Free Republic

Six illegal immigrant families filed multi-million dollar claims Monday against the Trump administration over last year’s family separations, saying they need the money to pay for counseling and other medical care to heal from the “torture” they said they suffered. The legal claims are the latest effort by immigrant-rights groups to punish the administration for the separations of thousands of children, which resulted from the Justice Department’s zero tolerance policy for illegal border crossers. The families and their lawyers say the policy intended to inflict “emotional distress” on the parents and children, hoping it would make attempting to sneak into...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested hundreds of people living without documents in North Carolina last week, according to the Charlotte Observer. The spike in arrests comes after major counties in the state severed ties with ICE. According to the Charlotte Observer, ICE Regional Director Sean Gallaghar said, “This is the direct conclusion of dangerous policies of not cooperating with ICE. This forces my officers to go out onto the street to conduct more enforcement.” About 200 people were detained in North Carolina. Gallaghar said the arrests could continue if ICE is not allowed to access county...

Efforts by the United States to send food to starving Venezuelans were blocked by order of President Nicolas Maduro. “Our policies have enabled our citizens to lose an average of more than 40 lbs. each over the past two years,” he boasted. “We have achieved objectives that the morbidly obese Americans envy and resent.” “The key is to remove the opportunity to eat,” Maduro explained. “The ’empty stores’ initiative we implemented largely accomplished this goal. It has also had the salutary added benefit of getting our people to eat garbage and keep almost all of the country’s edible waste from...

Harvey affected all Houstonians, but not everyone felt the impacts equally. Undocumented immigrants with disabilities faced unique challenges during and after the storm. A new report on immigrants with disabilities in Houston highlights widespread problems with accessibility, health and lost jobs and homes after Harvey. The report highlighted a lack of shelter for people in wheelchairs, including little privacy for those using catheters. Information on which shelters were wheelchair accessible was also thin, according to the report. The report also mentioned sub-par communication as something that could be improved before the next disaster. “The normal means of communications doesn’t always...

House Democrats are pushing hard to revive an Obama-era program that would keep illegal immigrant families out of detention and instead give them housing, transportation, healthcare, and legal aid to help them claim asylum in the U.S. President Trump ended the Family Case Management Program in June 2017, citing excessive costs and the low rate of enrolled families returning to their home countries. House Democrats want to bring it back to life in some form as part of an effort to reduce the detention of illegal immigrants and instead release them in the United States with some supervision. And they...

LULAC will move forward with its lawsuit against the state over a report on alleged non-citizens registered to vote in Texas, as the Secretary of State’s office now says it may have overestimated the numbers. The report released on Friday stated that as many as 95,000 non-U.S. citizens were on voter registration rolls, and about 58,000 of them had voted in at least one election in Texas since 1996. Several days since its release, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization filed the lawsuit over the report, claiming voter intimidation and citing a section of the Voting Rights Act in...

The U.S Department of Energy has disclosed it shipped a large amount of weapon-grade plutonium to Nevada without the state’s knowledge. used to be test site still has craters Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons In November, Nevada filed a request in a Reno federal court for an injunction to block a shipment of plutonium from South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site, which is often referred to by its former name, the Nevada Test Site. Turns out, the shipment had already happened.

Nervous that her presidential candidacy might not be sufficiently radical, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) sought to out bid rising Democratic star New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70% income tax with her own 50% tax on total wealth. “While her proposed 70% income tax is a worthy effort for a rookie member of congress, it overlooks the much larger stash of accumulated wealth just lying around for the taking,” Warren pointed out. “Immoral billionaires can always shift their income-earning activity outside the taxing jurisdiction. But their assets—homes, business facilities, heavy equipment and the like are less mobile and easier to...

An undocumented immigrant referenced by President Donald Trump in support of building a wall on the southern US border has been charged with killing four people in Nevada this month, prosecutors said Monday. Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman, an El Salvadoran native who was arrested on January 19, admitted to killing a Reno, Nevada, couple using a gun he stole from their home, police said in a probable cause statement. He was not charged in the deaths at the time of his arrest. Authorities in Washoe and Douglas counties filed a criminal complaint charging Martinez-Guzman with four counts of murder, with the...

While trekking the internet I came across this article from March 2018 by David Faris in the Washington Post about packing the Supreme Court: Democrats must consider court-packing when they regain power. It’s the only way to save democracy. I did a search and came up with the book he wrote, "It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics: It’s Time to Fight Dirty How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics The American electoral system is clearly falling apart—as evidenced by the 2016 presidential election. In It’s Time to Fight...

Is Venezuela paying the price for adopting gun control? The shocking nature of Venezuela’s economic collapse has been covered ad nauseam. However, one aspect of the Venezuelan crisis that does not receive much coverage is the country’s gun control regime. Fox News recently published an excellent article highlighting Venezuelan citizens’ regret over the gun control policies the Venezuelan government has implemented since 2012. Naturally, this regret is warranted. The Venezuelan government is among the most tyrannical in the world, with a proven track record of violating basic civil liberties such as free speech, debasing its national currency, confiscating private property,...

Officials at the New York State Catholic Conference are calling the Reproductive Health Act “worse than we thought it would be.” “It foresees a time in New York where it’s a crime to be pro-life,” said Kathleen Gallagher, director of pro-life activities and the Catholic Action Network for the conference, which is the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops. The measure, introduced in the Legislature the week of January 7, will expand access to abortion in the state, despite being promoted as simply codifying Roe v Wade. It not only increases access to abortion across the board, including...

Can you imagine how scary it would be to live in a world where your livelihood depended on having the ‘correct’ politics? It’s the sort of thing you might expect of totalitarian regimes – Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussain; everywhere that has ever tried communism; increasingly, Xi’s panopticon China – but definitely not of any liberal democracy in the 21st century. That dystopian future, though, may be much closer than you think. I only properly appreciated this recently when the podcast I’ve been doing for the last few years was mysteriously dropped by my regular employer, forcing me to seek...

Social media posts from the University of Illinois campus police are encouraging students to report “acts of intolerance” to the school’s Bias Assessment and Response Team. At least one officer for the University of Illinois is a member of the school's bias response team. This certainly conflates physical safety with being uncomfortable around non-politically correct individuals. So what is bias, according to the Bias. Assessment and Response Team? They define it as “actions or expressions that are motivated, at least in part, by prejudice against or hostility toward a person (or group) because of that person’s (or group’s) actual or...

Senate Democrats on Thursday began a “blockade” of all legislation after Senate Republicans refused to consider two House-passed bills that would fund partially shut down government agencies without money for a border wall. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Thursday morning blocked the two bills that were introduced by the two Democratic senators from Maryland, where thousands of federal government workers reside. Democrats made it clear afterward that they wouldn't agree to take up any bills other than those to reopen the government. “It’s my commitment to my federal workers and our country that the first order of business...

Liberals are all about freedom…their freedom to tell us Normal Americans what to think, how to feel, and what to do. And the highest form of liberalism is the ban, a bar to an activity, institution, or attitude that they wish to suppress either to enhance their own power or just for the sheer joy of telling people like us – who they hate – what to do. Often, it’s both.The following ten targets for prohibition may seem wacky now, but give the left time. “Really?” you might ask. But then, a decade ago everyone knew which bathroom to use,...

Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop (Screenshot) (CNSNews.com) – A federal district court ruled Friday that Colorado cannot block an attempt by Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips to sue the state over its “hostility” towards him and his Christian beliefs. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represents Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, in the lawsuit. As CNSNews.com previously reported , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in June 2018, saying the commission “violated the Free Exercise Clause” by requiring Phillips to go against his religious beliefs about gay marriage...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ready to tax the rich to make her Green New Deal a reality. “People are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” the recently elected New York Democrat told TV show “60 Minutes” in an interview set to air Sunday. Speaking of prior decades’ taxation rates in the country, Ocasio-Cortez added, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that the avowed “democratic socialist” went with the predictable “tax the rich”...

Xi has issued public remarks on several occasions this week – first to herald in the new year, then to issue threats to Taiwan to surrender to Chinese rule or expect military action. In that speech, Xi stated, “we make no promise to abandon the use of force, and retain the option of taking all necessary measures,” he also said, according to the Times. “Reunification is a historical trend and it is the right path. Taiwan independence is an adverse current of history and is a dead end,” Xi said, adding a subtle note to the United States that “foreign...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has adopted a new rule that allows the agency to collect social-media data from those who cross the border. The agency claims the exemption from Privacy Act provisions is necessary because it needs “to identity and understand relationships between individuals, entities, threats and events, and to monitor patterns of activity over extended periods of time that may be indicative of criminal, terrorist, or other threat.” A number of privacy groups and interests had opposed the expansion of the exemptions to the privacy law, but the agency in a filing in the Federal Register explained that...