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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Travis County Sheriff’s Office deputies do not have rifle-resistance vests because Sheriff Sally Hernandez will not commit to hold all arrested undocumented immigrants for deportation. In January, Governor Abbott announced the state would fund $23 million in grants to purchase 33,000 vests for more than 450 law enforcement departments. Every agency that applied for vests received them. Travis County did not apply for the grant because one condition from the governor’s office required the agency to “sign a letter confirming compliance with ICE detainer requests both now and during the grant term of at least one year,”...

A group of open borders activists blocked and surrounded federal immigration officials in downtown Los Angeles, California on Thursday, preventing the agents from accessing a nearby detention center. Coordinated by a slew of open borders groups, about 50 illegal immigrant activists stopped a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) van of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while they were on their way to a detention center.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As humans reach out technologically to see if there are other life forms in the universe, one important question needs to be answered: When we make contact, how are we going to handle it? Will we feel threatened and react in horror? Will we embrace it? Will we even understand it? Or, will we shrug it off as another thing we have to deal with in our increasingly fast-paced world? "If we came face to face with life outside of Earth, we would actually be pretty upbeat about it," said Arizona State University Assistant...

The family of a community volunteer killed by a gun stolen from a San Francisco officer filed a legal claim with the city Wednesday, alleging the police department failed to provide proper training on gun storage. Abel Esquivel, 22, was killed during a robbery Aug. 15 as he walked to his mother's house after working a late shift at a grocery store. He volunteered at the Central American Resource Center, which provides legal help to low-income Latino clients and other social services. Three men were arrested and charged with murder, including an 18-year-old facing deportation who was wearing a monitoring...

A female human trafficking victim too young to legally drive a car or buy a lottery ticket was savagely beaten with a bat by a pack of incensed MS-13 members, Montgomery County Police say. Late last month, Ivan Alexis Pena-Rodriguez, 20, Yervin Josue Romero-Rivera, 21, and Miguel Angel Ayala-Rivera, 24, were all formally charged with first-degree assault, plus other assorted criminal counts. According to court documents obtained by WJLA, Montgomery County authorities served a search and seizure warrant

The Supreme Court will hold a closed-door meeting to decide whether to take up a lower court opinion that blocked the White House plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a program at the forefront of the debate on illegal immigration. In an unusual move, the nation's highest court will consider the possibility of reviewing the opinion without a ruling from a federal appeals court

Federal deportation officers staged one of the biggest enforcement actions in years against businesses in Los Angeles this week, arresting 212 people and serving audit notices to 122 businesses who will have to prove they aren’t hiring illegal immigrants. Nearly all of those arrested were convicted criminals, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE said it targeted Los Angeles because it’s a sanctuary city, meaning it refuses to fully cooperate with federal authorities on deportations from within its jails. That means agents and officers have to go out into the community, said Thomas D. Homan, the agency’s deputy director.

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Do Democrat candidates really want to stake their prospects on San Fran Nan? – The demented face of the Democrat Party was on full display for reporters yesterday, as San Fran Nan stuttered, stammered, spasmed, muttered and facial ticked her way through a press availability. The American Mirror captures the horror show that the rest of the fake news media refuses to report on. This is who Democrats want to replace Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House next year. Frightening. Man, nobody could’ve seen this one coming. Oh, wait…: With Mitt...

The Houston school district is under fire after a student without legal status ended up in immigration detention following his arrest by a school police officer for an altercation with a female student. A lawyer for Dennis Rivera Sarmiento, 19, said his client was bullied by the 15-year-old girl and retaliated only after she taunted him with racial slurs, threw a full bottle of Gatorade at him and confronted him. "He's very fearful of being deported to Honduras," said Rivera's attorney, Brandon Roché. On Wednesday, students at Stephen F. Austin High School in Houston staged a lunch hour walkout to...

Federal immigration agents are escalating efforts to crack down on businesses hiring undocumented workers. New data released Friday morning shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited 122 businesses over the past five days, mostly in Southern California. Mike Poindexter is CEO of his family business the Poindexter Nut Company near Fresno, California. He says most Americans don't want these labor-intensive jobs. "We hire people all the time. They show up, they work two days and they leave," Poindexter said. His company is now being audited by ICE. "We've had somewhere between 5 to 10 percent of our workforce quit voluntarily just...

President Trump issued his first veto threat of the immigration debate on Thursday, with the White House saying the plan being offered by Senate Democratic leaders and a handful of GOP rebels would make border security worse, not better. In a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House said the plan would prevent agents from going after illegal immigrants unless they arrive after June 30, 2018. Analysts have said that creates an incentive for people to flood the border now, hoping to get into the U.S. before the deadline — and it also protects perhaps 10 million...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are reportedly in the process of a large-scale sweep in the Los Angeles area. Make no mistake that LA is the belly of the beast when it comes to illegal aliens and with the presence of untold numbers of street gangs, it is a potential motherlode for rounding up those with criminal records.

House GOP leaders are forging ahead with their own hardline immigration bill, as the Senate threw in the towel Thursday on legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants from deportation. The main author of the House bill, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), said Thursday that he’s building support for his measure, even as other GOP colleagues said an initial vote tally this week was well below the 218 votes needed to pass the bill. Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) “instructions to me are ‘get this bill done,’ and we’re working hard to accomplish that,” Goodlatte said in an...

The Schumer-Rounds-Collins immigration bill would be a total catastrophe. @DHSgov says it would be “the end of immigration enforcement in America.” It creates a giant amnesty (including for dangerous criminals), doesn’t build the wall, expands chain migration, keeps the visa... lottery, continues deadly catch-and-release, and bars enforcement even for FUTURE illegal immigrants. Voting for this amendment would be a vote AGAINST law enforcement, and a vote FOR open borders. If Dems are actually serious about DACA, they should support the Grassley bill!

The Senate on Thursday rejected immigration legislation crafted by centrists in both parties after President Trump threatened to veto the bill if it made it to his desk. In a 54-45 vote, the Senate failed to advance the legislation from eight Republican, seven Democratic and one Independent senators. It needed 60 votes to overcome a procedural hurdle.

A divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday held as unconstitutional President Donald Trump's anti-terrorist travel ban from eight countries, six of them majority-Muslim with a total population of 150 million. In a 9-4 vote, the Richmond-based court upheld a Maryland district judge's preliminary injunction against the ban taking full effect and ruled that the travel restrictions violate the Constitution's Establishment Clause, which bars the government establishment of a religion. “In sum, the face of the Proclamation, read in the context of President Trump’s official statements, fails to demonstrate a primarily secular purpose. To the objective observer, the...

Apparently having grown tired of waiting for the federal government to “do something” about immigration reform, some Colorado lawmakers have come up with an alternate solution. Some Democrats in the state legislature have a plan which would allow the state to issue their own “purple cards” (a state-level version of a green card), offering legal status to well-behaved illegal aliens. Right up front, I’ll just say that I hope they pass this law because watching the legal challenges and fallout should be either informative or hilarious. (CBS Denver) Colorado would have its own version of a “green card” under legislation...

Variety reported on Monday about Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger hosting a fundraiser next week for six vulnerable Democrat senators. Although the story did point out the irony of Disney pushing for the tax cuts that every one of the senators voted against, it skipped the more controversial detail that the senators would be receiving money from a fundraiser hosted by an executive who pushed for replacing American Disney employees with H1B visa foreign workers.  First let us go to the irony of a tax cut supporting company supporting senators who all opposed that tax cut in Bob Iger to...

There are few things in Washington that everyone agrees on – ask a Democrat and a Republican what the weather is like and you’re likely to get complete different answers. But there is one thing they all agree on: the current immigration system is messed up. I don’t use the popular word “broken” because something isn’t really broken when so many people simply ignore it. That’s the biggest problem with the immigration system, cities and states (and for decades the federal government) have ignored the law and are implementing their will instead. A major part of the appeal of Donald...

Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday that if Republicans pass an immigration plan that allows citizenship they will lose the majority in Congress this November. “Mark my words, if Republican majorities in Congress pass citizenship for millions of people, do amnesty, I think it is quite likely we will lose both houses of Congress,” Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said on Fox News.