Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer on Friday unveiled an immigration proposal seeking to make immigrants fleeing the effects of climate change eligible for legal entry into the United States. Like a lot of his White House rivals, Steyer is promising to use executive action to reinstate Obama administration protections for people brought to the country illegally as children. He’d do the same to nullify President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban and end the separation of immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The billionaire environmental activist from California also would seek to decriminalize illegal border crossings and work with Congress to approve...

More than 90% of illegal immigrants arrested by federal agents in the United States last year had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, including 56,000 assaults and thousands of sex crimes, robberies, homicides and kidnappings. Many had “extensive criminal histories with multiple convictions,” according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) year-end report . The 123,128 illegal aliens arrested by the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in 2019 had 489,063 criminal convictions and pending charges, representing an average of four crimes per alien, highlighting the “recidivist nature” of the arrested aliens, the agency writes, noting that sanctuary cities nationwide greatly...

Due to the vigilance of several Border Patrol agents, three people were rescued after trying to scale the new border wall in San Diego on Sunday evening. The event began at approximately midnight on January 5, when agents on patrol near Otay Mesa saw three people in a precarious situation. A man and two women, under the cover of dense fog, tried to enter the U.S. illegally by climbing San Diego Sector’s new 30-foot, steel bollard wall. The trio became stuck at the top of the wet, slippery wall after smugglers abandoned them. Due to the danger of the situation,...

The U.S. government on Monday launched a pilot program to collect DNA from people in immigration custody and submit it to the FBI, with plans to expand nationwide. The information would go into a massive criminal database run by the FBI, where it would be held indefinitely. A memo outlining the program published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security said U.S. citizens and permanent residents holding a “green card” who are detained could be subject to DNA testing, as well as asylum seekers and people entering the country without authorization. Refusing to submit DNA could lead to a misdemeanor...

Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans. “This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.: For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one....

Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States could be sent to Guatemala under a bilateral agreement signed by the Central American nation last year, according to documents sent to U.S. asylum officers in recent days and seen by Reuters. In a Jan. 4 email, field office staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were told Mexican nationals will be included in the populations "amenable" to the agreement with Guatemala. The agreement, brokered last July between the administration of Republican President Donald Trump and the outgoing Guatemalan government, allows U.S. immigration officials to send migrants requesting asylum at the...

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFGO) - The Burleigh County Commission has shot down a non-binding straw poll that would have been put on the June ballot asking voters if the county should continue to accept refugees for resettlement. The Monday night 3-2 vote was the same as the commission vote last month not to accept more than 25 refugees in 2020. Commissioner Brian Bittner proposed putting the question up for a public vote after some residents asked him to do it. Bittner is among those opposed to refugee resettlement. Commission Chairman Jerry Woodcox said after the meeting that he thinks a straw...

Voters overwhelmingly want companies to train and hire Americans before importing more legal immigrants or visa workers. But liberals are far more likely than conservatives to say Congress should allow companies to import more immigrants to take jobs sought by U.S. graduates and sidelined workers, according to Rasmussen’s December survey of 1,250 likely voters. The survey asked voters: When businesses say they are having trouble finding Americans to take jobs in construction, manufacturing, hospitality and other service work, what is generally best for the country? Is it better for businesses to raise the pay and try harder to recruit [Americans]?...

The Department of Homeland Security is agreeing to share citizenship information with the U.S. Census Bureau as part of President Trump’s order to collect data on who is a citizen following the Supreme Court’s rejection of a citizenship question on the 2020 census form.

It has been an emotional start to the new year for Rocio Rebollar Gomez and her family. On Thursday, after 31 years in the United States, a country where she had built a life and raised three children, including a son now in the United States Army, Ms. Gomez was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, where she had little family left. That son, Second Lt. Gibram Cruz, 30, who has been in the Army for five years and rushed to be with her the day after Christmas, said he was “shocked” at the way his mother was treated and called the...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has started filing claims to begin deporting illegal aliens who were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. The agency has recently began reopening administratively closed deportation cases and told CNN earlier this month that all DACA recipients can expect the same.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration stepped up deportations of Guatemalans in 2019, doubling the number of migrants sent back from the United States a decade earlier, data from the Central American country showed on Friday. Trump has made cracking down on illegal immigration a major policy focus and has continued to press the issue in the run-up to the November U.S. presidential election. Last year, the United States deported 54,547 people to Guatemala on 486 flights, the highest since at least 2007, according to data from the Guatemalan Institute of Migration. In 2009, the year Trump's Democratic predecessor Barack Obama...

Video at link. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Screen Capture) (CNSNews.com) - Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D.-Mich.) visited the Mexican side of the border barrier between California and Tijuana, Mexico on Monday to participate in “an interfaith prayer hosted by CAIR” (the Council on American-Islamic Relations). After the prayer service at the border wall, Tlaib sent out a Tweet that included a video report on the event by Now This News. “Rashida Tlaib visited the southern border to pray for separated families,” says a graphic on the video report. “To see firsthand what the wall has done to border communities, families and to...

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ordered a review of state laws that allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses and restrict data sharing with federal immigration authorities. Wolf on Tuesday ordered all of the components of DHS to conduct a department-wide review of the state laws to determine how they affect their day-to-day operations, according to a memo obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The DHS chief’s directive indicates he is prepared to take aim against the state laws. “Accordingly, I am instructing each operational component to conduct an assessment of the...

Syd Mead, the visionary futurist who worked on such classic fantasy/sci-fi films as Tron, Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, died today in Pasadena. He was 86. Roger Servick, his spouse and business partner of 40 years, told Deadline that Mead had been in failing health due to lymphoma cancer and he was undergoing treatment at City of Hope in Duarte, CA. Servick, who was by Mead’s side when he died, said his last words were: “I’m done here. They’re coming to take me back.” Mead’s art department credits include Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Aliens, Timecop, Mission: Impossible III,...

Former acting ICE director Tom Homan says the Department of Justice should sue New York over new law giving benefits to illegal immigrants.

Now that it is officially 2020, illegal alien adults in California are now eligible for Medi-Cal, the state's health care system for low-income families. Starting January 1 – today – Medi-Cal is now extended to illegal aliens ages 19 to 26. Before today those under the age of 19 were able to receive Medi-Cal benefits, the Modesto Bee reported. Before the new legislation took effect, quite a few illegal aliens were receiving limited Medi-Cal benefits (basically emergency services). Now they are able to receive full-scope Medi-Cal benefits, which include preventative and primary care on top of emergency services. Those who...

The Trump administration has expanded an experimental program designed to expedite the processing and deportation of asylum-seekers from all over the world, implementing the new policy in the busiest sector of the U.S.-Mexico border. The program, dubbed Prompt Asylum Claim Review, or PACR, expanded earlier in December to Texas' Rio Grande Valley, a highly transited and patrolled area. Hundreds of asylum-seekers have been subject to the policy since it debuted as a pilot program in the El Paso sector in October. A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesman confirmed the expansion Tuesday, saying the policy is no longer in the...

Denver officials do not plan on fully cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if they release an illegal alien who was deported six times before getting arrested for fleeing the scene of a deadly hit-and-run accident. Juan Sanchez, a Mexican national living in the U.S. illegally, is accused of striking a pedestrian in the Denver area with a vehicle and immediately fleeing the scene. If Sanchez — who lives in a state that largely limits cooperation with ICE — is able to make bond, his release back into the community could pose another showdown between local officials and federal immigration authorities....

The 'Jesus was a refugee' trope is tired and inaccurate. It's time for leftist politicians to stop exploiting Christmas by making false arguments about history.To profane a holy day, politicize it. Politicians’ profanity du jour is to exploit Christmas by making false arguments about immigration policy. Yet their rhetoric unintentionally supports the opposite points from what these politicians intend. Consider Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. On Christmas day, he said, “[D]ivinity on earth … came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee.” Today I join millions around the...