Free Republic

President Donald Trump shakes hands with FEMA Administrator Brock Long as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen watches after visiting areas in North Carolina and South Carolina impacted by Hurricane Florence (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the federal disaster response agency used government vehicles without proper authorization, but will not lose his job over it, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Friday. Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator William “Brock” Long had been under investigation by the Homeland Security Department’s watchdog over possibly misusing government vehicles to travel to his home in Hickory, North Carolina. Word leaked of...

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Tuesday night released documents appearing to show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) diverted nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The documents, first reported by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, detail the agency’s funding redirections for fiscal 2018 and show that millions of dollars were diverted to ICE from several agencies. Those diverted funds, totaling $33.1 million, “will provide funding in support of higher priority detention and removal requirements than those for which originally appropriated,” according to the documents. According to MSNBC, Merkley believes the transfer from...

A former staffer with the Department of Homeland Security who resigned Tuesday after ties to white nationalists were exposed reportedly attended policy meetings at the White House. Ian Smith, who emails reveal was in contact with a number of white nationalists, was at multiple policy meetings regarding immigration, The Washington Post reports. He did not provide significant input at the meetings and was mainly there as a placeholder for his boss, an official told the Post. Smith resigned prior to the emails being published by The Atlantic earlier this week. DHS distanced itself from his reported views. “The Department of...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reversing the closed-door “administrative closure” amnesty for 350,000 migrants which was quietly created by officials working for former President Barack Obama. The huge amnesty was carried out by Obama’s judges in the immigration courts who told roughly 350,000 migrants that their case files were being placed in storage facilities instead of being used in trials to send them home. But Sessions has ordered that the files be pulled from storage and sent back into the immigration courts, alarming immigration lawyers, and progressives. The migration industry is denouncing the amnesty reversal as an intrusion on the...

The White House has finally divulged the names of American Muslim leaders who met with President Obama this week, including Imam Mohamed Magid, who has advised the administration on formulating responses to incidents that Islamists consider offensive. After stonewalling journalists for two days about the names of the participants at the meeting Wednesday, the White House quietly attached the list of attendees to the end of its daily press briefing transcript Thursday evening. The guest list identified Imam Magid as a representative of the Adams Center, a large mosque in Sterling, Virginia. He has also served as president of the...

Investigative journalist Jenny Moore was found dead in her room at the Radisson Country Inn & Suites in Washington D.C. on Monday. She had been investigating claims of alleged involvement of former President William J. Clinton in sex trafficking. Four weeks before her death, Moore had provided information from interviews with the alleged victim to the Department of Homeland Security and allegations against Clinton.

The socialist Justice Department employee who harassed the Homeland Security secretary at a Washington restaurant won’t be disciplined for her political tweets, a government watchdog has concluded. Allison Hrabar’s Twitter posts complaining about deportation and detention policy aren’t political activity, the Office of Special Counsel ruled, and so they don’t break the federal Hatch Act. OSC Hatch Act Unit chief Ana Galindo-Marrone said someone must go beyond policy to actually back the election or defeat of a candidate to be in violation of the rules. “The tweets we reviewed from June 19 and 20, which Ms. Hrabar posted while at...

Peter Strzok Insisted on Retaining His Ability to Leak Information Judicial Watch Forces FBI To Take Steps to Preserve Comey Records Judicial Watch Investigates Leftist Attacks on Israel Peter Strzok Insisted on Retaining His Ability to Leak Information We’ve learned something new about the disgraced former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. When he was being moved over to Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel Operation, Strzok insisted on retaining the clandestine perks of his job. This was clear in 14 pages of documents we have received from the FBI. They show that Strzok demanded that he keep his high-level security...

A federal judge on Friday said the government must restart the entire DACA deportation amnesty, including accepting brand new applications — but gave the administration a chance to appeal before his ruling takes effect. The ruling by Judge John D. Bates is a major blow to President Trump, and creates even more confusion about his immigration policy. Judge Bates said Mr. Trump and his Homeland Security Department do have the power to revoke the Obama-era DACA program, but they cut too many corners in the way they tried to do it.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday called for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which resulted in the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern border. “It is and was a cruel policy inconsistent with the bedrock values of the nation,” Durbin said during an oversight hearing of the government’s efforts to reunite the families. “Someone in this administration has to accept responsibility.” Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, joins a growing list of senators calling out Nielsen for her role in the administration's...

The Department of Homeland Security has dramatically raised worksite enforcement to deter employers from hiring cheap illegal workers. Since October, the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit has checked employment records at 6,093 worksites, up from 1,716 in the prior fiscal year from October 2016 to the end of September 2017. The current pace of checks in 2018 is almost a five-fold increase from the prior year and included 100 stores in the 7-Eleven chain and 77 companies in California. The agency has made 675 criminal arrests of managers or supervisors, plus 984 administrative arrests of illegals in the last nine...

(Reuters) - A federal judge said on Friday the U.S. government had made “very promising” progress toward reuniting some 2,500 immigrant children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration. {snip} Nearly 850 parents had been interviewed and cleared for reunification as of Thursday and another 229 parents had been deemed ineligible because of criminal records, or because they “waived” reunification or for other reasons, the report said. The rest are pending review. More than 850 parents are facing final deportation orders, government lawyers told the court on Friday.

Republican senators called Thursday for the Senate to approve a resolution putting the chamber on record in support of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying the government’s top deportation agency does critical work in keeping the country safe. Led by Sens. Ted Cruz and John Kennedy, the resolution counters the call from a growing number of Democrats to abolish ICE over anger at the agency’s role in detaining and deporting illegal immigrants. “Abolishing ICE is unthinkable,” said Mr. Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) held a joint call Tuesday to announce their efforts to comply with a June 26 federal court ruling mandating children under five years old in HHS custody be “reunited” with parents if they were separated at the border. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit, set a July 10 deadline to reunite the families and refused to provide additional time for the government to use DNA testing to determine if the people in question are even the 102...

Judicial Watch Sues for Documents on Mueller’s Abusive Raid on Trump’s Lawyers In April, Special Counsel Mueller and the DOJ crossed yet another bridge too far, when Mueller recommended, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved, a raid on President Trump’s then-personal attorney’s home and office. At the time of the raid, I tweeted: “The raid is just one more reason to shut the Mueller operation down – it’s constitutionally suspect, ethically compromised, & frankly has no reason for being – given the fact that there’s no evidence of @RealDonaldTrump-Russia collusion.” Judicial Watch began an investigation that has resulted...

US Border Patrol had the audacity to separate another mother from her 2-year-old child merely for smuggling $157,500 worth of meth with her infant in the backseat of her car! This is a travesty of justice and unbelievably cruel! From US Customs and Border Patrol: YUMA, Ariz. – U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Wellton Station Interstate 8 Immigration Checkpoint arrested a Yuma resident for transporting 41 packages of methamphetamine in her vehicle Monday. At approximately 10:31 a.m., agents sent a green 2005 Chrysler Pacifica to the secondary inspection area for further investigation. A Border Patrol canine positively alerted...

President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to house and detain up to 12,000 illegal aliens in Department of Defense facilities. In a letter to the Defense Department, DHS officials have asked that enough detention space be made available for the agency to detain up to 12,000 illegal aliens, specifically border crossing family units. DHS officials say that if the Defense Department does not have the facilities to house that number, DHS is requesting that the agency identify land space to build “semi-separate, soft-sided camp facilities capable of sheltering up to 4,000 people, at three separate locations,” the...

Retiring U.S. Immigration and Customs Immigration Enforcement chief official, Thomas Homan, sat down with the Washington Examiner's Anna Giaritelli to discuss his time in the agency and what can be improved upon to increase border security. Homan remarked during the interview that, of the six administrations that he has worked for, no commander-in-chief has more positively impacted the border than President Trump. "It’s just a fact that our sitting president of one year has made a big difference," Homan said. "I've worked for six presidents. I started with Ronald Reagan...No one has done more for border [safety], public safety,...

A former top Border Patrol official was tapped Saturday to be the acting chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ronald D. Vitiello takes over from Thomas D. Homan, who had been the acting chief since the start of the Trump administration. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced the move, calling Mr. Vitiello a “well-respected career law enforcement officer” and promised he would be a good advocate for agents and officers.

It's a story that began nearly fifteen years ago… With its passage in November 2002, the Homeland Security Act set into motion what would be the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense. Opening its doors in March 2003, one of the component agencies in the new Department of Homeland Security was the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and strengthen public safety in response to the deadly attacks perpetrated...