Free Republic

Last week Seattle Judge Robart claimed no-one had been arrested from the seven nations that are included in President Trump’s executive order. From the hearing: • Judge Robart: “How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?” • DOJ Attorney Michelle Bennett: “Your Honor, I don’t have that information.” • Judge Robart: “Let me tell you… The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you’re here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these...

Replacing ‘old Americans’ with ‘new Americans!’ On Monday hundreds of liberal activists and refugee resettlement agency operatives (you pay their salaries with your tax dollars) held a conference call to plan political action against President Donald Trump’s order, that calls for a moratorium for 4 months on refugee resettlement, and his order to improve vetting for immigrants coming from dangerous terror hotspots around the world. (Below are some of the groups that participated.) If President Trump is cutting off federal funding to sanctuary cities how about cutting off funding for resettlement agencies who could be using federal dollars to organize...

Trump’s executive order is so modest that the foundation of it is essentially existing law. That law was passed unanimously by both bodies of Congress in 2002. In fact, it garnered the support of 16 Democrat senators and 57 Democrat House members who are still serving in their respective bodies! Following 9/11, Congress passed the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, which addressed many of the insecurities in our visa tracking system. The bill passed the House and Senate unanimously. The bill was originally sponsored by a group of bipartisan senators, including Ted Kennedy and Sen. Dianne Feinstein,...

State Department diplomats are circulating a memo objecting to President Trump’s executive order last week to suspend the nation’s refugee program and deny U.S. entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East. The document is destined for what’s known as the State Department’s “dissent channel,” which was set up during the Vietnam War as a way for diplomats to signal their disagreement on foreign policy decisions to senior management. The communications are typically private. It is not known whether the memo has been submitted yet to Acting Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, a holdover from the...

Today, Chuck Schumer was in tears over President Donald Trump's several-nation, temporary immigration ban.However, a little research shows that the same countries were singled out by Obama, with an effect of tightening entry to the United States by those countries: According to the draft copy of Trump's executive order, the countries whose citizens are barred entirely from entering the United States is based on a bill that Obama signed into law in December 2015. Obama signed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act as part of an omnibus spending bill. The legislation restricted access to the Visa...

The government’s new system that grants citizenship has “alarming” security breaches, including allowing immigrants to be approved without a full FBI background check, the Homeland Security inspector general said Monday in an “urgent” warning telling the government to put everything on hold. Inspector General John Roth said he got wind that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was about to take the troubled system online later this month, and said he was compelled to issue the extraordinary alert to try to prevent a massive mistake. He said that as of Jan. 11, about 175 citizenship applications were approved despite never having...

(Via CNN) No person accepted to the United States as a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, has been implicated in a major fatal terrorist attack since the Refugee Act of 1980 set up systematic procedures for accepting refugees into the United States, according to an analysis of terrorism immigration risks by the Cato Institute. Oh Really? No Refugees implicated in terrorism? Read on…

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, I, BARACK OBAMA, [] hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens who meet one or more of the criteria in section 1 of this order would...

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of persons described in section 1 of this proclamation would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. I therefore hereby proclaim that: Section 1. The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of...

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of persons described in section 1 of this proclamation would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. I therefore hereby proclaim that: Section 1. The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of...

Senior White House adviser and Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon defied suggestions from Department of Homeland Security lawyers, according to a CNN report, and personally convinced the president to include green card holders in the executive order that placed a travel ban on refugees and immigrants from seven countries in the Middle East. It is fairly unprecedented for a non-elected official to have such sway over the president and policy-making, but the fact that Steve Bannon personally overruled Homeland Security and their legal interpretation of the order is a testament to his influence over Trump. Last Friday the president signed...

Why would the text of President Trump’s Executive Order suspending travel visas be readily available on CNN (HERE), New York Times (HERE), Wall Street Journal (HERE), but not on White House page (HERE)? I don’t think it’s accidental. The limiting Visa program was President Obama’s action, not President Trump. If you review the actual text of the executive order (copied below in full) what you will immediately notice is the order doesn’t specify ANY countries to be included in the Visa suspension (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). President Trump is not suspending visas from countries his team...

<p>It’s the standard canard against immigration reform: the last time this country had immigration under control (1924-65), it caused the exclusion of Jewish refugees—who ended up exterminated by the Nazis. Therefore (though this would not follow even if this premise were true) restrictions on immigration are immoral.</p>