Free Republic

Bicycles and illegals don't mix on busy city streets in Chicago. No, wait: They actually mix a lot, and that's a problem. A Chicago bike-safety activist, who made it her business to erect bicycles spray-painted white on city streets where cyclists were killed as a reminder to drivers to look out for cyclists, decided that that issue wasn't all that important in cases where the driver is illegal. Which turned out to be her own assault by an incautious illegal alien driver. In her mind, being illegal trumped the very bike safety she spent time erecting monuments to. One set...

Pope Francis has a problem: Italian Catholics. In the home of the Vatican, believers are increasingly attracted by the hard-line stance of Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. Francis and Salvini espouse radically different approaches to migration. Where the pope has called on countries to take care of the less fortunate, Salvini has turned his close-the-borders approach to immigration into an electoral warhorse. The trouble for Francis is that Salvini seems to be winning — even among Catholic voters.

The Trump administration wants you to believe it's devoted to protecting American taxpayers from supposedly welfare-mooching foreigners. Don't. What President Trump is really doing is shutting the door on all but a small sliver of well-heeled immigrants — while telling the "tired," "poor," and "huddled masses" yearning to put cheap food on American dinner plates to get lost. There was a time when immigration restrictionists used to insist that they weren't motivated by nativist considerations because their beef was not with legal immigrants, but illegal ones who don't play by the rules. Trump has ripped the mask off that lie....

A federal judge on Thursday threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt after discovering that the Trump administration attempted to transfer a woman and her daughter out of the country while an appeal hearing for their deportation was underway. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan granted the American Civil Liberty Union's (ACLU) request for an emergency order to halt the expedited removal of immigrants seeking asylum from domestic abuse and gang violence after he learned the government had put a plaintiff in the case and her daughter on a flight to Central America.

Vox and ProPublica take aim at President Trump’s heightened concern for gangs in the United States in a recently published video, claiming his harsh characterizations of MS-13 are unfair. The gang, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, numbers in the tens of thousands and is composed primarily of outlaws from El Salvador, Honduras, and other Central American countries. Trump’s hardline stance on crime and border security has made MS-13 a more widely recognized public menace. But instead of acknowledging the rising violent threat that MS-13 poses to the American people, progressive media outlets like Vox and ProPublica are casting the Trump...

(CNSNews.com) - Amid growing concern about the illicit drug trade across the U.S.-Mexico border, the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas have been linked to South American drug trafficking organizations–and the money Hezbollah and Hamas make from narco-trafficking is used to finance their organizations, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS). “International terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, have also reportedly raised funding for their terrorist activities through linkages formed with DTOs in South America, particularly those operating in the tri-border area (TBA) of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina,” stated CRS in an April 30 report. As evidence that Hezbollah and...

Philadelphia is one of the so-called sanctuary cities in the United States. These are jurisdictions that are striving for the status of “no-go” zones in Sweden and Britain or trying to be French banlieue where the writ of national law does not run. In fact, Philly’s mayor, James Kenney, was so excited when a federal judge upheld his decision to refuse to allow federal immigration law to be enforced in Philadelphia that he did a small, orgasmic jig The price of his decision and that of his predecessor is now available for all to see and marvel at: U.S. Attorney...

Federal authorities Thursday announced the arrest of 13 people they say were ringleaders in a massive scheme to exploit illegal immigrants as cheap labor on farms and Hispanic-oriented businesses in Minnesota and Nebraska. They also carried out search warrants on 11 of the businesses Wednesday and nabbed 133 illegal immigrant workers they found at the time. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they suspect some of the migrants were coerced into working in rough conditions, either by force or threats of being reported to authorities for deportation...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers Wednesday issued criminal arrest warrants for 17 employers and other individuals charged with exploiting illegal immigrant employees in six Nebraska communities during a series of raids that swept up 133 workers. The operation, which also impacted two communities in Minnesota, was directed at employers and workers in O'Neill, Atkinson, Stromsburg, Ainsworth, Bartlett and Royal. Search warrants were also issued in Las Vegas. Businesses in Nebraska included a tomato greenhouse operation, restaurants, a grocery store, a grain company, a cattle company, farms and ranches.

O’NEILL, Neb. — Federal immigration enforcement officers surrounded a tomato greenhouse complex Wednesday morning in an apparent bust of undocumented immigrants. An ICE spokesman confirmed that it was an “ongoing law enforcement activity” and said that details would be coming later in the day. Shortly before 9 a.m. several ICE law enforcement vehicles arrived at the O’Neill Ventures plant on the northwest edge of O’Neill. Nebraska state troopers blocked the entrance.

Disadvantaged workers in San Francisco could get training for jobs in the cannabis industry under a proposed government program that would require businesses to hire the graduates. The program, dubbed CityGrow, is modeled after CityBuild, an existing government program overseen by the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, that provides training for disadvantaged residents to land jobs in the construction industry. Supervisor Ahsha Safai introduced the legislation last week for “advancing workforce equity.” He told the San Francisco Examiner Tuesday that the intent is “to make sure everyday San Franciscans are able to take advantage of these opportunities.” He noted...

Ever since San Francisco passed their new measure allowing non-citizens (including illegal aliens) to vote in school board elections, the debate over such a concept has flared up yet again. Despite polls showing that only Democrats approve of such an idea in anywhere near majority numbers, there are a lot of Democrats in the Bay area, so you’d think it would be a welcoming environment for them. That’s why it’s rather odd that so few non-citizens have been lining up to register to vote. How few, you ask? Registration opened on July 16th, but as of last Thursday, August...

Immigration and prison officials have seized Bibles and other holy books from immigrants detained at a federal prison in California, where they are being subjected to dangerous and inhumane conditions with no freedom to practice their respective faiths, the American Civil Liberties Union says in a lawsuit. The ACLU said, as part of a coalition of civil rights groups, it has filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Prisons for violating the constitutional rights of the roughly 1,000 immigrants detained at the federal prison located in a desert in Victorville....

“No one – nadie – has the right to invade someone else’s country,” the young lady informed me, her eyes snapping, her forefinger and thumb jabbing the air to punctuate her words. “And it does not matter what their politics are, how poor they are, or how many crocodile tears they cry.” Added a second young lady, equally as adamant and unrelenting, “The minute illegals cross the border, turn their a**es around and send them back where they came from. American gringos have to stop cowering to Latinos.” Now, before any bleeding-heart leftists start clutching their pearls, falling into a...

BREAKING -- ON THE WORLD STAGE -- “Trump letter to Kim Jong Un given to North Korea’s top diplomat at ASEAN summit,” by WaPo’s Carol Morello and Shibani Mahtani in Singapore: “According to an account given by State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, U.S. ambassador Sung Kim, traveling with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, gave the letter from President Trump, in a white envelope, to North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho immediately after Ri and Pompeo shook hands and returned to their seats at a group photo during an ASEAN summit in Singapore. “Nauert said Pompeo told Ri, ‘We should...

Senator Cory Booker, who is one of the Democrats contending for his party's 2020 nomination for president, is pleading political negligence, claiming that he didn't bother to read a sign that he allowed himself to be photographed holding.  Booker, who has raised considerable money from pro-Israel Jewish groups, apparently got carried away with intersectional enthusiasm at the Netroots Nation confab and was unable to get a clue from the t-shirt on the woman standing next to him that proclaimed Palestine's virtue in the realm of "feminist/queer refugee racial justice" that he might be endorsing a radical point of view. The...

Much of the heat that’s gripped California and hastened the spread of deadly wildfires recently is due to a strange but familiar shift in the jet stream — one that’s haunted the West with threatening fire conditions in the past and could cause more hot, dry spells in the future, especially with a changing climate. The jet stream, the river of wind high above the Northern Hemisphere, has been weaker and wavier in the past few weeks, scientists say. Instead of pushing weather systems along as it usually does, it’s allowing the patterns to stagnate. “We’re seeing this mix of...

In early June, I traveled to “The Valley,” as the McAllen-Brownsville area of Texas is called, down where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This river, one of the longest in the U.S., forms the entire Texas-Mexico border, meandering south and east 1,250 miles from our far-west desert city of El Paso to the semi-tropical tip of my state. Its cartographic function aside, the narrow and shallow Rio Grande has historically been viewed by families in the region as more a connector than a divider, and it has long fostered a rich, cross-fertilized culture along its length,...

Last week, a highly influential Italian magazine, Famiglia Cristiana, put on its cover Matteo Salvini, the head of one of the two major parties now jointly running the Italian government. Both parties – one Right, the other Left (actually a vaguely anarchic creation of comedian Beppe Grillo) – advocate sharp controls on illegal immigration. As do the majority of Italians and people in other European countries where illegal immigration has become overwhelming. For that, Salvini – a professed Catholic – was compared to Satan in a blaring headline: “Get behind me, Salvini!” This is neither a personal nor an ideological...

Fourteen transgender illegal aliens have been released from the Cibola County Detention Center in New Mexico after attorneys from the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) Massachusetts chapter got involved. The transgender illegal aliens from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala crossed the U.S. border in a caravan back in May and had been custody, pending their plea that the intolerance of their home countries makes it unsafe for them to return, MassLive.com reports. […] Six transgender illegal aliens from the 20-transgender caravan remain in custody at the Cibola detention center and will make the case for their release later this week, Daily Hampshire...