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Nevada is among the states with the highest sign-up rate for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, according to a new study of the federal initiative that gives temporary protection from deportation to some youths who are in the country illegally. In Nevada, 10,564 people have applied and 9,243 have been approved since the program began in August 2012, according to March data from from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the most recent available. Among those that are immediately eligible by meeting all requirements, Nevada has an application rate of 61 percent vs. the national average of 52 percent, according to...

Iowa Congressman Steve King hosted a town hall meeting Tuesday in north Ames’ Somerset Clubhouse, speaking at length about such issues as immigration and foreign policy but mentioning his 4th Congressional District challenger, 28-year-old Boone Democrat Jim Mowrer, only in passing. (SNIP) He explained his efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama administration directive granting temporary work permits to immigrants who entered the country unlawfully as children; and to amend the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, a law that has made it more difficult to deport children crossing the Mexico border...

Government records show discrepancy in apprehensions and court receipts. The Department of Justice does not have receipts for more than half of the unaccompanied alien children apprehended at the southwest border by Border Patrol since the start of Fiscal Year 2013, government records show. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show more than 85,000 total apprehensions of unaccompanied alien children during fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014 through June. Information from the same time period provided to National Review Online by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review shows 41,592 total receipts marked as juvenile in immigration courts. Kathryn...

For those puzzled by the recent thrusts and feints on our border crisis, here is a helpful primer: Related Stories Democrats blame the “urgent humanitarian crisis” at our border on an obscure 2008 sex trafficking bill. But, they refuse to change the bill. President Obama’s DACA order in 2012, protecting young people here illegally against deportation, summoned tens of thousands of migrant children from Central America. To solve the problem, the White House wants to open the door even wider by offering asylum to people from that region. House Republicans passed a bill giving President Obama funds to manage the...

President Obama's executive actions on immigration did not begin with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in mid-2012. It began in 2011 with his announcement of "prosecutorial discretion" on deportations. A few months later the border patrol noted the first uptick in unaccompanied children at the border. There has been an ongoing argument in the public sphere over whether or not President Obama's executive action known as DACA is responsible for the current surge of unaccompanied children at the border. GOP members have claimed it is a contributing factor and some note that the June 15, 2012 announcement seems to...

As many others have noted, the high point here is Rand Paul bailing out mid-bite as soon as he hears the word “DREAM.” He’ll get in your face on foreign policy and he’ll push bold, controversial ideas like restoring voting rights to felons, but put him on camera in the middle of a squabble between Steve “Cantaloupe Calves” King and a pair of illegals when he’s gearing up for 2016 and all that’s left is one of those little dust clouds like in a Roadrunner cartoon. If not for that, my favorite moment would be Erika Andiola reassuring King that...

In one of the more impassioned speeches on the House floor Friday night, Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador blamed President Barack Obama for the harm that has befallen some of the undocumented child immigrants crossing into the United States. Labrador said Obama’s 2012 executive action suspending deportation for some undocumented immigrants brought here as children helped encourage the current influx of tens of thousands from Central America. Many of them are being abused on the journey, he said. “Many of these children that are coming to the border don’t make it across the river,” Labrador said. “There are reports of the...

Updated 10:29 p.m. | House Republicans voted to prohibit President Barack Obama from granting what they consider to be an unconstitutional amnesty to illegal immigrants Friday. The bill would effectively end Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — a program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers” brought to the United States illegally by their parents to get work permits and avoid deportation. And it would prohibit the president from expanding the program, as he has been reportedly considering doing for as many as five million additional immigrants. The 216-192 vote was largely along party lines, with four...

Remember when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the consummate “moderate Republican,” shocked everyone by calling immigration an “act of love?” It looks like he’s changed his mind. On Thursday, he called for nearly all of the 50,000-plus immigrants in limbo on our Southwest border to be sent home. That is, “except for those deserving few who may demonstrate a true case for asylum.” Deserving few? Someone should ask Bush which of the children fleeing impoverished and violent countries (where they have a 1 in 15 chance of being murdered) like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “deserve” to be sent home....

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe turned up the rhetoric on immigration late this week, telling a national television audience that young immigrants at Fort Sill and elsewhere are in the U.S. “at the invitation of the president” and comparing the situation to the administration’s exchange of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners for U.S. serviceman Bowe Bergdahl. Inhofe also signed on to a bill by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that would effectively end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama administration’s policy of giving low priority to deportation of undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children and have been in the...

On Monday, DREAMers stormed the halls of Congress to stage a "GOP funeral" in front of the offices of Republican senators, some of whom have expressed concerns that President Barack Obama's unilateral grants of temporary amnesty have caused the current border crisis. Pro-amnesty activists from United We Dream dressed in black and marched around with a mock casket that had these words emblazoned on it: "RIP GOP." They held flowers and started chanting and singing, "We shall overcome." Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has said Obama should not award temporary amnesty to DREAMers in the future because the Deferred Action for...

On Saturday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accused President Barack Obama of knowingly allowing turning American into an "unfunded charity" for illegal immigrants to invade and overrun. Referring to Obama as "the DREAMweaver," Palin said when Congress declined to pass amnesty legislation, Obama "waved his magic wand" and enacted his own. "And that created the current crisis as illegals are pouring in to collect what he illegally promised them," Palin said at the Western Conservative Summit in Colorado. "If Obama won't obey the law and secure the borders, it's not immigration, it's invasion." Nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant children have flooded...

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) unveiled legislation to shut down President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’ program, and the bill is getting a mixed response among Republican colleagues.Cruz offered his bill as a plan to end the border crisis — and the suffering that takes place south of the border as children travel to the United States — by thwarting Obama’s policy of acting as if the DREAM Act has already passed.“The staggering conditions that children are being subjected to are a direct result of the amnesty that President Obama illegally and unilaterally enacted in 2012, which caused the...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Thursday introduced legislation that would defund the Obama administration program that allows some illegal immigrants to remain in the country without fear of deportation. Cruz is pressing to have the bill linked to the emergency funding that President Obama has requested to deal with the recent surge of Central American children illegally crossing into the United States. "The only way to stop the border crisis is to stop President Obama’s amnesty," Cruz said in a statement. "If we do not put an end to its expansion — to the promise of amnesty that is the...

One might hope that with a full-blown catastrophe looming on our nation’s southern border, Democrats might have considered discarding their standard talking points memo -- blaming the crisis on former President Bush and the Republicans in the House -- and respond with a realistic plan worthy of America’s national leaders. Alas, we are not so fortunate. Dead children literally are washing up on the shores of the Rio Grande -- a result of chasing the dream of amnesty spun by the likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. And the closest our brave commander-in-chief has ventured to the...

On Tuesday, Univision’s Jorge Ramos did something his colleagues at the Big Three network have been reluctant to do. He pinned the blame for the ongoing border crisis squarely on Barack Obama’s immigration policies. Writing in the June 24 edition of Miami’s El Nuevo Herald (translation courtesy of MRC Latino’s Ken Oliver-Mendez) Ramos blasted the President: (video after the jump) “This crisis of children is an unfortunate consequence of the immigration policies of President Obama. First, in concentrating his deportations on ‘criminals’ it became clear he wasn’t going to deport adolescent children. Second, upon offering the ‘deferred action’ protection (DACA)...

The Obama administration’s arrogance and penchant for, charitably speaking, chafing the boundaries of legality, is almost boundless. But dealing with illegal immigration turns the knob past 11. Obama’s DHS has renewed DACA, the program that allows illegal immigrant children to stay in the US, sort-of-legally. DACA created the current child-immigrant crisis, and Obama’s keen to exploit it.

At any other time, the growing crisis on the Mexican border, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied young people crossing illegally into the United States, might dominate the news. Yet the situation has received less attention than it might amid the furor over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary defeat, the collapse of Iraq, the continuing Bergdahl matter, and Hillary Clinton's book tour. They're all genuinely important news stories, and they've crowded out disaster at the border. But whether or not many people noticed, this was the week in which the Obama administration's attempts to deflect blame for the border...

There is growing evidence that a surge of tens of thousands of Central American minors across the Mexican border into Texas is being driven in large part by the perception they will be allowed to stay under the Obama administration’s immigration policies. The number of minors apprehended in the past nine months who came from those three countries alone is 34,611 — 3.5 times more than in all of 2012. That was the year Obama announced that he would defer the deportations of young immigrants brought to the country illegally by their parents before 2007. An internal memo from the...

The administration quietly redistributes illegal aliens through military bases.A source tipped me off last week to a curious occurrence: It seems that two planeloads of illegal aliens were recently shipped to Massachusetts. The first reportedly landed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford. According to my tipster, approximately 160 illegal immigrants arrived on that flight and stayed nearly a week before being transferred to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) site and then released. The second flight reportedly was diverted from Hanscom to Boston’s Logan Airport this past weekend. I am told that both Massachusetts and New Hampshire officials were...