Free Republic

Nearly 100 wealthy families and power couples contributed at least $100,000 each to help Barack Obama over the past two years, creating an elite set of donors to whom the president-elect repeatedly turned in financing his campaign, transition and inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows. As inaugural donations become public, a list of Obama's most loyal backers has emerged...The families gave to as many as five committees, records show, and 27 of the 94 families also bundled money from others, collecting millions of dollars on top of their personal donations. Among the supporters were well-known families such as the Rockefellers,...

Vast tracts of our most treasured public lands, supposedly set aside in perpetuity for Americans, are no longer controlled by the United States government. Instead, they have been invaded and taken over by Mexico’s violent criminal drug organizations to grow marijuana. Even more shocking: Mexican cartels have been growing marijuana for at least 10 years in Sequoia National Park, one of the crown jewels of the system. Nature-loving hikers are compelled to accept that parts of Sequoia are "no go zones" during the growing season. These Mexican marijuana messes are an ecological disaster. They are not innocent little plots that...

An FBI informant helped agents uncover a visa fraud and gun smuggling scheme run by two Annandale men, one of whom told the informant he could sell him a missile that “can reach the Pentagon,” according to a sworn statement unsealed Monday. The investigation started when the informant met with Amjad Hamed, a Jordanian native and legal U.S. resident since 1978, in Hamed’s Annandale home in April 2006, the affidavit said. Hamed reportedly asked the informant to obtain visas for six associates who wanted to immigrate to the U.S. from Jordan and the West Bank. Hamed reportedly told the informant...

EDINBURG -- The clerk warned Alejandro Salinas about the suspicious men who had been hanging out in front of the convenience store for the past hour. He told Salinas to be careful as he went back out to his Chevrolet Z-71 pickup truck, that he had just filled at the Aziz Convenience Store about 11 a.m. Saturday. Salinas walked out to his truck and hopped in. But before he could close the door, 18-year-old Hector Severo Ramos was holding a .25-caliber pistol at Salinas' neck, said Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño. "He says ‘Get out of the truck. I'm going...

The Travis County district attorney's office is reviewing more than just travel records in its ongoing criminal investigation into state Rep. Ismael "Kino" Flores. Prosecutors have requested documents connected to the September slaying of a ranch hand on Flores' Mission property and federal agents have also taken an interest in the representative's past, authorities said Monday. "(They) asked us if we would supply them all the reports and affidavits on the murder case," Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said. "We sent them what we had...." Flores, D-Palmview, was not suspected of any involvement in the slaying of Mexican national Adin...

Mexican Secretary of Exterior Relations, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, said that when Barak Obama becomes president, Mexico will reassert its contention that his agenda include an immigration agreement as a priority...In a press conference, she assured that President Felipe Calderon is confident that with Obama’s presidency a migration agreement will finally be reached that permits both nations a flow of migration that is legal, safe and orderly. Espinosa also said that the Mexican government hopes the US president-elect changes his position on the construction of the border fence. She pointed out that Calderon’s government will continue to raise the issue, respectfully...

Arizona’s Supreme Court Justice has agreed to enforce the Hispanic Bar Association’s demands of banning the terms “illegal” and “aliens” in all of the state’s courtrooms. Claiming that the terms are inflammatory, the president of Arizona’s Hispanic Bar Association, (known as Los Abogados) has asked state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor to stop using them at trials or hearings because they create perceptions of judicial bias. In a strongly worded letter to the chief justice, Los Abogados’ president says attaching an illegal status to a person establishes a brand of contemptibility, creates the appearance of anti-immigrant prejudice and tarnishes...

The October 2nd issue of The Economist ran an article with the strongly-worded title: “The U.S.-Mexican Border: Good Neighbours Make Fences.” Over the past year, the United States has been intent on expanding its security against unregulated immigration along the Mexican border as fast as possible by increasing the number of border patrol officers from about 6,000 to 18,000. At this point, both U.S. political parties - supported by U.S. public opinion - have become avid supporters of an impregnable border, and are prepared to freely expend even greater resources in building protective barriers instead of solving what could be...

MEXICO CITY Following President-elect Barack Obama’s triumph in the U.S. elections, the Mexican government hopes to enter a new stage in the country’s relations with its northern neighbour. But it will be no easy task, especially considering that Obama has said he is interested in renegotiating NAFTA in order to improve its labour and environmental standards. He also voted for the 2006 Secure Fence Act...although since then he has softened his support for the barrier. As soon as Obama’s victory was confirmed, Mexican President Felipe Calderón invited him to visit the country in the near future....the conservative Calderón also expressed...

WESLACO, TEXAS - People are taking deadly risks to cross the border into the U.S. illegally. Their goal is to get just north of the Falfurrias checkpoint. That's where people scatter to places across the U.S.... ...but it wasn't until our NEWSCHANNEL 5 crew encountered a group of illegals moving north in the middle of the night that we realized it's not a single person or a dozen crossing, it's a thundering herd of people. Hundreds of illegals are crossing in groups. Their footsteps are so consistent they create a drumbeat. A group of 20 and their smuggler caught our...

President-elect Barack Obama has turned to Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the fourth-ranking House Democrat and a close friend from Chicago, for a chief of staff, and John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff, to lead his transition team. In turning to Emanuel and Podesta, Obama sought out two veterans of President Bill Clinton's administration, known for their deep Washington experience, savvy and no-holds-barred approach to politics. Neither is considered a practitioner of the "new politics" that Obama promised on the campaign trail to bring Republicans and Democrats together, suggesting that the cool and conciliatory new president...

Immigration reform has a less than comprehensive look at the end of the Bush administration, as Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Michael Chertoff made clear in his wrap-up speech on the "State of Immigration." Over the past three years Chertoff has intensified the post-Sept. 11 immigrant crackdown with the aim of simplifying immigration reform...Chertoff argued in his Oct. 23 speech that immigration reform can be a simple matter of hunting down illegal immigrants and contracting out foreign workers. Pointing to the recent DHS record of arrests, deportations, and an increasingly fortified southern border, Chertoff made the case that he has successfully...

President Bush has extended an invitation to his successor, Barack Obama, to go to the White House and begin discussing the transition from one administration to the other. For his part, Obama already has begun building his transition team, which apparently will include Dr. Juliet V. Garcia, president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.... ... the president should pay attention to the clear message voters gave on Tuesday - that they want something different - and at least consider Obama's ideas and proposals in whatever decisions he makes for the remainder of his term. Bush...

Tamar Jacoby thought it could finally pass this time. She believed months of lobbying by her and other supporters — from businesses to labor unions to faith-based groups — had paid off. A high-profile author and researcher on immigration, Jacoby believed in her heart that the majority of the legislators from both houses finally "got it'' — that passing the controversial comprehensive immigration reform bill, the one President Bush endorsed, was good for America as well as for American business and the nation's economy in general. Then the tsunami hit. An estimated 2 million calls and faxes poured into legislative...

Although many Americans believe immigration is a domestic issue that should be excluded from talks with other governments, this is not a view held by other nations – or by the United States. Indeed, the US negotiated its first immigration deal in 1907, maintained for more than two decades a controversial treaty with Mexico covering immigration, and has kept up immigration talks and deals even with Fidel Castro since the early 1960’s. For many Latin American nations, not just Mexico, immigration is the single most important issue in their relations with the US. The Caribbean islands all have a similarly...

News that Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States has already sparked a global conversation about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how American foreign policy will shift in the coming months...US troops will be pulled out of Iraq in the next 16 months, while the American force in Afghanistan will be substantially reinforced, reversing what is widely seen as one of the fundamental strategic blunders of the Bush era. The US military effort is to be focused once more on al-Qaida and its allies. Obama has vowed that if necessary, American forces would, as under the...

Julio Frenk, who served as Minister of Health of Mexico between 2000 and 2006, spoke at University of California-Davis in April about Mexico's efforts to reform and expand its health care system...Mexico apparently has decided to do something about the 50 million of its citizens, most of them poor, who lack insurance and access to decent health care. The nation figures this will be an expensive, long-haul task and proposes to tackle the problem one piece at a time, starting with providing basic services to the poorest citizens... Frenk called it the "democratization of health." By this he meant all...

They will hunt down and destroy al Qaeda, secure all of the world’s loose nuclear materials in four years, and make vital medicines faster than ever before. Sound too good to be true? That’s President-elect Barack Obama ’s homeland security agenda. If two years of campaigning didn’t produce many specifics of either candidate’s homeland security plans, that may not change in the next several months.....Obama would “defeat terrorism worldwide” — his top national-security priority — by ending the war in Iraq; moving resources to Afghanistan; strengthening international partnerships in military, intelligence, law enforcement and financial transaction monitoring to eliminate shared...

SAN FRANCISCO – Ahead of the Nov. 4 election, with all eyes on the presidential race, hundreds of young people amassed in front of the Homeland Security offices in downtown San Francisco in what some say is the first in a series of civil disobedience style protests to stop ICE raids against immigrants. Last week hundreds of youth, families and organizers from over 10 different cities in the Bay Area gathered at the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in San Francisco to demand an end to ICE raids, to demand that all detention centers be shut down and to demand...

BRUSSELS -- The global blacklisting system for financiers of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups is at risk of collapse, undermined by legal challenges and waning political support in many countries, according to counterterrorism officials in Europe and the United States. In September, the European Court of Justice threw the future of the United Nations' sanctions program against al-Qaeda and the Taliban into doubt when it declared the blacklist violated the "fundamental rights" of those targeted... The U.N. blacklist is the backbone of an international effort to prevent al-Qaeda supporters from raising or transferring money...