Free Republic

Even as President Obama grapples with the crisis of immigrant children arriving at the Southwest border, White House officials are laying the groundwork for a large-scale expansion of immigrant rights that would come by executive action within weeks. Officials signaled strongly Friday that Obama's move would shield from deportation large numbers of immigrants living in the country illegally, as advocacy groups have demanded. Roughly 5 million of the estimated 11 million people who entered the country without legal authorization or overstayed their visas could be protected under a leading option the White House is considering, according to officials who discussed...

A desperate hunt is underway in Northern California for a tuberculosis patient who has refused treatment and may be contagious, putting those around him at risk. County health officials asked prosecutors to seek the warrant, in part, because Rosas Cruz comes from a part of Mexico known for its drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. Taylor, who did not know the status of Rosas Cruz's residency, said he is not interested in punishing him through the criminal court system. Rather, Taylor said he is using the courts to protect the public's health. By law, health officials can't force a patient to be...

Human smugglers in Mexico routinely give young illegal immigrant girls birth control for their trip through Mexico. The odds are they will be raped.

Three alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel are in jail after allegedly bringing their brutal tactics north of the border and using them on a South Carolina man who owed them a $200,000 drug debt. The FBI says the men kidnapped a 23-year-old from his hometown in St. Matthews, South Carolina, on July 9 and held him for nearly a week while they tried to extort up to $400,000 from his family. He was rescued mostly unharmed early Tuesday from a home in rural Roseboro, North Carolina, where he was found chained to the floor and blindfolded. Authorities say...

Glenn Beck said bringing soccer balls, teddy bears, and hot meals to illegal immigrants who have been detained along the U.S.-Mexico border will be the most right thing he has ever done. On July 19, Beck will travel to McAllen, Texas, because he believes Americans must "open our hearts" to the illegal immigrant children who have been unlawfully entering the country.

".....More than 25 residents spoke during the public comment section of Tuesday's council meeting, which followed a public workshop on Monday night. The resolution passed 6-2. Council members Thiess, Dan Becker, Todd Kinsey, Geri Bentley, Andy Mann and Mayor Timothy Paulissen voted in favor while council members Dennis OKeeffe and Joanna Dawson were opposed. Before the vote, Thiess announced that a similar measure based on the League City proposal was passed by Galveston County commissioners on Tuesday afternoon........"

Dozens of sheriffs around the country are refusing to detain noncitizens convicted of crimes for extra time to allow the federal government to start deportation proceedings after a court ruling that one immigrant's civil rights had been violated when she was held without probable cause. "When a judge says something is in violation of the Fourth Amendment, I am not going to just keep doing it," Sheriff William Gore of San Diego told The New York Times. "If they want to take someone into federal custody, the can decide to do that, but I am not going to keep holding...

Gladys Lopez allowed her four year-old illegal immigrant daughter to travel to the US. Now she can’t find her. The Obama administration lost track of the little girl. What happened to the girl remains a mystery. KRGV reported: The Obama Administration has lost track of an illegal immigrant girl. The four-year-old girl is just one of thousands who have been taken into custody by border patrol agents. Gladys Lopez says she was able to speak with her daughter, Eliana, briefly over the phone after she was taken into custody. Lopez hasn’t heard from the girl or immigration authorities since. Lopez...

The Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to allow members of Congress to go on a managed tour of a Texas facility that houses immigrant children, amid congressional criticism that the government is trying to keep members out of these facilities. But HHS has set several ground rules that members will have to follow if they attend. **SNIP** “No recording devices will be allowed (We may ask you to leave your cellphone in your vehicle),” the email said. “No questions will be allowed during the tour, but questions will be addressed right after the tour,” it continued. “No...

EDINBURG, Texas (AP) -- When authorities found an 11-year-old Guatemalan boy's body about a mile from Texas' southern border, they also discovered his brother's Chicago phone number scribbled on the inside of his belt buckle...."Down here finding a decomposed body ... we come across them quite often," Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra said, adding that this was the first child immigrant his office has found since he became sheriff in April. "It's a very dangerous journey

Militia members and other concerned U.S. citizens are converging on the border town of Laredo, Texas, on Friday to create a blockade against illegal immigrants crossing into the United States, the organizer of the human chain and protest said on Newsmax TV's "MidPoint." "This will continue for days and weeks to come" and spread "to other points" along the U.S.-Mexico frontier, Barbie Rogers, founder of the Patriots Information Hotline, said in a telephone interview from Laredo. "We are trying to contact every person and every patriot in the United States to go down and help do something the government should...

Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death with a stick after the doomed woman made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers. Noor Hussein, 75, was so outraged over the prospect of eating the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussein, 66, inside their Brooklyn apartment until she was a “bloody mess,” prosecutors said in opening statements of his murder trial Wednesday. .... in his home country, beating your wife is customary. “He comes from a culture where he thinks this is...

THOMPSON SPRINGS, Grand County — Four people were killed and four others critically injured after a van that was apparently involved in a human smuggling operation rolled multiple times on I-70 Friday morning. About 4:30 a.m., approximately 34 miles west of the Utah-Colorado border ... Investigators believe a ninth person, possibly a woman, walked away from the scene. That person had not been located as of noon. "We're looking at this as possibly being a human smuggling case," Royce said. The Utah State Bureau of Investigations, Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were assisting the Utah...

Immigration officials knowingly released dozens of murderers back into the U.S. in 2013, according to Obama administration statistics detailing all of the criminal convictions of the more than 36,000 immigrants released from custody last year. The numbers show that the criminals released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had amassed more than 15,000 drunken-driving convictions, 1,317 domestic violence convictions, 727 sex crimes convictions and even four that the statistics listed as “treason, sabotage.” The immigrants were in deportation proceedings, meaning ICE was trying to remove them from the country and could have held them in detention, but released them anyway,

An Ethiopian immigrant is suing Israel’s major banks—because they are denying him loans that he is seeking to build the Third Holy Temple (Beit Hamikdash). The Temple was the spiritual center of the Jewish people for millennia; the destruction of the first two temples marked the exile of the Jewish people twice, first to Babylonia and then to Rome. The destruction of the Second Temple rendered the Temple Mount a ruin, and was later taken over by first the Christians, and then the Muslims, who built two mosques on the site of the Temple. […] However, the immigrant does not...

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is done being patient. There was a time when an Oval Office meeting with President Obama could buy their silence. But no longer. On Friday April 4, the CHC sent a six-page letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson demanding that Obama use "all legal means available" to "suspend, delay, or dispense with the deportations of immigrants who would qualify for legal status and protection under S. 744." At no point does the letter bother to call for new legislation or the passage of S.744. Instead, the CHC just demands that Obama enforce current...

If President Obama means what he says about wanting an immigration system that reflects American values, helps the economy and taps the yearnings of millions of Americans-in-waiting, he is going to have to do something about it — soon and on his own. It has been frustrating to watch his yes-we-can promises on immigration reform fade to protestations of impotence and the blaming of others. All Mr. Obama has been saying lately is: No, in fact, we can’t, because Republicans and the law won’t let me. Mr. Obama is correct when he complains that long-term immigration repairs have been throttled...

A drug ring that employed a vast network — including a voodoo priest — supplying methamphetamine across Central Florida and the U.S. was shutdown this week, the Polk County Sheriff's office announced Wednesday. The 13 suspects arrested Tuesday were among 25 couriers, distributors and street dealers identified in Operation Hoodoo Voodoo, the investigation of a multimillion-dollar meth pipeline from Mexico. Javier Flores, known as "El Don (The Boss)," supervised the shipments from his home in southern California and remains at large, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. On Tuesday, 44 pounds of the powerful amphetamine were seized at Love's...

From the “not what you might expect” files, here’s a fact about Catholicism in the early 21st century that flies in the face of conventional wisdom: It’s growing by leaps and bounds in the heart of the Muslim world. Many Americans have heard about an exodus of Christians out of the Middle East, and that’s all too real. Christians now make up only 5 percent of the region’s population, down from 20 percent a century ago. In places like Iraq, whole Christian communities are on the brink of extinction. Yet the Arabian Peninsula today is also seeing one of the...

So many teenage girls turned up dead in a vacant field on the outskirts of Mexico City that people nicknamed it the "women's dumping ground." They began showing up in 2006, usually left among piles of garbage. Some were victims of domestic violence, others of drug gangs that have seized control of entire neighborhoods in the gritty town of Ecatepec, northeast of the capital. The lot has since been cleared and declared an ecological reserve. But its grisly past is not forgotten and the killings have only accelerated. Dulce Cristina Payan, 17, was one of the victims. Two years ago,...