Free Republic

Two Illinois Republicans considered among the nation’s most vulnerable congressional incumbents are breaking from their party and its outspoken presidential nominee, Donald Trump, to push laws that would include a path to citizenship for people living in the country illegally. Rep. Bob Dold and Sen. Mark Kirk joined GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida and business leaders at an event Wednesday in Chicago. They argued comprehensive immigration reform would help the economy, ensure companies have the workers they need and is the right thing to do. “It’s about people before politics,” said Dold, whose district north of Chicago is home...

BROOKINGS, Ore. - Law enforcement put nearly 12,000 mature marijuana plants through a wood chipper Monday while dismantling a grow operation found in a remote corner of Curry County near the California border, Sheriff John Ward said. A helicopter surveyed the area from the air, and an armed ground team entered the grow first to make sure the area was safe, Ward said. They found a camouflaged living structure and evidence of weapons and chemicals. No one was present as law enforcement moved in. "It was obvious that whoever was tending to the marijuana had left prior to the eradication...

You are reading the 1,500th post to American Rattlesnake, a project which began in the febrile imagination of my friend and colleague, Michel Evanchik. If you had told me in 2010 that over half a decade later this website would exist, let alone be flourishing, I would have scoffed. Those of you who are regulars know how fond I am of hyperlinking useful information that illustrates a relevant point. One of the discoveries you make while curating these old posts is how ephemeral this medium is, as many of the sites linked to have long since disappeared into the Internet...

SUB-HEADING - Group aims to register 400,000 new Hispanic voters before November election A political action committee largely funded by liberal billionaire George Soros is paying salaries to employees at a pro-illegal immigrant group. The Immigrant Voters Win PAC was launched in March with the goal of registering 400,000 new Hispanic voters before the November elections. The PAC is a joint effort between numerous left-wing immigration activist groups as part of the larger “Families Fight Back” campaign organized in opposition to Republican politicians. The group has raised $4 million since its inception, according to the PAC’s financial filings with the...

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton says she would create a new office of Immigrant Affairs in the White House to help her achieve her goal of comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Speaking to a joint gathering of black and hispanic journalists on Friday, Clinton said she would start working on immigration reform “immediately” if she wins in November. “I will defend DACA and DAPA while I work vigorously for immigration reform,” Clinton said. “I have proposed an Office of Immigrant Affairs for the White House so that we are able to answer questions and provide information and...

This is no surprise, since resettlement contractors like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) are given millions of your dollars every year (more than 90% of their funding comes from you!) to bring refugees to your towns, they spend a lot of time pressuring Washington for more moola! In 2014, LIRS had a total revenue of $59 million and $55 million came from government grants (from you!). Hartke pulled down a comfortable $235,000 salary and five other employees were in 6 digits. If you want to know if LIRS is resettling refugees where you live, click here, find your state...

White racism, not a June 2 videotaped rape by refugees from strife-torn tribal cultures, is causing the growing civic protest in Twin Falls, Idaho, according to KMVT, the main local TV station. The pitch was delivered with the help of Nancy Taylor, who is a local advocate for greater immigration. I believe that there is a very small group in Twin Falls, very small and vocal, who, for lack of a better word, are racist … A little girl was assaulted, and just because people of color are involved, it becomes an issue. Unfortunately, children in this community are victims...

Around 800 US-bound migrants, most of them from Haiti, Africa, Asia and Cuba, are currently in dense jungle on the Panama-Colombia border, Panama's president said Friday, describing it as "another migration crisis." The migrants are in the Darien Gap, a swampy forested area teeming with snakes that lies across the border, Juan Carlos Varela told reporters before heading to the region. No roads cross the southern border, and passage by foot is dangerous and uncertain. Varela said that the land border was closed but admitted that migrants were crossing it to get past authorities. He said the number of border...

Havana on Sunday blamed Washington for a surge of Cubans trying to reach the United States by land and sea, accusing the Obama administration of encouraging illegal and unsafe immigration. Tens of thousands of Cubans over the last two years have flocked to the U.S.-Mexican border and taken to the sea in hopes of reaching Florida, fearing a growing detente between the Cold War foes will lead to a change in U.S. policy. Under a 1960s law, the Cuban Adjustment Act, the Communist-run country’s citizens are treated as legal immigrants if they set foot on U.S. soil, while migrants from...

Jane Orient, M.D., serves as the Executive Director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). This Arizona-based organization attracts conservative-thinking doctors and frequently finds itself in disagreement with the well-known American Medical Association.Dr. Orient has issued a call to start using DDT in the fight against the Zika virus. Her stand places her in marked contrast to an assortment of leftist environmentalists and their political allies. To them, DDT is harmful. But examination of the claims that DDT adversely affects people, plant life, and fish shows the worries to be unreasonable if not completely false.Created in 1874 by...

According to data from the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center, almost all of the Syrian refugees resettled in Virginia since October have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. Of the 121 Syrian refugees placed in Virginia so far, 112 have been placed in communities at least 100 miles away from the nation’s capital; 105 were placed in cities where median incomes fall below the state average. The D.C. suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington are all among the nation’s wealthiest and, according...

New FBI IRS Scandal Documents: Obama IRS Waited Years to Tell the Truth Obama Donor/DOJ Prosecutor Compromised Integrity of IRS Scandal InquiryBreaking the Law is an Obama Administration Policy New FBI IRS Scandal Documents: Obama IRS Waited Years to Tell the Truth Following up on some mega disclosures last week, this week we released 105 pages of newly obtained FBI “302” documents revealing that, beginning in 2010 and lasting through the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, the IRS orchestrated a deliberate policy of burying conservative groups’ tax exemption applications in bureaucratic delays. Interviews with numerous Cincinnati IRS employees in...

Hillary Clinton says she knows that she has work to do to win over Americans' trust. The Democrat presidential nominee has some of the highest unfavorable ratings of any presidential candidate in modern history. In many polls, a majority of Americans say they don't trust her. She said Friday to a meeting of black and Latino journalists in Washington: "I take it seriously. It doesn't make me feel good when people say those things."

“In her remarks today, Hillary Clinton pledged unconstitutional and illegal executive orders on immigration -- assuming king-like powers for herself -- that would give precious jobs and benefits needed by unemployed Americans to those illegally in the country. Her pledge for amnesty in her first 100 days -- in the middle of a national security and a border security crisis -- demonstrates her callous and cruel disregard for the safety of the American people. This Administration has released hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal immigrants, and yet Clinton says she wants to go even further, ending virtually all deportations and...

Administration officials said Friday that the 10,000 Syrian refugees President Obama wants to welcome this fiscal year is a floor, not a ceiling, and they can go even higher than that total. “We can now say that we’ve welcomed 8,000 Syrian refugees so far this year and we are very confident we will welcome at least 10,000,” Assistant Secretary of State Anne C. Richard told reporters in updating the flow. At today’s pace, more than 12,000 refugees could be admitted by the end of September, which marks the end of the fiscal year. Those are part of the 85,000 total...

Congress should give serious consideration to mandating a different registration system that reduces, if not eliminates, UNHCR’s role in the intake process The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is where would-be asylum seekers are first registered and vetted for possible referral to a destination host country for resettlement. UNHCR is the prime international advocate for self-identified “refugees” seeking asylum. While the agency gives lip service to security concerns and the need to weed out terrorists, it operates on the premise that such asylum seekers, wherever they come from including the Middle East, should be given the benefit of...

BOGOTA Colombia will begin deporting thousands of undocumented migrants — including an estimated 1,273 Cubans — who have been stranded in the country after Panama shut its southern border in June, authorities confirmed Wednesday. Colombian Migration Director Christian Kruger is asking the migrants, many of whom are stranded in the northern town of Turbo, to turn themselves in for voluntary deportation. Otherwise, they will be sought out and expelled, he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After a slow start, it appears increasingly likely that the Obama administration will hit its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States before the end of September. State Department totals show that 2,340 Syrian refugees arrived last month in the United States. That's more than what occurred during the entire seven months after President Barack Obama directed his team to prepare for 10,000 admissions from the war-torn country. Total admissions for the current budget year now come to about 7,900, and the vast majority of them are Sunni Muslims, records show.

SPACE (8/3) reports that a new modeling study indicates that life on Earth may be “premature,” and that the probability of life emerging throughout the universe in the distant future is 1,000 times greater than it is now. Study Lead Author Avi Loeb, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated, “If you ask, ‘When is life most likely to emerge?’ you might naively say, ‘Now.’” He added that despite such inclinations, “we find that the chance of life grows much higher in the distant future.” The scientists conducting the research “determined that the main factor influencing the possible evolution of...

The nation´s top immigration officer on Wednesday pushed back at claims the administration has an open-border policy, adding that it upsets him to deport illegal immigrants. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said that the U.S. is filling over a dozen jets a week with illegals and flying them back to Central America. "That´s what we´re doing on a daily, weekly basis. We have something like 15 to 18 flights of migrants a week, just to Central America that we send back, people who have come here. And so we don´t have open borders," he told reporters. "We have