A native Salvadoran faces likely deportation after pleading guilty in connection with nearly $1 million in COVID-related fraud.
On Tuesday, a man who calls himself a woman and prefers the name Ruby Corado learned that he will have to spend 33 months behind bars followed by two years of supervised release. Corado pled guilty to one count of wire fraud back in July 2024.
Corado was previously charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, laundering of monetary instruments, monetary transactions in criminally derived proceeds, and failure to file a report of a foreign bank account. Prosecutors dropped the other charges in exchange for the guilty plea.
'You betrayed this country.'
In 2020, Corado applied for two federal COVID-relief loans on behalf of Casa Ruby, the now-defunct nonprofit he founded in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to help homeless LGBTQ+ youth. An Economic Injury Disaster Loan and a Paycheck Protection Program loan, both from the Small Business Administration and totaling $956,215, were then deposited directly into a Casa Ruby account, according to a defense sentencing memorandum.
However, Corado instead wired at least some of those funds overseas and hid them from the IRS, prosecutors claimed, according to NBC Washington. Corado also escaped to El Salvador in 2022, apparently to evade federal authorities.
Prior to sentencing, Corado submitted a statement to the court, admitting to funneling at least $200,000 to El Salvador. He claimed he had hopes of establishing Casa Ruby services there
"I am sorry that my mistake impacted my work," he told the court.
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In his statements during the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, D.C. District Judge Trevor McFadden issued a scathing rebuke of Corado.
"You betrayed this country," McFadden said, according to WUSA9. "You spotted an opportunity to defraud the American people."
McFadden also professed himself "very dubious" that Corado tried to bring Casa Ruby to El Salvador, noting that the defense offered no evidence that Corado had attempted to establish any nonprofit there.
McFadden also ordered Corado to pay back the SBA in full.
The defense had argued for leniency, requesting that Corado, who identifies as a "transgender woman," be able to serve his sentence at a local jail or perhaps even at home out of fear that the Trump DOJ will place him in a men's facility in accordance with his "biological sex":
DOJ policy has moved to align federal detention practices with directives rejecting gender identity in favor of "biological sex," resulting in transgender women being transferred into men’s facilities and in efforts to curtail gender-affirming medical care. Attorneys representing transgender women in BOP custody have described these shifts as placing their clients in "incredibly dangerous" situations, effectively emboldening predators and exposing inmates to foreseeable harm. As one longtime advocate explained, the signals sent by these policies can determine "whether a person lives or dies."
Whether Corado will be housed in a men or women's facility remains unclear, though he was incarcerated in a men's jail after his arrest in March 2024. What is clear is that Corado will likely be deported back to El Salvador after his sentence is concluded.
"Your deportation is likely if not certain," Judge McFadden said.
Corado also faces a civil suit regarding alleged failure to pay Casa Ruby employees. Though that suit was paused pending the criminal proceeding, it may soon resume now that Corado has been convicted.
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Democratic attorneys general from 12 states are suing the Trump administration in hopes of barring the Department of Health and Human Services from defunding various gender ideology initiatives.
President Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to gender ideology on his first day back in office, declaring in Executive Order 14168, "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality."
James noted that in New York alone, over $80 billion in funding is at risk because of the requirement that applicants comply with the president's reality-affirming order.
In addition to requiring every agency to use the term "sex" and not "gender" in federal policies and documentation, the order tasked each federal agency with ensuring that federal grant funds "do not promote gender ideology."
Pursuant to the EO, the HHS released guidance to the U.S. government, the public, and external partners that sex is an immutable biological classification and that there are only two sexes, male and female.
The HHS also issued a new policy statement indicating that recipients of health, education, and research grants subject to Title IX requirements must be "compliant with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 ... including the requirements set forth in Presidential Executive Order 14168 titled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
The Democrat-run states of California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington claim in their new lawsuit that the HHS' enforcement of the directives in Trump's EO violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the guarantee of separation of powers, and the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
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According to the states, the grant conditions are "impermissibly retroactive because they alter conditions attached to the funds Congress duly appropriated to HHS by imposing new conditions on existing appropriations of federal funds to the States."
They further alleged that the conditions not only constitute an attempt on the part of the HHS to unilaterally amend Title IX but are discriminatory, serving to "exclude transgender, intersex, non-binary, and gender-diverse individuals and make denial of their existence official policy."
California Attorney General Rob Bonta — who was barred last month from enforcing laws that keep parents in the dark about whether their kids are masquerading as members of the opposite sex at school — said in a statement, "HHS has overstepped its constitutional authority and ignored proper procedures in an attempt to codify its hateful agenda."
New York Attorney General Letitia James made clear what's at risk for each Democratic state: tens of billions of dollars in grant funding to ideologically captive institutions. James noted that in New York alone, over $80 billion in funding is at risk because of the requirement that applicants comply with the president's reality-affirming order.
James suggested that the directive was "cruel and unjust."
The Democrat-controlled states want the federal court in Rhode Island to declare the policy unlawful and to block the HHS from enforcing it.
Blaze News has reached out to the HHS for comment.
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Just six months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning sex-rejecting genital mutilations and puberty blockers for minors, the high court's questions and remarks during oral arguments on Tuesday regarding two cases concerning men competing on girls' and women's sports teams in Idaho and West Virginia signal that gender ideologues are set to lose more ground.
Twenty-seven states have passed laws and/or regulations prohibiting males from participating in girls' or women's sports.
West Virginia, for example, enacted the Save Women's Sports Act in 2021, requiring public school and collegiate sports teams to require athletes to participate on teams corresponding with their sex.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old male transvestite in West Virginia who has pretended to be a girl since the third grade and taken puberty blockers, sued the state's board of education as well as other officials, claiming that his exclusion from girls' sports violated both Title IX and the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
This case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., has been kicked through the courts and is now before the Supreme Court.
The other case taken up by the high court on Tuesday, Little v. Hecox, is highly similar.
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Lindsay Hecox, a 24-year-old male student at Boise State University who took cross-sex hormones for only one year, wanted to join the women's cross-country team, where his male physiology would serve as a tremendous advantage over his female competitors. He was unable to join the women's team on account of Idaho's Fairness in Women's Sports Act, which banned male transvestites from competing on female athletic teams.
Like the transvestite student in West Virginia, Hecox sued, claiming the Idaho law violated his constitutional rights.
Both cases were brought to the Supreme Court by the two states' Republican attorneys general with attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom.
'If we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board.'
"Men cannot become women; their biological differences are scientifically clear. And no ideological arguments attempting to justify allowing males to enter female sports can stand against this truth," stated ADF president and chief counsel Kristen Waggoner.
The possibility that the SCOTUS will rule again against gender ideology has LGBT radicals panicking.
For instance, Erin Reed, the boyfriend of cross-dressing Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), wrote that "depending on how the Court rules, these cases could reshape the legal framework governing transgender rights for an entire generation."
The Human Rights Campaign wailed: "As transgender youth continue to face numerous targeted attacks from health care to education, these cases mark another key moment in the fight against anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that could have implications beyond the sports world."
GLAAD previously stated: "Similar to misleading narratives about bathrooms and other single-sex spaces, propagating inflammatory scenarios about transgender women and girls participating in sports has become a common tactic in broader attacks on trans rights and equality."
In Hecox, liberal justices raised questions about whether the case might be moot because of the transvestic student's claim that he won't attempt to compete in collegiate women's sports again; whether transvestic men with low testosterone levels might qualify as a sub-class deserving of a legal carve-out; and whether the Supreme Court could decide that while most men have an unfair advantage in women's sports, the transvestite in this particular case does not.
Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst argued in turn that the case wasn't moot, as Hecox has time left to change his mind about future participation; that it "will always be possible to carve the class down further"; and that an exception would not be administrable as it'd be invasive, requiring ongoing testosterone monitoring of the athlete.
Hurst — who on multiple occasions attempted to help remedy Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's confusion — later emphasized in his rebuttal that male athletes pose a threat to women's sports, citing a 2024 U.N. special rapporteur report that indicated that "over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports" as the result of male interlopers.
"Idaho's law classifies on the basis of sex because sex is what matters in sports," Hurst said. "It correlates strongly with countless athletic advantages like size, muscle mass, bone mass, and heart and lung capacity."
RELATED: 'Not medicine — it's malpractice': Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report
The conservative justices appeared to take Hurst's point to heart and signaled skepticism about the arguments alternatively advanced by Hecox's lawyer Kathleen Harnett against the Idaho law.
In addition to noting that the Idaho legislation is not discriminatory against all trans-identifying people as it does not bar women from men's sports but only men — who enjoy physical advantages over women — from women's sports, Justice Amy Coney Barrett alluded to scientific evidence indicating that testosterone is not the only advantage enjoyed by male athletes.
On theme, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked, "Why would we, at this point, jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country" while there remains scientific uncertainty and "strong assertions of equality on both sides?"
Kavanaugh, who has coached his daughters' sports teams, also raised concerns about whether allowing "transgender girls to participate will reverse" the "inspiring" success of girls' separate sports over the past five decades.
While Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether trans-identifying individuals should be considered a "quasi-suspect" class entitled to a higher standard of scrutiny on account of their alleged history of discrimination, he appeared unconvinced by the argument that excluding boys from girls' sports is a form of unconstitutional sex discrimination.
Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Harnett on whether she was challenging the distinction between boys and girls or seeking an exception to the biological definition of girls, and expressed skepticism about the possibility of such an exception.
Roberts appeared concerned about the broader ramifications of permitting exceptions to the definition of girl for a sliver minority of challengers, noting that "if we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board and not simply to the area of athletics."
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The NHL may have banned Pride-themed warm-up jerseys, but that did not stop the Seattle Kraken from releasing their own transgender jersey this week.
One of the newest NHL franchises, the Kraken jumped out of the gate with wokeness in 2021 by naming their home rink Climate Pledge Arena, as a "rallying call" for companies and organizations to "commit to net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement."
'I hope that people can, like, see the logo and, like, feel some trans joy and queer joy, too!'
The NHL struggled with backlash over Pride Night jerseys in 2023, with select Russian and Canadian players refusing to wear the sexuality-themed attire. The league eventually banned all themed warm-up jerseys, but launched a Player Inclusion Coalition just a week later.
With the league being no stranger to leftist ideology, the Kraken have found a work-around for 2026 despite gender- and sex-based events seeing significantly less support in the United States. The team released a transgender unicorn jersey this week, announcing they would auction off the bizarre design online for their Pride Night.
RELATED: NHL reverses ban on rainbow Pride stick tape; LGBTQ group calls it 'a win for us all'
The team included transgender and gay Pride flags on their post announcing the jersey, and the artist who designed the unicorn clarified the transgender inspiration.
Tattoo artist Vegas Vecchio was profiled by the hockey organization and, after immediately announcing her "they/them pronouns," rattled off strange rantings about being "exposed" to "queerness."
"Being able to be in Seattle surrounded by the queer community and being exposed to the queerness I never got to experience growing up, it inspires my work a lot," she explained.
"I ended up doing the unicorn; it seems like such a classic queer symbol," she continued. "And I was like, 'If anyone is going to do a unicorn, it's going to be me.' I hope that people can, like, see the logo and, like, feel some trans joy and queer joy, too!"
The artist also noted that people would describe her artwork as "very gay."
Fans revolted in the comments on the Kraken's post on X, with several asking if the jersey was actually meant as a joke.
"Hardcore stupidity. Are you going to start doing straight jerseys also?" another X user wrote.
"That's not a Kraken. No matter how it identifies," another fan joked about the logo.
Alongside dozens of less-than-safe-for-work memes, one fan called the jerseys a "humiliation ritual" for the players. However, Kraken players did not seem bothered by the design.
Canadian players Ryan Winterton, Brandon Montour, and Tye Kartye all went along with the controversial photo shoot, while German goalie Philipp Grubauer made a public statement on the topic at the same time.
"It's so important to create a safe and inclusive space within the hockey community," he said in a team post. "As a proud ally of the LGBTQ+ community, I'll continue to stand by your side."
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Gorsuch authored Bostock, the case the Biden administration used to enforce ‘transgender’ ideology across the federal government and in states and localities that received federal funding.
