Free Republic

<p>President Donald Trump is continuing his habit of painting immigrants as criminals, highlighting gang connections, calling family reunification a national security threat and bemoaning the death of a pro football player involved in a car accident with a man living in the country illegally.</p>

INDIANAPOLIS -- President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday morning about the death of Indianapolis Colts player Edwin Jackson. Jackson was killed early Sunday morning when he and his Uber driver, 54-year-old Jeffrey Monroe, were pulled over on I-70 near Holt Road. They were outside the vehicle when a Ford F-150 crashed into them, killing both men. Police say the suspected driver, Manuel Orrego-Savala, 37, was intoxicated at the time of the crash. His BAC measured at 0.239 percent -- three times the legal limit. Orrego-Savala, a citizen of Guatemala by birth, is in the United States illegally, according to Indiana State...

Just in case any of our elected representatives didn’t notice, we’re going to run out of money (again) in a few days. As you may recall, the largest sticking point in the recent edition of Shutdown Theater was the lack of an agreement on a DACA bill. As Ed mentioned earlier, there is a new proposal to get Congress moving on settling the matter and it’s coming in the form of a bipartisan, gang-style arrangement between Senators John McCain and Chris Coons. The details remain a bit sketchy, but the Washington Post has what little we know about it so...

Edwin Jackson was a walk-on at Georgia Southern, developed into an all-conference talent, then became an NFL starter with Indianapolis. He made the AllState Good Works Team as a college senior for the time he spent volunteering at a local school. On Saturday night he was in the back of an Uber when he asked the driver to pull over because he was feeling sick. Both men got out and were on the shoulder of the road when an F-150 plowed into them, killing both. It was a hit-and-run in the literal sense, as the driver of the Ford left...

Democratic Senators are rejecting President Donald Trump’s four-part amnesty-and-immigration reform, and are instead working with business-first GOP Senators to pass an amnesty with only token reforms. “There is not likely to be a DACA deal, though we’re working every single day, on telephone calls and person to person, to try to reach this bipartisan agreement,” Sen. Dick Durbin told Jake Tapper on the February 4 edition of CNN’s State of the Union. Durbin said the Democrats would not stage another shutdown, but declared: I think we’re making real progress. I want to salute the moderates in both the Republicans and...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) The Philadelphia Eagles won the franchise’s first Super Bowl, denying the New England Patriots what would have been their 6th NFL championship. Excited Eagles fans swarmed the streets of Philadelphia in celebration, setting fires, breaking windows and vandalizing businesses. So, it was just like they would have done had the Eagles lost. In a last-ditch effort to finally completely destroy the Republican Party – something he tried but failed to do in his 2008 run for the presidency – RINO John McCain is planning to introduce a budget bill in the Senate...

MCALLEN, Texas — Federal authorities arrested a Democrat Texas state judge after a series of raids on his courtroom and his home. Information on the charges and other details of the investigation remain sealed. The judge is expected to be presented in federal court on Monday.

LOS ANGELES – Family members are worried about the possible deportation of a 30-year-old father of two who was recently detained by ICE after living in the U.S. since being brought here when he was a toddler. "ICE is abusing their power. They're doing this all across the nation," Roman Maury said outside a court hearing for Torres on Thursday. " He wasn't doing anything wrong. ... He was dropping his kids off at school." ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said Torres was targeted for arrest by deportation officers with ICE's Los Angeles-based fugitive operations team. All ICE arrests are "targeted"...

Sheriff Joe Arpaio may agree with "95 percent" of President Donald Trump's policies, but he has his own plan for the Dreamers. "I would deport these Dreamers and let them see the country they came from, be ambassadors to our country, and later on give them kind of a fast track to come back into the United States legally and that would take care of a lot of issues," he told ABC News, talking about recipients of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals. "A lot of these Dreamers have a good education and all that and they can go into...

The White House has canceled their planned meeting with lawmakers to roll out their immigration “framework” that gives U.S. citizenship to at least 1.8 million illegal aliens, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demands more concessions from the administration. A statement from pro-open borders Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) office revealed that White House advisers — including Gen. John Kelly, former Koch brothers executive Marc Short, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kirstjen Nielsen, and senior adviser Stephen Miller — have canceled their Monday rollout of the amnesty package. DHS spokesperson Tyler Houlton, though, called the canceled rollout a “scheduling issue,” saying...

United We Dream, described as the “largest immigrant youth-led network in the country,” rejected President Donald Trump’s immigration framework that would give 1.8 million young illegal aliens a pathway to citizenship. “Let’s call this proposal for what it is: a white supremacist ransom note,” Greisa Martinez Rosas, advocacy director for UWD, said in a statement on Twitter. “Trump and Stephen Miller killed DACA and created the crisis that immigrant youth are facing.”

Democratic Majority Leader denounced the White House’s new amnesty offer as inadequate, just one day after he said had endorsed a border wall because it won’t be built. Schumer’s conditional rejection of the new White House amnesty giveaway is muted and suggests that Schumer and his allies expect to pressure GOP Senators into yet more concessions. Dan Horowitz, editor of Conservative Review, says Democrats will feign opposition to the amnesty to encourage further negotiations and concessions from uninformed and confrontation-averse GOP legislators. “They will have plenty of messaging about noble ‘dreamers,’ improving ‘border security’ … Schumer is very familiar with...

U.S. Office of Bi-National Intelligence in Mexico City. The OBI is a U.S. Gov. cluster: DEA, DIA, CIA, FBI, ATF, and others, authorized by the Obama administration in a document called “A National Anti-Narcotics Strategy for the Southern Border”

The Mexican government has been sending thousands of Central American asylum seekers back to their conflict-ridden countries where they fear persecution, a new Amnesty International report claims. The report, based on a survey of nearly 500 people, said Mexico's National Migration Institute, INM, is violating the non-refoulement principle, an international law which bars a country to send back the asylum seekers in fear of persecution. Nearly 40 percent of those detained were in violation of non-refoulement, Amnesty International said in its report, whereas 75 percent of those detained by the INM were not informed of their right to seek asylum...

The Senate's top Democrat has withdrawn an offer that would allow President Trump to fulfill a signature campaign pledge: Construction of a wall along the U.S-Mexico border. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) took back his offer late Sunday through an aide, according to a person familiar with the situation, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about ongoing talks.

Party leaders must learn from the GOP and listen to their base, which skews as progressive as the Republicans’ does reactionary. Senate Democrats on Monday voted overwhelmingly to end the government shutdown without protections for the DREAMERs - who were protected from deportation and allowed to legally work by the Obama-era DACA policy eliminated by President Trump in 2017. For the Democratic Party’s progressive base, their capitulation was a disappointing end to a moment in which it seemed like the party might finally take a real stand against abhorrent Republican policies. The DREAMERs were meant to be an unassailable group...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't smile much. But as the Kentucky Republican sat in his chair on the Senate floor, listening to Chuck Schumer, announce that Democrats would vote to reopen the federal government, his lips spread into a nearly ear-to-ear grin. He looked like the cat that had just swallowed the Democratic Party. What McConnell knew - and what infuriated Democratic activists across the country were just finding out - was that Schumer's strategy of shutting down the government to force President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans into locking in an immigration deal had failed in epic fashion....

Congress sped toward reopening the government Monday as Democrats reluctantly voted to temporarily pay for resumed operations. But by relenting, the Democrats prompted a backlash from immigration activists and liberal base supporters who wanted them to fight longer and harder for legislation to protect from deportation the 700,0090 or so younger immigrants who were brought to the country as children and now are here illegally. Immigration activists and other groups harshly criticized the deal reached by the Democratic leadership. Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, said the members of the group are “outraged.” She added that senators who...

A Mexican Uber driver living in the U.S. illegally was charged Monday with raping, assaulting and robbing young women in California, prosecutors said. Alfonso Alarcon-Nunez's four alleged victims are between 19 and 22 years old and three were intoxicated when they were assaulted, San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow told reporters. Officials said Alarcon-Nunez was not always driving for Uber when he picked up those women but said the alleged crimes show that the company should improve its driver screening process, Dow said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that the United States would never recover from the “stain” of deporting young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, who are often called "Dreamers." During a Sunday show interview, Sanders said their deportations would be “one of the ugliest stains” in American history. “If we allow Trump to get away with what he did, and that is repeal the executive order on DACA, and if these 800,000 people, young people, are subjected to deportation, this will be one of the ugliest stains in the history of the United States,” Sanders told CNN’s...