The World and Everything in It: January 12, 2026

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

U.S. immigration judges decide what amounts to persecution, to trigger asylum. But should appeals courts review those?

KAGAN: We're going to have to look at all this evidence, all these facts, and decide whether these threats were that level of menacing…

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today, the Monday Moneybeat, taking aim at institutional investors who snap up family homes. David Bahnsen is standing by.

And the WORLD History Book.

AUDIO: Last Friday, Noriega declared his military dictatorship to be in a state of war with the United States.

The 1990 case that echoes today.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, January 12th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran protest deaths  »  Activists say Iran’s crackdown on nationwide protests has now killed well over 500 people, with thousands more detained as demonstrations stretch into a third week.

A U.S.-based human rights group reports more than 10,000 arrests and says most of those killed were protesters.

Iranian-born British actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi says the protests started over Iran’s struggling economy and plummeting currency, but:

BONIADI: This time, there is no demand other than we want you gone this time. It's unequivocal that. What they're saying is, we want this regime gone.

Protests continued Sunday in Tehran and other major cities. Iranian officials warned that U.S. or Israeli forces could become targets if outside powers intervene.

Cuba warning  »  President Trump is warning Cuba to strike a deal with the United States after the ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Cuba has long relied on Venezuelan oil, but shipments have stopped as U.S. forces seize tankers and move to control Venezuela’s exports.

In a social media post, Trump said Cuba benefited from Venezuelan oil and money in exchange for security support but said that arrangement is over. He urged Havana to “make a deal.”

Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel fired back online, blaming U.S. sanctions for Cuba’s deepening economic crisis.

SOUND: ICE protests in Minnesota

MN immigration shooting latest  »  Protesters screaming in Minneapolis days after an immigration enforcement agent shot and killed a woman who federal officials say tried to hit him with her vehicle.

US House Majority Whip Tim Emmer of Minnesota is accusing the state’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of fomenting unrest.

EMMER: Tim Walsh should have come out right away and said, everybody, be calm. Withhold your judgment. We know that this is a very, uh, sensitive matter. Let law enforcement do their work.

Democrats say the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration is to blame.

Newly released cell phone video is adding fresh detail to the shooting of Renee Nicole Good. The video shows Good apparently moving her vehicle back and forth as agents try to get around her.

Federal officials say the footage supports their claim that Good was interfering with the operation and posed a threat. But Minnesota Democrats say the video shows her trying to leave, not attack anyone.

Thune govt shutdown  »  Two months after ending the longest government shutdown in US history, Congress is staring down the barrel at another potential shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he’s hopeful that there’s enough common ground to avoid that.

THUNE:  Let's do the basic things that the American people expect, and funding the government is one of those, and I'm hopeful, um, that we'll have some cooperation from Democrats.

The stopgap funding bill passed back in November only keeps the bills paid through the end of this month.

At the center of last year’s 43-day shutdown was a demand by Democrats that Republicans agree to extend Obamacare subsidies.

The House just passed a bill agreeing to do just that. The Senate is still deciding how to proceed on healthcare spending.

Mars landing  »  NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says he believes the United States can land astronauts on Mars in the years ahead.

President Trump has repeatedly pledged to become the first country to do that, even saying his administration aims to do it by the end of his second term.

And Isaacman says that’s the kind of vision that gets everyone excited.

ISASSCMAN: I love, uh, President Trump's, uh, ambitious and achievable vision of American astronauts going to Mars and planting the stars and stripes. We've gone to our very close neighbor in the moon. We will return, but to actually set a goal to travel to a planet other than our own for the first time ever is just so inspiring.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has expressed his interest in landing humans on Mars and wants to do it as soon as 2029.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: U.S. immigration judges decide what amounts to persecution to trigger asylum. Plus, The Monday Moneybeat with David Bahnsen.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 12th day of January, 2026. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, two cases that go to the heart of immigration and civil justice—and they matter well beyond the courtroom. What the court decides will shape asylum claims, affect the work of advocacy groups, and test the authority of a government elected on promises of tighter borders and enforcement.

We begin with oral arguments.

EICHER: Case one is Urias-Orellana v. Bondi.

It’s about asylum—and about how much power federal judges should have to second-guess immigration courts.

Here’s how the attorney for the asylum seeker framed the case. Nicholas Rosellini.

ROSELLINI: Deciding whether undisputed facts qualify as persecution under the law involves legal interpretation, not fact finding.

REICHARD: That distinction is the fulcrum here. We usually think of fact-finding as the job of juries or trial judges, and legal interpretation as the work of higher courts.

But in this case, the asylum seeker wants federal judges to step in and decide whether the facts already found by immigration courts rise to the legal level of “persecution.” If they do, he stays.

EICHER: Here’s the background. Douglas Urias-Orellana left El Salvador with his wife and child and entered the United States illegally in 2021.

Back home, a hitman for a drug trafficker had shot two of his half-brothers and threatened to kill the rest of the family. Urias-Orellana moved within El Salvador for a time, but eventually fled north and applied for asylum.

REICHARD: The immigration judge believed his account—but still denied asylum, ruling that the threats did not meet the legal standard for persecution.

That standard is high. Courts have said persecution must be severe—more than threats alone—and tied to membership in a protected group, with the home government unable or unwilling to stop it.

EICHER: The Justice Department says that judgment call belongs to the immigration system. It argues courts should defer to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which heard the case and weighed the evidence firsthand.

But Urias-Orellana’s lawyer says this is not just about facts—it is about how the law defines persecution, and who gets to apply that definition.

Here’s Rosellini again:

ROSELLINI: And courts have repeatedly established auxiliary legal principles on things like sexual violence, religious persecution, economic deprivation, and beyond. But courts did not establish those principles by pondering the term "persecution" in the abstract. They interpreted the law by applying the persecution standard to particular sets of undisputed facts.

Rosellini pointing out there’s no way to draw a principled line between fact and law here.

REICHARD: The government disagrees. Here’s Assistant to the Solicitor General Joshua Dos Santos. (You’ll hear him use the term “sicario.” He means the hitman.)

DOS SANTOS: Petitioner appears to have been fine when he moved away from the hometown and he lived for years in peace in other parts of El Salvador. Then --then Petitioner talks about the threats, but, on the other hand, the threats demanded money. So whether you infer from that was it just intimidation, were they even connected with the sicario, I mean, these are all questions of the kind that go to juries. The juries draw inferences that can cut in different directions.

EICHER: Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back on that, referencing another case:

SOTOMAYOR: …the question was whether those undisputed facts met the standard of persecution ‘because of’ political opinion. So I don't see how that's not a mixed question of law and fact …

Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to favor the opposite view.

ROBERTS: The sort of finding that we typically leave to a district court or another fact finder involving credibility, weighing of facts, and all that sort of thing, to — to reach a particular determination it seems to me a prototypical case for the B-I-A.

And Justice Elena Kagan seemed to agree with the Chief while bemoaning the work load involved should the asylum seeker here win the case:

KAGAN: What’s going to happen in this case is we're going to have to look at all this evidence, all these facts, and decide whether these threats were indeed that level of menacing, and that sounds like really weighing evidence to me. That sounds really factual.

EICHER: The asylum seeker’s lawyer summed it up this way, essentially sending up an SOS to please clarify the path:

ROSELLINI: The case law as it is now is a muddle, so I'm not going to pretend that there is some consensus going in our favor, but we don’t need to show that.

So the question for the justices isn’t whether this man and his family can remain in the US. It’s how much authority federal judges have to second-guess immigration courts.

And make no mistake, there’s a political angle here, too:

Half-a-dozen advocacy groups filed friend of the court briefs on this one, and each one of them is actively involved in pushing the courts to override the executive branch on immigration.

REICHARD: This last case today also turns on who gets the last word, but this time it’s not immigration courts and federal judges. It is state legislatures versus the rules that govern federal courts—and the answer will shape who gets into court at all.

EICHER: For patients who believe they were harmed by medical negligence, the stakes are obvious. For doctors and hospitals, it’s the cost of defending lawsuits. And for the states that have tort reform to limit malpractice claims … this case is a test of how far tort reform can reach.

REICHARD: The case is Berk v Choy. 

Harold Berk is a Florida man who was staying in his second home in Delaware when he suffered a foot and ankle injury.

He went to the emergency room and says he received negligent medical treatment that made matters worse. He filed a medical malpractice suit in federal court under what is called “diversity jurisdiction.” That’s a federal rule that lets you file a case in federal court when the parties are from different states and enough money is at stake.

EICHER: But Delaware requires something extra in medical malpractice cases: an affidavit of merit. That’s a sworn statement from a medical expert that certifies the claim is reasonable. More than half the states have that rule.

REICHARD: Berk’s orthopedist declined to make the affidavit. So Berk just submitted his medical records instead.

But in Delaware? No affidavit, no case.

So the federal district court dismissed Berk’s lawsuit.

EICHER: And it did so on the basis that the affidavit rule is considered substantive law. That’s different from procedural law, things like how to file a lawsuit and when. Substantive law is about what you’re legally entitled to, like the standard of medical care.

And that difference matters here, because substantive state law applies in federal court.

REICHARD: Berk wants that affidavit requirement gone. Delaware insists on it. Berk’s lawyer, Andrew Tutt:

TUTT: That requirement conflicts with more than a half dozen Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It conflicts with Rules 8 and 9, which set forth what a plaintiff must do to state a claim in federal court, and it conflicts with Rule 11, which bars verification and affidavit requirements unless a federal rule or statute provides otherwise.

Tutt went even further. The doctors call Delaware’s rule substantive …

TUTT: But Delaware's law is procedural from tip to tail. It designates when a complaint can be docketed, what it must say, and when the defendant must file a responsive pleading. It doesn't define malpractice or alter any substantive standard of care….This is a procedural law.

EICHER: The medical providers disagree, obviously. They want the affidavit rule to stay—because it’s an obstacle to filing a lawsuit against them. The providers’ lawyer is Frederick Yarger. He says Berk, the injured man, is taking an extreme position:

YARGER: That a federal court must ignore the entirety of a state statute if any part of it might conflict with a federal rule in some case. This court has rejected that approach which is why Petitioner in this briefing effectively concede that to prevail he has to convince the Court to overrule at least three of its decisions.

In this complex case, there was a light moment, if you can call it that: Justice Samuel Alito invoked a famous idea from physics:

ALITO: Schrodinger’s cat ……

For an explanation, we turn to a movie from 2013, the movie Coherence in which actor Hugo Armstrong plays a character who explains the concept well.

KEVIN: It's a thought experiment. There's a, there's a cat in a box that has, like a 50-50 chance of living, because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box. So regular physics would say that it's one or the other, that the cat is either alive or dead. But Brian would argue that quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously, and it's only when you open the box that they collapse into a single event.

So with that background, you will now understand constitutional law that much better.

ALITO:I don't know that we've ever invoked Schrödinger's cat in — (Thomas laughing) — our analysis of statutes or rules, but what are you saying? Is the affidavit of merit a pleading for purposes — we've got Rule 8 and Rule 11. Is it a pleading for one and not a pleading for the other?

REICHARD: So it’s up to the justices to open up that box and see if the cat or pleading or affidavit is alive or dead. 

If the court upholds the affidavit requirement, then states can impose higher pleading requirements on federal courts, and just call them something else. That raises costs for plaintiffs, but doctors argue it smokes out meritless claims.

So here as in the asylum case, a seemingly simple question: Who decides the rules and who must defer to whom?

EICHER: Before we go, one decision—the Supreme Court’s first opinion of the term in an argued case. It’s Bowe v. United States.

Michael Bowe is serving a 24-year federal prison sentence, including ten years for using a gun in what the law calls a “crime of violence.”

Later court rulings narrowed that definition, and Bowe asked to have his sentence reduced.

REICHARD: Lower courts said no to that, pointing to a rule that generally blocks repeat challenges to prison sentences.

But that rule applies to state prisoners, not federal ones.

EICHER: In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with Bowe.

Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the Court’s liberals to say the state-prisoner rule does not apply to federal inmates—and if Congress wants it changed, it has to do the work itself.

REICHARD:And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning. Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: David, the housing story moved from the business pages last week to the front pages.

President Donald Trump saying he wants to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes.

The White House is framing this as an affordability move—arguing that big pools of capital have crowded out ordinary buyers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was at the Economic Club of Minnesota last week where the question came up. Let’s hear a bit of what he said:

BESSENT: And the idea here is bygones are bygones. We're not going to have a forced sale here. So this is not retroactive. It's all perspective. And as someone who's in markets for 40 years, markets are made on the margin, and so we're pushing out the marginal buyer. … So we haven't decided on the exact contours of this. We want to keep the traditional Mom and Pop owners in. We want to keep families who rent out to their other family members. So we will decide what the correct level is, is it a dozen homes? Is two dozen? What makes you an aggregator?

His questioner pointed out the White House is aligning itself with Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat who is a regulator’s regulator. Bessent shrugged it off with a joke, saying even a squirrel that has to wear glasses finds an acorn once in a while.

Let’s walk slowly through this: Did these “marginal buyers,” as Secretary Bessent says, drive up housing prices and will driving them out lower housing prices?

BANSEN: Well, they most certainly did not, and it is incredibly easy to empirically establish that three of the markets that have had some of the biggest home price appreciation in America, Bend, Oregon, Providence, Rhode Island and San Jose, California have zero institutional ownership. Three of the worst performing markets had the highest institutional ownership.

To the extent we’re talking about total institutional ownership, people that own over 1000 homes, and this is including multi family, which what the President and Secretary Besson is not including. So there’s more institutional ownership in apartment buildings, and they’re not even including. They’re not even talking about that.

But in single family, it is 0.4% of the housing stock. Now, some will say, No, you can’t look at it in terms of total ownership, because the marginal buyer is the new buyer. Okay?

Well, the new buyer at the peak year, was 3% and you look at the largest institutional owner, a company called Blackstone, which is repeatedly confused with BlackRock, and makes for all kinds of fallacious statements on social media. But that’s a pretty understandable mistake to make once it’s regrettable when people double down on it.

Blackstone owns 0.06% about 60 to 63,000, homes through conduits and subsidiaries in a country of 85 million homes. So we’re talking about something that is not remotely rational.

But I will start with the basic idea that if it were true that people buying at scale pushes prices up, it is not Secretary Besson or President Trump’s, or President Biden’s, or the next president’s business, when he says we have to pick with the contours, like, do we want them to allow 20 homes or 100 homes? That is called central planning.

There is not a buyer forcing a transaction, whether it’s from a mom and pop seller or an institution, there are two sides to every transaction the market is made where buyers and sellers together agree on a price, and I think we should be horrified at the idea of the government having an opinion whatsoever as to who a seller is allowed To sell to.

This doesn’t just affect the institutional owners. It affects the private parties that now are being told you can’t sell your home to someone who owns 100 other homes.

If we’re concerned about affordability, this is the best argument. Why in the world would we want to take out one of the rare people bringing new supply to market, being told you’re not going to be allowed to make a market here disincentivizes production.

It is understandable that politically, the President wants to address affordability. You and I have discussed affordability countless times in this podcast. It’s a very important issue, but we cannot turn to the Les playbook out of political desperation, you do not generate the right solutions.

We We all were very critical, understandably and justifiably of Vice President Harris’s idea of I’m going to give subsidized down payments to first time home buyers. Well, it would help the first time home buyer, and then it ends up getting priced in and so forth. Taking buyers out of a market is distortive.

Now there’s also a tremendous economic confusion here. People say, Well, look, there’s a pretty fair amount of institutional buyers that came into Charlotte, North Carolina, and the prices went up in Charlotte.

Did the prices go up because institutional buyers came in, or did institutional buyers come in because they believed the prices were going to go up because it was an attractive market with good fundamentals, good wage growth, good job growth, good schools and low crime and all the other things that matter.

There’s so many factuals that prove my point here and counter factuals that disprove the other it’s a very discouraging conversation.

But ultimately, the reason Warren and sanders and Mamdani have been behind this for so long is it is class rhetoric. It’s class warfare rhetoric. It makes it sound like there’s some big, bad institution causing the problem, and it takes our eyes off the ball.

Nick we need new housing stock getting built. What is the government doing to state, local, federal, whatever the case may be, what are the issues that are key? Us from building the right amount of housing supply.

That’s what we should be focused on, and I think these issues keep us from having that important discussion.

EICHER: David, one other point Bessent made in Minneapolis—beyond what we just heard—was historical and tax-related. He said institutional buyers really entered the single-family market after the Great Financial Crisis because they were the ones with liquidity. And he argued they have a tax advantage—depreciation and expensing—in ways ordinary families do not.

Do you see that as a real distortion, or is that just how business taxation works across the economy?

BAHNSEN: Last I checked, we didn’t write the tax laws. They did.

First of all, that is barely true with single family at all. It’s almost entirely about multi family and the institutions did not come in at the time of the financial crisis. They were also liquidity starved as well. They came in earlier.

But it wasn’t right at the point of 0809 the whole point Nick was no one was coming in. Then there was no market.

And when the market started to come back in 11 and 12 and 13, it’s because there were people willing to put capital in, you know, who wouldn’t put capital in? Were banks because of Dodd Frank, because of all the legislation and regulation that we did after the crisis.

Now there also was no capital going in, because the market was overbuilt, oversupplied and under demanded. So the supply demand equilibrium was different then.

Now it’s come the other way, but we can turn the assembly lines back on for widgets very quickly. Houses take a while.

And if it weren’t for some institutional capital, a multi family, we would be in a very, very precarious position.

But to the extent he’s talking about single family, it’s just such a tiny, tiny amount that came in.

Now, by the way, an individual with six homes, I’ve owned plenty of investment property. Personally through LLCs, I can get the depreciation, so the fact that institutions benefit from it and an individual doesn’t, it’s an apples to oranges argument.

Individuals can get tax deductibility for construction, for investment real estate, and benefit from depreciation if they’re in the real estate business against their ordinary income.

So I really believe that we’re looking here to try to create a boogeyman for something that is the absolutely we’re looking in the wrong direction.

EICHER: So it seems like we’re looking for a boogeyman because affordability feels scary and very real to people—and that’s why these ideas find a willing audience.

Is there something Washington could do right now, but refuses to do, that would actually make homes more affordable?

BAHNSEN: Yes, well, Washington can use the bully pulpit to try to get states to let up on their burdensome restrictions, most zoning and permitting and Ceca the and very the environmental restrictions, most of these things are in a state, county, local level, and Washington could try to use its bully pulpit to do some of that.

But the problem here is that we’re all talking about stimulating demand, and this will get to another issue of what the President did this week was stating he wants Fannie and Freddie to buy $200 billion of mortgage bonds now.

These are all mortgage bonds that already have mortgages in them that are already originated. The home is already built, the home is already bought, and the borrower took a mortgage, and then a bunch of those mortgages got bundled together and put into a bond, and Fannie and Freddie create those bonds, securitize those mortgages so that banks get the risk of the mortgage off their balance sheet, and then it frees up liquidity for them to go do more lending.

That’s always been the idea of Fannie and Freddie, and now the Fannie and Freddie are very well capitalized, and the President is ordering them because they’re under his purview, because they’re still in conservatorship from the 2008 failure to buy $200 billion.

But here’s my question, what happens now, as all these bonds get bought and there’s more liquidity going to banks and other lenders to then go out and buy more and theoretically, because there’s all these non price sensitive buyers, this is basically quantitative easing.

But instead of the Fed doing it, it’s the federal government doing it.

As rates come lower that stimulates demand, right? There’s now more people wanting to buy because the mortgage cost has come down because of a governmental intervention and distortion, but there’s no new supply for them to buy, so higher demand and lower or the same supply, what does that do to prices?

It pushes prices higher. It gets priced in, just like Kamala Harris’s idea of subsidizing a down payment.

So you can’t stimulate demand and not supply and solve your problem, because it will end up being reflected in the price equilibrium.

And so what it is, is case where you asked, What can Washington do? And I might suggest we could very well be in a position where, instead of Don’t just stand there, do something, maybe we need to say to Washington, don’t just do something, stand there.

EICHER: Well, there are a couple of other areas where the administration is talking about doing something.

One that caught my attention this week is the President’s openness to putting a cap on credit-card interest rates. We talked about this during the Biden years, and at the time you argued it would likely deny credit to lower-income borrowers and end up hurting the very people it’s meant to help.

I assume your view hasn’t changed just because a Republican president is now embracing the idea.

BAHNSEN:  Yeah, well, and he actually used the exact same number that was in Bernie Sanders bill that they literally put before the Senate 11 months ago. And of course, it didn’t go anywhere.

But he said, Oh, credit cards are making plenty of money the banks that issue these credit cards, I want to limit it at 10% and the issue here is, once again, it’s what we refer to in economics.

Nick is the piety myth, the idea that if something is okay, if it has good intentions, this may very well have good intentions, but it does not have good consequences, because there is a certain pool of people that have a lower income and troubled credit history and might be good borrowers now, but they’re in an overall risk pool where the credit card companies are going to have a certain level of defaults from people in this bracket, and they have to price that risk accordingly.

Now, if they have to issue the credit card below that price of risk. What do they do? They don’t give them the credit card.

And what are the people who need credit desperately but can’t get the credit card? Do they go to loan sharks? They go to these other various much higher cost, unregulated elements of providing short term credit and liquidity.

So it is again, a governmental intrusion that does more harm than good.

And I will say for the world listeners, I do end up saying this more than I wish I had to. I’m not picking on the president here. I’m only talking about the policies objectively, and if anything, one of the reasons I feel like I could be more critical is because the President, in his general policy portfolio about deregulation, the way he understands supply and demand energy, he says, I want to bring energy prices down, and I want to do that by promoting more supply.

He gets it with energy. So why do we not get it with housing and with the financial markets and these other areas.

So in a sense, it’s a compliment to the President that is forcing me to be critical, because I think there’s a certain inconsistency here, but there’s a number of these policy issues that are very troubling, and the element longer term, I don’t think any of this is going to happen, besides the Fannie Freddie deal now in a future administration, or when a mayor, ma’am Donnie in New York City, or a blue state governor, or someone else who does have the authority to do it comes along and says, Let’s ban this. Let’s do this. Let’s regulate that.

Some of these same things. What is the conservative opposition going to be against some of these things, when are people on the right sometimes promoting it?

We really, I think, have to be careful here to maintain that integrity, that consistency, and ultimately, that moral authority.

EICHER: All right—David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. We really intended to discuss some of the key issues raised in your annual white paper on the economy … but the news just prevented that. I hope we get to that next week, but in the meantime, you can read it yourself. It’s published at DividendCafe.com. Just head there and you’ll find it. David, thank you again, and see you next week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up next, the World History Book: taking down a dictator.

The capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro has sparked comparison to another U.S. operation to capture a fugitive from justice: General Manuel Noriega, then the leader of Panama, back in 1989.

EICHER: Noriega, like Maduro, faced drug-trafficking charges in the U.S. And Noriega, like Maduro, was taken into custody on January 3rd. Maduro this January 3rd, Noriega, 36 years ago. Here’s WORLD Reporter Mary Muncy.

MARY MUNCY: On December 17, 1989, 20-year-old Corporal Jeff Tiegs was getting ready to go home and marry his high school sweetheart.

JEFF TIEGS: That's when the phone call came.

The wedding would have to be postponed. Tiegs and his fellow Rangers had to get to base.

TIEGS: I had no idea where we were going. So, we were getting our kit together. You know, it's packing your bags, loading ammunition, getting all your gear put together.

The next day, they turned on the news.

TIEGS: It said, you know, ‘the 82nd airborne and the Ranger Regiment is preparing to invade Panama.’

To take General Manuel Noriega. He had worked with American intelligence forces under previous Panamanian leaders, but U.S. officials had warned for years about his monopoly on power and involvement in drug trafficking. In 1989, he annulled an election to keep himself in power. Then, his forces attacked his opponents.

From a White House briefing about the operation:

C-SPAN: The situation in Panama under General Noriega has reached a crisis.

This, combined with the looming 1990 deadline to appoint a Panamanian to lead the Panama Canal, pushed leaders over the edge. The U.S. refused to hand such a strategic asset to a regime it no longer trusted.

Over the next few days, Tiegs’ safety briefings went from ‘they don’t know we’re coming, this is where you’ll land,’... to ‘they know we’re coming. Here’s how to get past the extra fortifications.’

Although Tiegs and his squad had gotten alerts before, they’d never actually deployed.

TIEGS: But once we got to the airfield and all of the ammunition was laid out was when I realized, ‘Oh, this is, this is real,’

They boarded a plane and got ready to jump into the massive operation.

AUDIO: [EXPLOSIONS AND GUN FIRE]

TIEGS: I jumped out of the aircraft, and there's like a A-10 jet right there. And I was like, ‘what the?’

Red and green tracers were flying through the air.

TIEGS: I had to remind myself, like, ‘what? What color are our tracers? Like, who's, who are the good guys?’

The good guys are red.

Tiegs hit the ground in the Panama airport. Then he and his team started clearing their targets. Some 20,000 other American troops were also involved.

A few hours later, President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation and told Americans why years of diplomacy had come to an end.

CBS NEWS, GEORGE BUSH: Last Friday, Noriega declared his military dictatorship to be in a state of war with the United States and publicly threatened the lives of Americans in Panama.

The tensions had turned violent: just 24-hours after Noriega’s declaration, Panamanian forces killed a U.S. Marine and brutalized another American officer and his wife. Combined with Noriega’s federal drug trafficking indictments in Florida, the White House acted.

BUSH: Key military objectives have been achieved. Most organized resistance has been eliminated. But the operation is not over yet, General Noriega is in hiding.

For four days, Noriega eluded the manhunt, slipping through safe houses across Panama City. By Christmas Eve, he resurfaced, seeking asylum inside the Vatican’s embassy.

But the U.S. wasn’t about to storm the sovereign territory of the Holy See. So the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group used a different kind of pressure. They surrounded the compound with high-powered loudspeakers atop Humvees and began a musical assault.

RICK ASTLEY NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP: Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.

ALICE COOPER NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY: No more mister nice guy.

VAN HALEN, PANAMA

About ten days later, Noriega had heard enough.

CBS NEWS: Under cover of darkness, US helicopters take General Manuel Noriega from the Vatican embassy in Panama.

NBC NEW YORK: Less than 24 hours after he surrendered in Panama, Manuel Noriega has been arraigned in a Miami court on drug charges.

The president addressed the nation again.

AP ARCHIVE, BUSH: We are now engaged in the final stages of a process that includes the economic and political revitalization of this important friend and neighbor, Panama.

The US reported that 23 Americans were killed in the invasion, and about 300 Panamanian civilians and combatants were killed.

BUSH: And I want to express the special thanks of our nation to those servicemen who were wounded and to the families of those who gave their lives… A free and prosperous Panama will be an enduring tribute.

Corporal Tiegs spent a few more weeks helping to dismantle Noriega’s regime. Then he went home… and finally got to marry his high school sweetheart.

American officials installed the previously elected Panamanian leaders into office. Then US teams started streamlining the economic and political system.

ANDREW NATSIOS: We set up a displaced camp and started feeding people.

At the time, Andrew Natstios was part of the US Agency for International Development. He went to Panama right after the US took control.

Bush set aside about two billion dollars for the long-term reconstruction of the country.

NATSIOS: We had a very productive relationship there. The country had developed so much that it was a middle class democracy. There's no need for an aid mission. And so about 10 years ago, they closed the aid mission.

The per capita income in Panama has tripled, and there have been elected officials running the country since Operation Just Cause was completed 36 years ago this month.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Mary Muncy.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: How the American military is playing catch up with Chinese technology. And, an interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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