President Trump’s very good week ended with a surprise announcement on an agreement with Guatemala on asylum-seekers. Late Friday afternoon, President Trump summoned the White House press pool to the Oval Office. He, along with Enrique Degenhart, the Guatemalan minister of government, and acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan announced that a deal has been reached for Guatemala to be a safe third country for migrants seeking asylum en route to the U.S. southern border.

The agreement offers a safe harbor in Guatemala for those who are determined to have legitimate asylum claims. Central Americans arriving in caravans at the U.S. southern border have overwhelmed the American system for those seeking asylum, most specifically Salvadorans and Hondurans. The new system should be in effect in August.

On a call with reporters Friday, McAleenan said the agreement with Guatemala would “be up and running in August,” after the two governments had completed several steps to ratify the deal. Under the agreement, Salvadorans and Hondurans would need to seek asylum in Guatemala, McAleenan said.

“If you have, say, a Honduran family coming across through Guatemala to the U.S. border, we want them to feel safe to make an asylum claim at the earliest possible point,” he said. “If they do instead, in the hands of smugglers, make the journey all the way to the U.S. border, [they would] be removable back to Guatemala.”

President Trump voiced support for such an agreement with Guatemala, as a previous attempt failed.

“We’ve long been working with Guatemala, and now we can do it the right way,” Trump said Friday. He claimed the agreement will put “coyotes and the smugglers out of business.”

He added: “These are bad people.”

This is a sensible move, especially in terms of trying to ease the burdens of overcrowding at the border. The Trump administration sees it as a way to shrink the number of migrants arriving and making asylum claims. It is a step in the right direction, especially given the non-stop complaints from President Trump’s opponents and social justice warriors about conditions at detention facilities. It just makes sense that migrants file a claim in the first country they come to once they are outside of their own.

Last week a deal fell through with Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales. He was to sign it but the country’s Constitutional Court is on summer recess, therefore unable to issue approval of such an agreement. President Trump, unhappy about the delay, threatened to impose tariffs on Guatemala. And, just like that, there is now a deal. At least a tentative agreement, pending any legal challenges to the designation as a safe third country. If those traveling to the U.S. border don’t first apply for asylum in Guatemala, they will not be eligible for asylum in America. They will be sent back to Guatemala, though, not to their home country.

Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, described the document signed by the two countries as a “safe third” agreement that would make migrants ineligible for protection in the United States if they had traveled through Guatemala and did not first apply for asylum there.

Instead of being returned home, however, the migrants would be sent back to Guatemala, which under the agreement would be designated as a safe place for them to live.

“They would be removable, back to Guatemala, if they want to seek an asylum claim,” said Mr. McAleenan, who likened the agreement to similar arrangements in Europe.

The Spanish text of the deal was released late Friday, calling it a “cooperative agreement regarding the examination of protection claims”, instead of “a safe third country”. This appears to be a decision made by President Morales to get around a court ruling that blocks him from signing such an agreement with the United States without the approval of his country’s congress. Morales leaves office in January and some running to replace him grumble that the next president should be the one making an agreement, not Morales.

Critics point to the dangerous conditions in Guatemala and say that the country can’t provide safe conditions or a fair system of protection for the migrants.

But critics said that the law clearly requires the “safe third” country to be a truly safe place where migrants will not be in danger. And it requires that the country have the ability to provide a “full and fair” system of protections that can accommodate asylum seekers who are sent there. Critics insisted that Guatemala meets neither requirement.

They also noted that the State Department’s own country condition reports on Guatemala warn about rampant gang activity and say that murder is common in the country, which has a police force that is often ineffective at best.

Asked whether Guatemala is a safe country for refugees, Mr. McAleenan said it was unfair to tar an entire country, noting that there are also places in the United States that are not safe.

It may not be perfect but the agreement is a start. Anything, at this point, to ease the burdens and chaos on our southern border is a win.

Consider this the media version of “RTs ≠ endorsements.” The Covington Catholic High School teen who was smeared as a racist over a badly reported incident at the March for Life will not be able to recover damages from media outlets. A federal judge ruled that the Washington Post did not make false and defamatory claims about Sandmann, and that reporting what Nathan Phillips alleged was protected by the First Amendment.

It’s not the end of this, but it’s not likely to get much better on appeal:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post over its coverage of an interaction between a Kentucky high school student and a Native American activist on the National Mall, which gained national attention after the video went viral.

Judge William O. Bertelsman dismissed the suit, stating that the Post’s coverage was protected as free speech and rejecting Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann’s argument that the newspaper implied inaccurately that Sandmann had behaved in a menacing or violent way. The Post had quoted the activist, a veteran named Nathan Phillips, who said Sandmann stood in his way to get to the Lincoln Memorial in the Jan 19 incident.

Bertelsman wrote that though Phillips’ claim may have been inaccurate, the Post had a right to publish it. The Post couldn’t be sued for defamation simply if some of its reporting was inaccurate, he wrote, rather it had to both false and defamatory.

Bertelsman concluded that the Post had the right to report on Phillips’ point of view even if Phillips’ claims were “erroneous.” Bertelsman took Sandmann’s claims as fact but ruled that irrelevant to the defamation claim:

“The court accepts Sandmann’s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not impede or block anyone,” the judge wrote.

“However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being ‘blocked’ and not allowed to ‘retreat.’ He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but . . . they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions.”

That’s not going to bode well for Sandmann’s other lawsuits. He has filed a similar claim against CNN and has identified over 50 other potential targets for legal action. Unless Sandmann can point to much more egregious conduct, especially statements of “facts” in reporting that were clearly false and published for defamation, this project doesn’t have much promise, as I wrote at the time:

In order to win a libel or defamation action, the plaintiffs have to show that the statements were objectively false, caused financial injury, and weren’t protected speech. The big problem for Sandmann and his attorneys will be the first and second points. Respondents will argue that they thought they had the full story from the first video, and they were at worst simply mistaken rather than acting with intent to defame. They might also argue that even the longer video remains open to a wide variety of interpretations, so there is no objective foundation for legal action. On top of that, what financial injury did a 16-year-old high-school student incur from a week of terrible coverage? His attorneys will argue that Sandmann’s prospects are damaged for life, but it’s going to be difficult to quantify those damages beyond sheer speculation.

As it happens, Bertelsman found problems with Sandmann’s argument on points 1 and 3. He also relied on Milkovich to note that the complaint’s reliance on figurative speech cut against precedent as well:

In his ruling, Bertelsman also cited the case, Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., writing that statements that are “loose, figurative” or “rhetorical hyperbole” are protected by the First Amendment because they can’t be proved true or false.

Bertelsman identified words used by The Post to describe the students as falling under the protection established in Milkovich: “swarmed,” “taunting,” “disrespect,” aggressive” and “rambunctious,” among others.

Those are terms of opinion rather than fact, and rely heavily on perspective. None of this makes the reporting on Sandmann and the Covington Catholic High School students good, of course. In fact, the reliance on these terms points to a certain bias that came through loudly and clearly at the time. This should embarrass  the Washington Post, but bad reporting alone isn’t actionable. If it were, most media outlets would have blinked out of existence decades ago, and all we’d have are social-media video clips.

The question in the headline, by the way, is a trick question. Freedom of speech and “modern-day McCarthyism” are, unfortunately, not mutually exclusive states. In fact, to combat the latter we need the former even more. The best cure for bad speech is more and better speech. That is why the courts have been stingy about defamation and libel, restricting it only to the most obvious of circumstances. Sandmann got victimized by the national media and deserves a hearty rhetorical defense, but defamation suits aren’t going to work to correct the record.

Of course, Sandmann’s attorneys plan to appeal this, and who knows? Perhaps the Supreme Court might be in the mood to rethink Milkovich and other libel-slander-defamation law. Justice Clarence Thomas certainly made his feelings known about Sullivan in February, not long after this legal action got filed. Until the Supreme Court decides to redefine defamation in relation to opinion and free speech, though, this isn’t going anywhere.