the Biden administration over its efforts to curb illegal immigration. On Wednesday, an appeals court ruled that the state has the right to build a razor wire border wall to deter migrants.
Officials have also offered land to the incoming Trump administration to build deportation centers to hold illegal immigrant criminals.
"My office has identified several of our properties and is standing by ready to make this happen on Day One of the Trump presidency," Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said during a visit to the border Tuesday.
Authorities have also warned of unaccompanied migrant children being caught near the border. On Thursday, a 10-year-old boy from El Salvador told state troopers in Maverick County, Texas, that he had been lost and left behind by a human smuggler.
The boy was holding a cellphone and crying, Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez posted on X. The child said his parents were in the U.S.
On Sunday, troopers encountered an unaccompanied 2-year-old girl from El Salvador holding a piece of paper with a phone number and her name. She told authorities that her parents were also in the U.S.
That morning, state troopers also encountered a group of 211 illegal immigrants in Maverick County. Among the group were 60 unaccompanied children, ages 2 to 17, and six special interest immigrants from Mali and Angola.
"Regardless of political views, it is unacceptable for any child to be exposed to dangerous criminal trafficking networks," Olivarez wrote at the time. "With a record number of unaccompanied children and hundreds of thousands missing, there is no one ensuring the safety & security of these children except for the men & women who are on the frontlines daily."
He noted that the "reality is that many children are exploited & trafficked, never to be heard from again."
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that Texas has the right to build a razor wire border wall to deter illegal immigration into the Lone Star State.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced the ruling on X, saying President Biden was "wrong to cut our razor wire."
"We continue adding more razor wire border barrier," the Republican leader wrote.
Wednesday’s 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals clears the way for Texas to pursue a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of trespassing without having to remove the fencing.
It also reversed a federal judge's November 2023 refusal to grant a preliminary injunction to Texas as the state resisted federal efforts to remove fencing along the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Eagle Pass, Texas.
Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee during the president-elect's first term, wrote for Wednesday's majority that Texas was trying only to safeguard its own property, not "regulate" U.S. Border Patrol, and was likely to succeed in its trespass claims.
Duncan said the federal government waived its sovereign immunity and rejected its concerns that a ruling by Texas would impede the enforcement of immigration law and undermine the government's relationship with Mexico.
He said the public interest "supports clear protections for property rights from government intrusion and control" and ensuring that federal immigration law enforcement does not "unnecessarily intrude into the rights of countless property owners."
Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a "huge win for Texas."
"The Biden Administration has been enjoined from damaging, destroying, or otherwise interfering with Texas’s border fencing," Paxton wrote in a post on X. "We sued immediately when the federal government was observed destroying fences to let illegal aliens enter, and we’ve fought every step of the way for Texas sovereignty and security."
The White House has been locked in legal battles with Texas and other states that have tried to deter illegal immigration.
In May, the full 5th Circuit heard arguments in a separate case between Texas and the White House over whether the state can keep a 1,000-foot floating barrier on the Rio Grande.
The appeals court is also reviewing a judge's order blocking a Texas law that would allow state officials to arrest, prosecute and order the removal of people in the country illegally.
A Texas Democrat believes President-elect Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexico will get the country to come to the table "so we can solve the problem about immigration and fentanyl."
Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas’ 28th Congressional District – which borders Mexico in the southern part of the state – made the comment Tuesday during an interview on NewsNation.
"If it means a 25 percent tariff to potentially fix the border, would you favor that?" Cuellar was asked.
"Well, let me put it this way: Laredo’s the largest port; we handle 40 percent of all the trade between the U.S. and Mexico. I know this is a way to negotiate, get some leverage. I know that Mexico will come to the table," he responded.
"But nobody wants a 25 percent tariff on them, and the Mexicans are threatening to do the same thing, and we don’t want to get into that," Cuellar added. "But I think this will definitely get Mexico to the table so we can solve the problem about immigration and fentanyl."
Trump has vowed to impose tariffs on Mexico when he returns to the White House in January.
"As everyone is aware, thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before," Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. "Right now a Caravan coming from Mexico, composed of thousands of people, seems to be unstoppable in its quest to come through our currently Open Border."
"On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders. This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!" Trump continued.
"Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem," he declared. "We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it is time for them to pay a very big price!"
A source told Reuters that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a "good discussion" with Trump regarding trade and border security following that Truth Social post.
Trump also said Monday, "I have had many talks with China about the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States – But to no avail."
"Until such time as they stop, we will be charging China an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America," he added.
In response to that, the China Daily newspaper – which is run by the Chinese Communist Party – published an editorial Tuesday saying, "The excuse the president-elect has given to justify his threat of additional tariffs on imports from China is far-fetched," according to Reuters.
The editorial added: "There are no winners in tariff wars. If the U.S. continues to politicize economic and trade issues by weaponizing tariffs, it will leave no party unscathed,"
