Free Republic

New York, California, Georgia, Texas, and Nevada also received migrant flights. The House Homeland Security Committee subpoenaed documents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday detailing a list of 45 cities that thousands of paroled migrants flew into in the past two years via a controversial immigration program. The DHS established the immigration policy in October of 2022, which was intended for Venezuelans to enter the country legally as long as they had an American sponsor, and passed a vetting process. It was later opened to migrants from Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The program did not secure the...

The lawsuit by the State of Texas, challenging the federal requirement to pay taxes and register homemade silencers, is moving forward in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Oral arguments are scheduled for April 29, 2024. The case is now known as Paxton v Dettelbach. On February 24, 2022, Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, filed suit against the acting head of the ATF, then Marvin Richardson. The lawsuit was required by Texas law. HB 957 became law in Texas on September 1, 2021. On July 15, 2022, Paxton, acting for the State of Texas, amended the lawsuit...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against two state-level health policies that exclude so-called “gender-affirming” treatments, teeing up potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court...Judge Roger Gregory, an appointee of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote in his majority opinion that the policies’ exclusion of surgeries such as vaginoplasties for certain diagnoses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.“The coverage exclusions facially discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity, and are not substantially related to an important government interest,” he said.The 8–6 decision affirmed lower court decisions against West Virginia’s...

MAGA Continues: Full Speed, to November!

U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa acquitted three former Backpage executives of myriad counts against them last week—more evidence of how empty so much of the federal case against them is. Humetewa ruled that there was insufficient evidence to uphold 50 of the counts* against journalist and Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey, 10 of the counts against former Executive Vice President Scott Spear, and 18 of the counts against former Chief Financial Officer Jed Brunst. From the beginning, this prosecution has been premised on a bogus rationale (authorities yammer on about sex trafficking though none of the defendants are charged with sex...

Columbia University banned media access on its campus Tuesday as pro-Palestine protests continue. "Media access to campus is suspended. Campus is accessible only to CUID-holders and essential personnel as a safety measure and that includes media," read an announcement on the university website. The university also revealed that early Tuesday morning, "a group of protestors occupied Hamilton Hall on the Morningside campus of Columbia University."

Jack Poso 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec BREAKING: Trump found in contempt of court for 9 gag order violations

What anti-racism workshops taught usWe had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity. An older white woman whom I’ll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldn’t be white anymore. This provided...

A federal agency worked with the Trump transition team to send two pallets of “document boxes” relating to former President Donald Trump’s presidency to his Mar-a-Lago home — one year before Special Counsel Jack Smith then raided the residence to look for classified documents. Smith indicted Trump in June of 2023 for allegedly mishandling classified documents, one year after armed federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago in search of such documents. The General Services Administration (GSA) was in talks with Trump’s team both during and after his term regarding “pallets” of items from the president’s tenure, emails show. The GSA informed Trump’s...

Several Republican-led states said that they are banning U.S. Department of Justice election monitors from entering polling sites in the November general election after the agency sent observers to various states in the 2022 midterms. When the DOJ announced that it was sending election monitors to polling sites in multiple states for the 2022 midterm elections, Florida and Missouri said that the department employees would not be permitted to observe the polls. Now, eight other states have said that they will also not allow DOJ election monitors to enter polling sites during the election this November, with some saying that...

Even for medical practitioners who are pro-abortion, this is a dangerous precedent to set—first they came for Dr. Terence Davids, tomorrow they’ll come for you. (A Martin Niemöller poetic iteration, if you will.) Here’s the story, from a post published by the Campaign Life Coalition (CLC):Dr. Davids is a physician working in Saskatoon at the Bridge City Mediclinic.…One day last December, a woman came into the clinic to have her pregnancy assessed by Dr. Davids. However, the purpose of her visit was not to check on the health of her child. This visit was to gather size and development details...

In successfully lobbying Congress for an additional $61 billion in Ukraine war funding, an effort that ended this month with celebratory Democrats waving Ukrainian flags in the House chamber, President Biden has cast his administration’s standoff with Russia as an existential test for democracy. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas,” Biden declared in his State of the Union address in March. “History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th.” While Biden’s narrative is widely accepted by Washington’s political establishment, a close examination of...

A California court ruled state laws cannot broadly override local control over development and zoning, finding one of the state’s most significant new zoning laws is unconstitutional. “This is not a case about whether or not our State Legislature may enact legislation to ensure access to affordable housing or whether it may act to address the different concern of a statewide housing shortage more generally,” wrote California Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin in his ruling. “However, because the provisions of SB 9 are not reasonably related and sufficiently narrowly tailored to the explicit stated purpose of that legislation —...

ive West Virginia middle school students who protested a trans athlete's participation in a shot put competition have been banned from future competitions. Becky Pepper-Jackson, 13, competed in the Harris County Middle School Track and Field Championship on April 18, two days after a federal appeals court ruled West Virginia’s transgender sports ban violates the teen's right under Title IX. Five girls from Lincoln Middle School stepped up to the circle for their turn, then refused to throw the ball. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has filed a lawsuit against the Harrison County Board of Education on the student's...

EEOC's landmark new regulatory guidance elevates gender identity as a protected class under discrimination laws like race, sex and religion. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In landmark guidance, the federal commission created to fight racial and sexual discrimination declared Monday that employers that fail to use a worker's preferred pronoun or refuse them the chance to use the restroom of their choice will be engaging in prohibited harassment. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the new harassment guidelines Monday after voting along partisan lines on Friday to approve them, even in the face of opposition from nearly two dozen red states. Three Democratic...

Prosecutors say they will not retry an Arizona rancher whose trial in the fatal shooting of a Mexican man on his property ended last week with a deadlocked jury. The jurors in the case against George Alan Kelly were unable to reach a unanimous decision on a verdict after more than two days of deliberation. The judge declared a mistrial on April 22. The 75-year-old Kelly had been on trial for nearly a month. The rancher was charged with second-degree murder in the Jan. 30, 2023, killing of 48-year-old Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea outside Nogales, Arizona, near the border with Mexico.

A group of Republican senators reached out to National Public Radio (NPR), urging the network to “start a course correction” to shake off a left-wing bias controversy under the leadership of CEO Katherine Maher. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) led a letter sent to Maher on Monday, highlighting concerns raised by Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR who resigned this month after he stoked fresh scrutiny of the media organization with claims that it “lost America’s trust” with an increasingly leftist bent. “It is not NPR’s job to tell Americans what to think but to inform them with unbiased facts....

We’ve all surely had dark thoughts that the CIA is really running the United States, including many media venues. Maybe that’s been true for decades and we just didn’t know it. If so, let’s just say that it would explain a tremendous amount of what has otherwise been clouded in secrecy.How would this be possible? Knowledge is power while secret knowledge is full control. Even fake knowledge means power and control, such as we found out in the phony Russiagate investigation early in Trump’s term. They hounded the new administration for years under a completely fake scenario in which Russia...

In the meantime, lawfare designed to deny Americans their choice for POTUS continues. Among the many bizarre features of the Trump documents case is the relationship between former presidents and the National Archives. The Presidential Records Act (1978) is the defining statute. It’s entirely civil, not criminal, in nature. Disagreements between former presidents and the Archives are to be settled in civil court, and case law makes clear presidents have the sole power to declassify, though there is no universal procedure for such declassification. The Supreme Court has dealt with the issue: The Supreme Court determined in its 1988 decision...

We all get to vote, but the ability to make legislation is no longer in the hands of the people we elect,’ Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger said. As the administrative state implements more regulations on Americans, a team of legal veterans has come together to fight the expansion of unelected government agency power. Sometimes, they even win. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which consists of a team of 27 lawyers and support staff, including former judges, had four of the cases they litigated go before the Supreme Court in 2023. One case was decided in their favor, the...