Free Republic

CHICAGO, Dec 13 (Reuters) - The windowless newsroom of The Phoenix, the Loyola University Chicago newspaper, hums like an old refrigerator. A coffee pot burbles in the corner as juniors Julia Pentasuglio and Ella Daugherty lean over a glowing laptop, updating a Google map. Each red pin marks a sighting of federal immigration agents near campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. Nearby, editor-in-chief Lilli Malone scrolls through reports from Rogers Park, a neighborhood along Chicago's lakefront where 80 languages mix. There were new pins from seven sightings that day alone - reports of vans barreling down side streets, masked immigration officers...

BOSTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a provision of U.S. President Donald Trump's signature tax and domestic policy bill that deprives Planned Parenthood and local affiliates that perform abortions of Medicaid funding is not an unconstitutional punishment.

In October, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sent a letter to the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections (BRE) requesting review of the election records from the 2020 election. These records had been previously ordered to be retained beyond the requirements of 52 USC 20701 due to pending litigation. Sheri Allen, the chairperson of the Fulton County BRE, obtained outside counsel, without submitting it to a vote of the Board, to respond to the DOJ that the records requested were not beholden to 52 USC § 20701 and, even if they were, they were not in the...

Since January 2025, over 250 attorneys—roughly 70%—have left, been reassigned, or accepted deferred resignation offers from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, signaling an unprecedented weakening of the agency responsible for enforcing federal civil rights law. This mass exodus follows the appointment of Trump ally Harmeet Dhillon, who has refocused the division’s priorities toward conservative causes such as voter fraud investigations and curbing transgender rights, while sidelining traditional civil rights enforcement in areas like housing discrimination, education, and police oversight. Entire sections, including Voting Rights and Title VI enforcement, have been reduced to fewer than five attorneys—or none...

Representative Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat, demanded on Thursday that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem either resign or face impeachment. The congresswoman requested that House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, carry out an investigation into Noem’s leadership of DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agencies spearheading the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy. “Under Secretary Kristi Noem’s leadership, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has done irreversible harm to our constituents, trampling the rights of all people and disregarding...

CHICAGO (WLS) -- A federal appeals court is blocking the release of hundreds of people detained by immigration agents during "Operation Midway Blitz" in the Chicago area, at least for now. The case centers around whether the government violated a consent decree banning warrantless arrests in certain cases. The appeals court said each detainee's case should be evaluated individually. A federal judge has ordered the release of hundreds of migrants arrested in the Chicago area, including some arrested under the Department of Homeland Security's "Operation Midway Blitz," by Nov. 21 after finding their arrests could have violated a 2022 consent...

It’s been 50 years since Godfrey Wade arrived to the United States from Jamaica at the age of 15 with his mother, moving to New York with a green card that granted him permanent residency. The Black man enlisted in the U.S. Army a few years later, spending eight years in the service, where he was primarily stationed in Germany before he received an honorable discharge. He then began a civilian life in Georgia while raising a family, working as a fashion designer, master tailor, tennis coach and chef over the years while staying out of trouble. That is, until...

Since taking office, President Donald J. Trump has made substantial progress reversing the inflation and cost-of-living disaster he inherited from the recklessness of the Biden Administration. Inflation has been cut by more than half, gas prices have fallen sharply, real wages are growing again, and key household expenses are finally heading in the right direction.But President Trump is also clear: there is still important work ahead to ensure every American feels the full benefit of lower costs. While Democrats attempt to con Americans into believing they’re the champions of affordability, the reality is that Democrats created the problem — and...

The United States trade deficit shrank dramatically in September, falling 10.9 percent to $52.8 billion as President Trump’s sweeping tariff policies began to reshape trade flows in line with the administration’s goals, according to data released Thursday by the Commerce Department.The deficit reduction reflected gains on both sides of the ledger. U.S. exports jumped 3.0 percent to $289.3 billion, the highest level in months, while imports rose just 0.6 percent to $342.1 billion. The combination produced the kind of outcome the Trump administration has sought: American goods finding stronger markets abroad even as the flow of foreign goods into the...

President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is celebrating a “record-breaking achievement” in immigration enforcement, touting that more than 2.5 million illegal aliens have left the United States since the president took office in late January.This week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had successfully deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens from the U.S. since January 20 — noting the majority are illegal aliens with pending criminal charges or criminal convictions.In addition, Noem said almost two million illegal aliens have now self-deported from the U.S. during the same period, as she again encouraged...

Former President Joe Biden’s record-setting waves of mass immigration to the United States sent home prices and rents surging for the lowest-income Americans, a newly published investigation from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reveals.The report, published annually by HUD, looks at “worst-case housing needs,” which is defined as Americans who are low-income but who do not receive government assistance or welfare and who pay more than one-half of their income toward housing costs.“Between 2021 and 2023, cases of worst-case needs remained elevated at 8.46 million households, virtually the same as the 2019-to-2021 period,” the report details, pointing...

Democrats want us to believe they care about the little guy, the working class, the average American. Yet. somehow, their policies always seem to hurt the people they claim to help and enrich the elites who fund their campaigns. On the campaign trail last year, President Trump proposed his No Tax on Tips plan, and the left freaked out. Though they claimed it was bad policy, Kamala Harris went on to steal the plan just a couple of months after him. No Tax on Tips became the law of the land with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill,...

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment automatically makes all babies born on American territory citizens. Trump’s effort to overturn the traditional reading of the constitutional text and history should not succeed. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment provided a constitutional definition of citizenship for the first time. It declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." In antebellum America, states...

New research suggests that chatbots have a greater sway on policy issues than video ads, and that spouting the most information—even if wrong—is the most persuasive strategyArtificial intelligence chatbots are changing the world, affecting everything from our brains to our mental health to how we do our work. Now, two new studies offer fresh insights into how they might also be shifting our political beliefs. In a new paper published December 4 in Nature, scientists describe how having a brief back-and-forth exchange with an A.I. chatbot shifted voters’ preferences on political candidates and policy issues. Another paper, published December 4...

Sharing a meme against President Trump in response to a memorial for assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk cost a Tennessee man his liberty for 37 days, which in turn got him fired. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is representing Larry Bushart, told Just the News on Tuesday it's still prepping a lawsuit on his behalf. The Alliance Defending Freedom beat FIRE to court in response to another alleged criminal investigation of speech related to Kirk in neighboring North Carolina, alleging a school district known for a Supreme Court precedent on school busing sanctioned an unidentified high school...

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES — Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dismantled a lawyer’s illogical arguments about a president’s executive power during a high-stakes Supreme Court hearing on Monday. The moment came during oral arguments for Trump v. Slaughter, a case centered around President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat member of the Federal Trade Commission. As The Federalist previously reported, the high court will weigh the constitutionality of statutory limitations on a president’s ability to remove members of so-called “independent agencies” and whether to overturn longstanding precedent established in its 1935 Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. decision. During his...

The Trump administration must stop deploying the California National Guard in Los Angeles and return control of the troops to the state, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction sought by California officials who opposed President Donald Trump’s extraordinary move to use state Guard troops without the governor’s approval to further his immigration enforcement efforts. But he also put the decision on hold until Monday. California argued that conditions in Los Angeles had changed since Trump first took command of the troops and deployed them in June. The administration initially...

The Supreme Court on Dec. 8 vacated a ruling upholding New York’s ban on religious exemptions to its school vaccine mandate and ordered a lower court to review its stance on the ban. The case is known as Miller v. McDonald. Justices vacated the March decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had found the legislation banning religious exemptions to vaccination requirements was “neutral on its face” and did not “target or affirmatively prohibit religious practices.” The justices directed the appeals court to reconsider its ruling in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor, a Supreme Court...

The U.S. Supreme Court has revived a lawsuit filed by a group of Amish parents against a New York state law that removes a religious exemption to school immunizations. In an orders list released Monday, the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling against the parents and other plaintiffs in the case of Joseph Miller et al. v. James McDonald et al. The case was sent back to the lower court for consideration in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor, a Supreme Court decision from June in which the high court ruled 6-3 that parents can opt their children out of...

Law enforcement officials in Britain made more than 12,000 arrests over “offensive” social media posts in 2023, according to the latest figures published by The Times in London, which reports that “police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts” on the internet. This is an exceptionally large number of arrests for a Western democracy. Yet Britain has a proud history of tolerance and freedom of speech. From the Reformation and the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More to the radical liberal thought of Locke and Mill, our freedoms were hard-won, emerging from centuries of religious conflict. Today,...