Free Republic

Lemon is facing warranted backlash after telling Black and Brown Americans to legally arm themselves in case ICE agents come to their doors. During a live broadcast, Lemon said he was “tired of the niceties” and suggested the Second Amendment exists for situations like this. “Black and Brown people need to get a gun legally. Go get your permit, go get your license, and learn how to use it,” Lemon said. “Because if ICE shows up at your door, you should be able to protect yourself and your family.”

CHICAGO (AP) — Cook County’s top judge has signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at courthouses. Cook County includes Chicago, which has seen a federal immigration crackdown in recent months. Detaining residents outside court has been a common tactic for federal agents, who have been stationed outside county courthouses for weeks, making arrests and drawing crowds of protesters. The order, which was signed Tuesday night and took effect Wednesday, bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while going to court proceedings. It includes arrests made inside courthouses and in parking lots, surrounding sidewalks and...

CHICAGO (AP) — Federal immigration officers in the Chicago area will be required to wear body cameras, a judge said Thursday after seeing tear gas and other aggressive steps used against protesters. U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said she was a “little startled” after seeing TV images of clashes between agents and the public during President Donald Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdown. “I live in Chicago if folks haven’t noticed,” she said. “And I’m not blind, right?” Community efforts to oppose U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have ramped up in the nation’s third-largest city, where neighborhood groups have assembled to monitor...

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a Columbus Day statement alerting Americans that “we are all on stolen land” and accusing Republicans of attempting to “whitewash American history.” Instead of actually commemorating the federally-recognized Columbus Day — or saying nothing at all — the far-left “Squad” member took to social media to instead celebrate “Indigenous Peoples Day,” which is not a federal holiday. “Happy Indigenous People’s Day! We are all on stolen land,” Pressley wrote. “And while Republicans try to whitewash American history, we acknowledge our country’s role in inflicting trauma on our Indigenous neighbors.” “We’ll keep celebrating their contributions, centering...

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has vowed to prosecute Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in a post-Trump era. Pritzker made the comments during an interview with FOX 32 Chicago this week as ICE agents step up their efforts across the city of Chicago. “The tables will turn one day,” Prtizker explained. ”These people should recognize that maybe they’re not gonna get prosecuted today, although we’re looking at doing that, but they may get prosecuted after the Trump administration because the statute of limitations would not have run out.” The 60-year-old added that he had spoken with Illinois Attorney General Kwame...

U.S. District Court Judge LaShonda Hunt, a Biden-appointed federal judge in Illinois, has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE to dismantle a security fence protecting the federal immigration processing facility in Broadview, Illinois, a facility that has been the site of violent protests and anti-ICE riots since the launch of President Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz earlier this fall.

Former President Barack Obama stated that President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to quell crime in Democrat-run cities is “inherently corrupting,” arguing that he would have received a different reaction from conservative media if he had sent the military into Texas during his tenure. Obama spoke with left-wing comedian Mark Maron for the final episode of his long-running podcast, published Monday, in which he shared several of his grievances about how Trump has been leading the country. “When you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting. And so when you now...

“That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy.”Even more than Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama led the most radical effort to politicize the United States military. An effort that his allies and Sen. Warren’s continued under the Biden admin.Between firing commanders in what many described as a ‘purge’ and rewarding wokeness while punishing conservative ideals when it came to promotion, saddling the military with leftist priorities like DEI and green energy, Obama drastically weakened the military by politicizing it resulting in such disasters as Benghazi and the capture of US military personnel by...

Left-wing US bishop says Pope Leo supports his efforts on immigration Left-wing U.S. Bishop Mark Seitz told America magazine last week that Pope Leo XIV supports him speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.“You stand with me, and I stand with you,” Leo told the El Paso ordinary during a meeting he had with a U.S. delegation at the Vatican on October 8. “The church [sic] cannot remain silent.”Seitz serves as the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) committee on migration. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Seitz participated in a Black Lives Matter protest where he...

Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team of 35 “rapid responders” who have been sprinting across the city to film arrests, aiming for at least two to arrive on the...

Demonstrators will once again take to the streets for “No Kings Day,” a nationwide series of protests against the Trump administration, on Oct. 18. While protests against President Trump have not been uncommon since his first term, “No Kings Day” kicked off on June 14. These gatherings were organized in response to the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary military parade in Washington, D.C., which coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday. Across the country, 2,000 “No Kings” protests are scheduled for next Saturday, according to a post from the Indivisible project. There are plans in major cities like Los Angeles; Boston; Washington; Chicago;...

Posing as a TV reporter clad with body armor, Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday mocked the Trump administrative narrative that National Guard troops are needed to quell chaos in “war-torn Chicago” in a bit for ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “This is JB Pritzker, reporting from war-torn Chicago. As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground. It’s quite disturbing,” he says on a downtown Chicago bridge. “The Milwaukee Brewers have come in to attack our Chicago Cubs. “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them, and our deep dish pizza, well, has...

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson ordered the removal of police tape near a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility this week despite the federal government's call for the establishment of a perimeter around the ICE location, according to a report on oregonlive.com. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the ICE facility on Tuesday and Portland Police Bureau Chief Bob Day noted that authorities had the vicinity cordoned off for the occasion. But the perimeter was removed on Wednesday, according to the report.

CHICAGO (Reuters) -On a chilly morning outside Nash Elementary School in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, teachers greeted students with the usual high-fives and hugs, while handing out sheets with red-bolded words proclaiming in capital letters: “Defend your rights under the threat of occupation.” Four weeks into President Donald Trump's "Operation Midway Blitz" deportation drive, mass arrests across the city - which have swept up parents on their way to school and entire families - have induced fear in immigrant communities and protectiveness from educators, according to city leaders, the teachers' union, parents and immigration advocates. "My Latino students, they're fearing...

Former Vice President Harris said on Thursday that any checks and balances to hold back President Trump have not worked. On tour to promote her new book about her campaign, “107 Days,” Harris spoke with journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher at the Warner Theatre to a sold-out audience. “The point is that the guardrails have failed, for the most part,” Harris said. “Except one, which is the people and the power of God.” “So right now, in this moment, if the Supreme Court isn’t a guardrail … what is, from a legal point of view, the guardrail that you see?”...

In issuing her decision, U.S. District Judge April Perry said, “I simply cannot credit [the Trump administration’s] declarations to the extent they contradict state and local law enforcement. … DHS’ perception of events are unreliable.”

MAGA commentators are stepping up as soldiers in Trump’s culture war to provoke confrontations against “Antifa” with the backing of DHS.TWO WEEKS AGO, THE X ACCOUNT for the Department of Homeland Security was being, all things considered, relatively normal.There was a repost of a video about law enforcement at the Charlie Kirk memorial, a video on how the Secret Service had dismantled a digital network that could have carried out attacks near the United Nations General Assembly, a video of part of Trump’s tone-deaf, chest-beating speech at the U.N., and posts and news updates on the Dallas ICE field office...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Leo urged the world's Catholics to help immigrants in his first major document, which was released on Thursday and invoked one of the late Pope Francis' strongest criticisms of U.S. President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies.Leo's document, known as an apostolic exhortation, is focused on the needs of the world's poor. It calls for widespread changes to the global market system to address rising inequality and to help people living paycheck-to-paycheck.The 104-page text started as a writing project by Francis, who was unable to complete it before his death in April after 12 years leading the global...

Trump is not only scapegoating our city; he is plotting to make the neighborhoods of working families, immigrants and communities of color the staging grounds for authoritarian force.While many families prepared their children for school Monday morning, Sept. 29, I woke up to calls from parents in Chicago too afraid to leave their homes. Rumors of immigration enforcement were spreading, and the simple act of walking a child to school felt like too much of a risk. I am a mother and an Illinois state representative, and these calls hit me in two places at once: as a parent who...

President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition. Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten...