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Iran's Top Negotiator Says U.S. Naval Blockade Violates Ceasefire, Prevents Reopening Strait of Hormuz; Appeals Court Rules Texas Can Require Schools to Display 10 Commandments; Arctic Sea Ice Drops to an Alarming New Low. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired April 22, 2026 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[13:33:57]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": We're hearing now from Iran's top negotiator after President Trump announced he's extending the ceasefire with Iran. Trump has vowed, however, to keep the American blockade on Iranian ports in place.

Prompting the Iranian official to post on X, quote, "A complete ceasefire only makes sense if it is not violated by a naval blockade and holding the world economy hostage." Adding, reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not possible with a blatant violation of the ceasefire.

In the meantime, President Trump is saying he's the one keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed. He posted on social media, "Iran is collapsing financially. They want the Strait of Hormuz immediately, starving for cash, losing $500 million a day, military and police complaining that they are not getting paid SOS."

Kenneth Braithwaite is with us now. He served as Secretary of the Navy during the first Trump administration. Thank you so much for being with us to talk about --

KENNETH BRAITHWAITE, FORMER SECRETARY OF THE NAVY: It is a pleasure, Brianna.

KEILAR: -- this critical time that we're looking at here. And in the middle of the ceasefire extension, Iran has seized these two ships in the Strait.

[13:35:00]

A Greek-linked cargo ship was also attacked. How are you looking at Iran's actions here?

BRAITHWAITE: Well, again, I think they're desperate. The blockade is working. I mean, we have the most formidable naval armada that we've ever put together in decades there. We have three carrier strike groups. We have two amphibious readiness groups. There's over 10 destroyers there. I mean, the firepower that's been amassed there by the U.S. Navy is unprecedented. So I think they're just grasping for straws. KEILAR: The -- I wonder what this does tell you, though, about the status of Iran's navy, because obviously, completely making it non- operational is one of the stated objectives of this administration, and they have championed that they've been able to do that. But then you look at what's happened here and the capabilities. How much capability does it take to do something like this?

BRAITHWAITE: So there's actually two navies, Brianna. There's the Iranian navy, which was decimated, as the president indicated, in some of the initial strikes. So a navy as we know it doesn't exist anymore. But what Iran has is the Guards Navy. These are the small, commercially acquired high-speed boats with, you know, different weapons on board that are close in. And enough of those are swarmed together, it makes a real challenge. There is quality in quantity. And so that's what we're up against now with these small Guards Navy craft.

KEILAR: That sort of drives home the asymmetric nature that the U.S. is facing here.

BRAITHWAITE: Absolutely.

KEILAR: So does it matter then, in a way, if you have the big war -- yes, it's such a huge I think when it comes to the narrative, to see these pictures of big warships that are destroyed. But when you're looking at what even these small vessels can do, armed with the right weapons, does it take away from what the Trump administration has said they've accomplished thus far?

BRAITHWAITE: I don't think so. But remember that the theater of operations matters, right? You and I both know how narrow the Strait is. The channel that goes through there is only two miles wide. I mean, the Iranians can stand off up to 1,000 kilometers and be able to target that with Chinese-provided anti-ship missiles.

Then, on top of that, you have the Guards Navy and the asymmetrical aspect that you just alluded to, and then you have mines that are put in the water. I mean, again, it is a very constrained area to operate in. You could have the greatest navy, which we do, in the world, and still be up against some of these challenges just because of the environment in which you're operating.

KEILAR: The ceasefire extension that the president agreed to last night does not have a specified end date. And I wonder how much you think that matters.

BRAITHWAITE: I think it does matter. I think, you know, to really do what we need to do there, which is to seize the enriched uranium, that's our strategic objective. To do that, we'd have to put boots on the ground. And I think every military leader, all that I've spoken to, many that you've had on this show, that's untenable for America to wrap their arms around, right?

I don't think there's the support for that in the United States. So therefore, the president needs this time in order to be able to get to a deal. I'm just hoping that that deal includes making sure that the enriched uranium is ours. And of course, it has to open the Strait.

KEILAR: The fractured leadership, the damage that has been done to the leadership, and the way that may have fractured some of the communications and the ability to operate as usual, is part of the reason why the president's top aides believe they did not hear back from the Iranians yesterday.

BRAITHWAITE: I believe that.

KEILAR: How are you seeing that?

BRAITHWAITE: Yeah, no, I absolutely believe that. The command and control that existed before with the supreme leader, there was no question. Today, really, who is in control? Who is in command of both the Iranian forces, the IRGC, what's left of the Iranian Navy? Who's speaking on behalf of who? I'm not sure that we really have identified or understood that.

KEILAR: Kenneth Braithwaite, former Secretary of the Navy, thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it.

BRAITHWAITE: Great to be here, Brianna, thank you.

KEILAR: And ahead, Texas can now require public schools to display the 10 Commandments in classrooms. We'll discuss with a lawmaker who co-authored the legislation.

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[13:44:17]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": A federal appeals court just ruled that Texas can require the 10 Commandments be posted in public school classrooms. The Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas law did not violate the First Amendment, which protects religious freedom.

The court wrote that it did not agree with plaintiff's claim that merely exposing children to religious language could lead to coercive indoctrination. The ACLU, though, says that the decision tramples on the First Amendment and it plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Joining us now is a co-author of the law, Republican State Representative Mitch Little. Representative Little, thank you so much for being with us. What is your reaction given to this ruling and that the plaintiffs have vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court?

[13:45:00]

REP. MITCH LITTLE, (R) TEXAS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: Overjoyed at the fact that the legislation we worked so hard on in the Texas legislature, both in the House and the Senate, was upheld by the Fifth Circuit. I had an opportunity to review Judge Duncan's opinion, which was quite lengthy yesterday, holding that the law we passed, Senate Bill 10, was not an establishment of a religion in Texas and didn't have a coercive effect.

I think the Supreme Court is going to agree, having overturned the earlier Lemon opinion from the 1980s.

SANCHEZ: Well, the Supreme Court didn't explicitly overturn Lemon. I think you're referring to the 2022 case regarding the football coach in Washington State. Is that correct?

LITTLE: No, that's the Kennedy decision, which the Supreme Court also upheld, but the Lemon opinion has been abrogated by law and the Supreme Court decided that a good bit ago, the division on the Fifth Circuit between the nine judges who voted in favor of this opinion and the eight who voted against it really came down to whether they felt like Lemon abrogated the stoneholding that was the underpinning for excluding the 10 Commandments from these classrooms.

SANCHEZ: Not all Supreme Court justices agreed that Lemon should be applied in all circumstances, as you know, and this may get into the weeds for our viewers. But essentially, I'd like to sort of boil down for them the last time that the Supreme Court ruled on something like this. They effectively said that this football coach in Washington State who knelt at midfield after games to pray wasn't violating the students' constitutional rights because students who didn't want to participate could just walk away.

That has since opened the door for folks to argue that things like putting up the 10 Commandments in classrooms should also be constitutional. The difference there is that the court weighed that a child being able to opt out of that prayer on the football field is an option for them. How can a student opt out from a religious text mounted on the wall of a classroom?

LITTLE: Two great questions. So the first question I want to deal with is, the simple posting of the 10 Commandments in the classroom. It doesn't require a teacher to have any discussion about the 10 Commandments. It doesn't require alignment or belief by any student. Therefore, it's not violative of the establishment cause.

The second question is, how can a student opt out? It goes to the heart of the issue that I think the United States Supreme Court is going to take up, and some judges in the Fifth Circuit had questions about this as well, was did the plaintiffs in the case that they just decided yesterday actually have standing as offended observers?

Just like this, the question that Supreme Court's going to have to deal with is, are these students who are in the classroom as offended observers having to at least see this post on the wall that they have standing to seek redress from the Supreme Court?

SANCHEZ: The law mandates that a specific version of the 10 Commandments is put up, and for those unfamiliar, the first commandment opens, "I am the Lord thy God. You shall not have any other Gods before me." How are kids supposed to interpret that in a non-religious context? How is that not an endorsement of a specific belief and therefore, endorsing a message of religion to students in a public school?

LITTLE: It's a great question. So the idea that they are exposed to it as a text from within one faith is not an idea that is foreign to United States history. Faith informs our public structure, our government, and has since the founding of the United States. So the fact that they are exposed to it in the classroom does not necessarily mean that it's coercive.

I don't know if you've been in a public high school classroom recently, but it's the place that I think could probably benefit more from the 10 Commandments than just about anywhere other than, I don't know, the United States Congress.

SANCHEZ: So would you be opposed to other religious texts being displayed?

LITTLE: Well, those amendments came onto Senate Bill 10 when we were arguing it in the Texas House of Representatives. None of them passed. Of course, I think the issue is, do we think that we as a state have the right to determine whether those are going to be allowed to be posted in the public school? And simply, I think the issue is, they don't have the votes for that.

SANCHEZ: What about in a district, perhaps, that is Muslim majority or Hindu majority?

LITTLE: Well, I don't think that we're there yet on any of our districts in the state of Texas, but I think that the core issue here is what the 10 Commandments has to say about our heritage as a nation and our morality as a people. And the public school system was never designed to be divorced from those issues.

SANCHEZ: I think many of the founding fathers would disagree.

[13:50:00]

They argued for a separation of church and state, and most notably perhaps, the idea that there should not be an endorsement by the government of a certain set of beliefs. And if the First Commandment is, you shall not have any other deity before me, then that endorses a certain view. The Constitution itself doesn't have God or Jesus or Christianity in it.

LITTLE: No, but the Declaration of Independence does. But let me address your issue a little more directly. As Judge Duncan's opinion directly targets this question of establishments, and there was actually a very deep history of establishment of religion prior to the United States Constitution.

Many of the states had prescribed religions. And so it's certainly a fundamental aspect of our American government, our American Constitution, that we not establish a religion. The Fifth Circuit decided yesterday that simply posting the 10 Commandments or copy of it in a classroom does not violate the Establishment Clause, and I happen to agree. I think the United States Supreme Court will agree, too.

SANCHEZ: So if a teacher decided, as we noted in the New York Times, there was a teacher that started putting up spiritually themed posters from a multitude of different faiths in response to this law, a practice that she says she will continue, would you be opposed to that, to having kids in a classroom with multiple different faiths expressed?

LITTLE: It depends on how it's expressed. So you may be familiar with the United States Supreme Court's opinion in Mahmoud and dealing with teachers essentially forcing LGBTQIA+ ideology on students in the classroom and saying that it's essentially hurtful or wrong to disagree with those things as a family.

It all depends on the context and the use of the text within the classroom. So if the teacher is posting --

(CROSSTALK)

SANCHEZ: So if they treat it the same way as these 10 Commandments and the teacher doesn't proselytize to students, and she doesn't disagree or try to correct students who disagree with it, would you be OK with those texts being there?

LITTLE: I think it purely depends on the application and I think it also depends on what it is that's posted. And I think the legislature will probably have to deal with that at some point.

SANCHEZ: So then let me follow up with what is a teacher to say to a student who asks about that First Commandment, saying that you should not have any other deities besides the deity that is expressed in these specific version of the 10 Commandments when a student inquires about that? If they can't proselytize, if they can't disagree, if they can't endorse a view, what do they say to these students?

LITTLE: I think as a teacher, you have to answer the kid's question as best you can and say, well, here's what I think about that and then ask them, what do you think about it? So I hope that the posting of the 10 Commandments in the classroom does create a curiosity on the part of Texas students to be able to ask those questions either back home with their family, of a teacher, of an administrator, of a coach, of a friend. And I think it'll do Texans a lot of good, actually.

SANCHEZ: State Representative Mitch Little, we have to leave the conversation there. We look forward to having you back when the Supreme Court weighs in on this.

LITTLE: Yeah, God bless you. Thanks.

SANCHEZ: Thanks so much. You too.

Still ahead, it's Earth Day and CNN's Bill Weir is live from the Arctic Ocean where ice is reaching a record low. Bill, is it cold up there?

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: It is very cold, but warm enough to melt ice, enough missing ice to cover twice the size of Texas. We're going to show you this beautiful place, talk about how everything is changing up here. It is a hot spot in many more ways than one. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:58:28]

KEILAR: Happy Earth Day and not so happy Earth Day. We're going to the top of the planet to highlight some serious concerns about the climate crisis. Scientists say the peak ice level observed in the Arctic each spring is alarmingly low this year.

They say about half a million square miles that are normally frozen over are now liquid water, and that is about twice the size of the state of Texas. CNN's Bill Weir is in the Arctic right now. He's with us now from Norway.

Bill, tell us what you're seeing. Tell us what you're hearing from experts.

WEIR: Well, we're tucking into this beautiful fjord here. We're in Svalbard, this archipelago way high up in the Arctic. Really interesting place where a lot of science happens here, but we really came up to try to see the pack ice that covers the North Pole, it's supposed to, but it is disappearing. It's so far away from us.

We may not have enough time to get there, but I spent some time yesterday with international climatologists, glaciologists. They all study together in this amazing little town up here in Svalbard. I met a glaciologist who says they're so frustrated looking at the politics of the United States and seeing how Donald Trump has pulled back from climate science almost entirely with hostility.

Meanwhile, Russia has been expelled from the Arctic League after their invasion of Crimea. So 50 percent of the Arctic nations are not at the table. Russia, the United States, that means that Italy and Germany and South Korean scientists are trying to keep the science going, measuring how things are changing up here, but it affects everything. It affects life up here. The permafrost is melting --