Free Republic

The U.S. government is currently installing sections of Trump’s 30-foot-high wall in three places. The good news for those who wish to see a wall built along the U.S.–Mexican border is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has built seven miles of 30-foot-high wall in the past few months, and roughly 30 more miles of high fencing are slated for construction. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of border to go. New reports from Carlos Diaz, southwest branch chief of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, indicate that one of the three current wall projects is nearly...

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pushed back against Democrats calling for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to be abolished in a Friday op-ed published in the Washington Post. The op-ed, titled, “Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,” likened demands to abolish ICE to a hypothetical demand from those who wanted to end the Vietnam war by abolishing “the entire Defense Department.” “Obviously, that would have completely compromised national security,” Johnson wrote, adding that ending the agency “would compromise public safety” as well. “Calls to abolish ICE only serve to sow even greater division in the American...

Coasting to victory on promises to reign in rampant corruption, Mexican president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has sent shock waves through the Americas. Few realize that his election is likely to increase the number of low-income, low-skill illegal aliens coming to the United States. Obrador admires Cuba and former Chilean socialist leader Salvador Allende. Venezuela’s socialist dictator Hugo Chávez helped with previous presidential campaigns by providing advisors and Venezuelan ambassador reportedly attended meetings with Obrador supporters. While Mexican presidential candidates have long supported illegal aliens coming to the United States, Obrador’s rhetoric has been different. Instead of campaigning on the...

Immigration has emerged as the number one issue for voters in the midterm elections, surpassing both the economy and health care as the policy area that will most determine how votes are cast, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday. The poll, conducted between June 28 and July 2, found that fifteen percent of registered voters named immigration as the issue that will most significantly impact how they cast their vote, while fourteen percent said the economy was their top priority. Immigration first became a top issue for voters in May after the Trump administration rolled out its “zero tolerance”...

A Rasmussen poll shows that 36 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of liberals want to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, according to a Rasmussen poll. Fifty-two percent of Democrats and 65 percent of liberals also say “the government is too aggressive … in deporting those who are in this country illegally,” according to the poll. That response is a big problem for Democratic politicians because the anti-ICE views are a huge outlier among voters, yet are thrilling the Democrats’ base in the primary elections. In a June 26 primary in New York, for example, Democratic leader...

Hawking her new book, Fascism, former secretary of state Madeline Albright said she is concerned about Fascism in the U.S. and around the world. She told a BBC reporter that Donald Trump isn’t a Fascist but he is the “most undemocratic president in modern American history and that troubles me.”

Contrary to reports of mass confusion at the Southwest Border, where the Department of Health and Human Services is under a court order to reunite children with the parents who brought them here illegally, "there is no confusion whatsoever," HHS Secretary Alex Azar told Fox News Thursday morning. Azar said his department is working against a court-imposed deadline to reunite the 11,800 children with the people who are claiming to be their parents. The process includes DNA testing. "Every child is accounted for," Azar said. "We know every child, where they are. We know the record -- the last time...

Are we going to have immigration limits or not? That's the question underlying the calls for the abolition of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the bureau within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for upholding our immigration rules away from the borders. The push to #AbolishICE is threatening to become a litmus test for Democratic politicians. It has been embraced by presidential hopefuls like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as other far-left figures such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, actress-turned-New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, and a number of House members. Despite...

There’s a popular saying among those of us in the Mexican American community who grew up on the border: We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. With Sunday’s election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as Mexico’s next president, the idea to revisit the legality of our southern border, proposed by Mexican leftist leader Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, is suddenly not so crazy.

A federal district judge has ruled President Donald Trump’s administration’s practice of indefinitely detaining some asylum seekers can’t proceed, dealing a major blow to what immigration attorneys have said is one of the administration’s tools to deter people from seeking safe haven in this country. The lawsuit was filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union and named as a defendant the El Paso Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office. Other field offices named in the lawsuit include Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark and Philadelphia. The El Paso office covers West Texas and New Mexico. The ACLU alleged in...

Is building a wall on our border a morally good action? As a professor who has taught biblical ethics for 41 years, I think it is – in fact, the Bible itself repeatedly views protective walls with favor. WALLS GIVE PEACE AND SECURITY In the world of the Old Testament, people built walls around cities to protect themselves from thieves, murderers, and other criminals, and from foreign invaders who would seek to destroy the city. People could still enter the city, but they had to do so by the gate, so that city officials would have some control over who...

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the far-left presidential candidate in Mexico and former mayor of Mexico City, has called for mass migration to the U.S., saying it is a "human right" for Mexican citizens to enter the United States. Just what we need. Another "human right" invented by the left. The Daily Caller: "And soon, very soon – after the victory of our movement – we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world," Obrador said, adding that immigrants "must leave their towns and find a life in the United States." He...

Vice President Mike Pence demanded that Central American nations do more to stem illicit immigration, charging that few asylum seekers from the region had legitimate claims to safe haven in the United States. “This exodus must end,” Pence told a meeting of leaders here Thursday from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — which make up the so-called Northern Triangle that produces much of the illegal migration traffic to the U.S.-Mexico border. {snip} The vice president called on the Central American countries to take a number of specific steps, including …. removing “public advertisements for human traffickers within your nations” —...

The latest Harvard/Harris Poll, though, reveals that swing voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the Democrats’ plan to end all immigration enforcement across the U.S. Nearly 3-in-4 swing voters, about 73 percent, of swing voters said they do not want ICE to be disbanded. Less than 30 percent of swing voters said they support the abolishment of ICE. Likewise, Americans in general oppose the Democrats’ plan to abolish ICE. Nearly 70 percent of Americans polled in the Harvard/Harris Poll said they do not support ending ICE and thus all immigration enforcement. Abolishing ICE, as Breitbart News reported, would have allowed more...

Retiring U.S. Immigration and Customs Immigration Enforcement chief official, Thomas Homan, sat down with the Washington Examiner's Anna Giaritelli to discuss his time in the agency and what can be improved upon to increase border security. Homan remarked during the interview that, of the six administrations that he has worked for, no commander-in-chief has more positively impacted the border than President Trump. "It’s just a fact that our sitting president of one year has made a big difference," Homan said. "I've worked for six presidents. I started with Ronald Reagan...No one has done more for border [safety], public safety,...

President Trump said he hopes that Democrats who are calling to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "keep thinking about it." "Because they're going to get beaten so badly," he said. Mr. Trump made the comments to Fox News' Maria Bartiromo in an interview that will air on Fox News Channel's "Sunday Morning Features" with Maria Bartiromo at 10 a.m. "You know ICE, these are the guys that go in and take MS-13, and they take them out," Mr. Trump said. "Because they're much tougher than MS-13, like by a factor of 10. And these are the ones –...

It's a story that began nearly fifteen years ago… With its passage in November 2002, the Homeland Security Act set into motion what would be the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense. Opening its doors in March 2003, one of the component agencies in the new Department of Homeland Security was the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and strengthen public safety in response to the deadly attacks perpetrated...

A number of liberal Twitter users and journalists spread a conspiracy theory Thursday insisting a Department of Homeland Security document contained a secret Nazi code. In February, DHS put out a press release entitled "We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again," a fact-sheet making the case for President Donald Trump's proposed border wall. "When it comes to stopping drugs and illegal aliens across our borders, border walls have proven to be extremely effective," it argued. The press release went largely unnoticed until months later, when a tweet accusing the document of being a...

Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is not going out quietly. The federal law enforcement agency chief is retiring from his post later this week, but not without having had the final word in a national fight over the role ICE plays. "It's just ridiculous what's going on," Homan told the Washington Examiner Thursday, his second-to-last day, at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Technically, Homan will be on the federal payroll until Saturday, but he will spend the day working remotely. In times of crisis, Red Cross fills in the government's gaps Watch Full Screen to...

President Donald Trump never mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by name in his speech to supporters in Fargo, North Dakota on Wednesday evening. But he responded indirectly to the “democratic socialist’s” surprising primary win in New York’s 14th congressional district the day before by defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the agency Ocasio-Cortez has vowed to abolish. Trump told the cheering crowd: In recent days, we’ve heard of shameless attacks on these courageous law enforcement officers [ICE]. Extremist Democrat politicians have called for the complete elimination of ICE. “We don’t want ICE anymore!” You know what would happen to parts of...