Free Republic

A man caught by D.C. police after carjacking a woman in the Sibley Hospital parking lot on Wednesday is an illegal immigrant who had already been deported once. He also carjacked another woman earlier in the week in Potomac, Maryland minutes after getting out of jail. On Monday, Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez was released from the Montgomery County Detention Center where he has been since June. The charges against him for that arrest are unclear. He then showed up at an Islamic education center in Potomac and violently carjacked a 38-year-old woman. “He was standing at the driver side door -- her...

Advocates for mass-migration are using skewed financial claims to smear Donald Trump’s popular border proposals, which actually would help revive the near-bankrupt Social Security and Medicare programs. For every illegal migrant household that leaves the United States under Trump’s plan, Americans would recoup nearly three-quarters of a million dollars ($719,350), according to 2010 data collected by Heritage scholar Robert Rector. The lifetime savings accrued from one deported illegal household would provide funds for 125 low-income inner city students to receive the maximum Pell Grant award in 2015-2016 ($5,775); it could cover the cost of pre-kindergarten for 90 at-risk children (around...

Charles Krauthammer and George Will continue to showcase their insane alignment with the DC Machine writ large. You might think of them as pundits, until you realize their punditry is expressed alignment with the policy positions of: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore. Laura Ingraham scratches the surface on the “anchor baby” issue, but more directly frames the discussion around the larger picture of failed immigration enforcement which has led to the crisis. We are...

Ever since Donald Trump, the mercurial businessman, media personality, and presidential candidate, proposed his immigration policy, centering on the mass deportation of up to 11 million human beings, reaction among conservatives has been decidedly mixed. Ann Coulter, for whom illegal immigration is the alpha and the omega of public policy, exalted that Trump could perform abortions in the White House, and she would not care. But Charles Krauthammer, writing in the National Review on Thursday, and George Will, in his latest column published Saturday, provided reality checks. Krauthammer wondered what the practical political effects would be of reenacting the Trail...

It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government’s size and coercive powers. Most of Donald Trump’s normally loquacious rivals are swaggeringly eager to confront Vladimir Putin but are too invertebrate — Lindsey Graham is an honorable exception — to voice robust disgust with Trump and the spirit...

Trump is a deeply ridiculous individual and his presidency would be the stuff of nightmares. But it’s important to understand that he’s offering more than just violations of political correctness.The punditry’s reaction to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has come in three phases. The first was annoyed indifference, accompanied by invocations of the Manny Ramirez Defense that this was “just Trump being Trump.” Most assumed the mouthy magnate was looking for a boutique issue to exploit so he could make a brief publicity splash and get out of the race, like he did with President Obama’s birth certificate in 2011. Responses...

Donald Trump's six-page platform on immigration may not be, as Ann Coulter wrote, "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta." But given the issue's role in elevating the candidate to leading Republican polls, it merits serious attention. And at least some of the platform's planks are serious. Trump calls for nationwide use, presumably mandatory, of E-Verify, the government system that is supposed to enable prospective employers to verify a job applicant's immigration status. He also calls for completion of a visa tracking system. About half of the nation's estimated 11.3 million illegal immigrants (Pew Research Center estimates, not significantly...

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but Mr. Bald Eagle has certainly gotten the nation talking in a very serious fashion about important nuances of constitutional law, particularly on the subject of immigration. This long overdue conversation will no doubt be tested in the courts multiple times in the coming years and perhaps we will get some clarity, but for the moment the debate continues to rage among candidates and legislators alike. Jumping into the conversation this week is “constitutional literacy adviser” for the National Constitution Center, Lyle Denniston. In an opinion piece which seems to specifically target...

The bottom line is this: As long as Republican politics demands extremism, some candidates are going to adopt highly controversial positions that rally conservative support while potentially driving away voters in general elections. “Would you support a change in the 14th amendment if necessary to achieve that?” Trump cited his rival’s views on immigration, Iraq and the Common Core education standards. So, I see what Mr. Trump is talking about right there. “Our country is going to hell”. Trump announced in his proposal for his policy for immigration that was released this past Sunday that he wants to put an...

We've gone far enough now with the Trump political phenomenon to know that it is no mere or momentary matter of name recognition which has placed him as the top contender for the Republican nomination, as bizarre an eventuality as that might appear. He now leads all national polls and all polls in the key early primary and caucus states - and by significant margins. We've also witnessed key GOP stakeholder Fox News try to derail Trump's campaign and fail miserably at it. Lots of top Republicans jumped on that bum-rush Trump bandwagon only to be damaged in turn when...

The billionaire's immigration positions are as ludicrous as they are destructive. Donald Trump is porn for nativists. Now, a person can derive much political self-gratification from wishful thinking, but remember porn isn’t real. So enjoy daydreaming about mass deportations and visualizing the repeal of birthright citizenship, but don’t let yourself get desensitized to reality. In the real world, Trumpism is destroying any slim hope the GOP could have a rational immigration debate or cobble together a consensus on policy. Before his fans began genuinely considering a Trump presidency, you’ll recall that the most popular justification for supporting the vanity run...

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly during an interview Tuesday night repeatedly challenged a key portion of Donald Trump's immigration agenda. The real-estate magnate and Republican presidential candidate recently unveiled his multipart plan to clamp down on illegal immigration. Among other things, Trump called for ending birthright citizenship, or the right of anyone born in the US to American citizenship. As O'Reilly pointed out, however, the US Constitution's 14th Amendment enshrines birthright citizenship into US law. "That's not going to happen because the 14th Amendment says if you're born here, you're an American," O'Reilly said. "And you can't kick Americans out....

Sweet Mother of Hades this is getting beyond absurd. Another entire media cycle consisting of completely manufactured nonsense projecting their determination of ‘what is’ against the reality of ‘what isn’t’…. Having watched an entire media cycle of punditry pontificate about Donald Trump proposing to deport “by force” 11 to 42 million illegal aliens we find ourselves shaking our heads at how little the MSM think of the viewing audience. NO-WHERE in Donald Trump’s proposal does he say, or advocate for, the mass “rounding up and subsequent deportation” of millions of illegal aliens. He never said it, he never proposed it,...

Okay, so what happens after Trump? What happens if he fades away or decides he’s had enough and drops out? What do his angry, frustrated and fed-up supporters do? Do they also drop out? Early warning: This column has more questions than answers – usually not a good thing for someone who’s at least attempting to influence the conversation. But when writing or talking about Donald Trump and his run for the presidency, there are few easy, or obvious, answers to the many questions his candidacy raises. You’ve been warned. There is a civil war raging in the Republican Party,...

When Donald Trump said he’d build a wall across the border and that Mexico would pay for it, some people in the South Texas wondered how the billionaire mogul would swing a deal like that. Now they know. In a newly released position paper — the first and so far only one of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination — Trump has announced he’d slap new costs or regulations on virtually every aspect of cross-border activity, from cash wire transfers to border-crossing cards and port-of-entry fees. Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, hasn’t fleshed out his proposal...

Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign with an ugly tirade against Mexican immigrants—“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”—that shot him to the top of the GOP polls. He’s been there ever since, despite racism, sexism, and open disrespect for combat veterans. Now, Trump is the center of gravity in the Republican race for president, and his antics affect every candidate, from mainstream picks like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, to more direct rivals like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz. On Monday, his pull got a little stronger. Trump published his first set of proposals, a plan for immigration...

Donald Trump told host Chuck Todd of Meet the Press that he would deport all illegal aliens if he were elected president. “They have to go,” he told Todd. “We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” he said in the interview, which will air in full on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this Sunday.Pressed on what he’d do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: “They have to go.”“We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don’t have a country,” he...

Fifty foreign nationals have been arrested in several cities across the U.S. in raids this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on suspicion of human rights violations. ICE says the "Operation No Safe Haven II" involved arrests in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, St. Paul and Washington. All the individuals taken into custody have outstanding removal orders and are subject to deportation, the agency says. It says 10 of them are also convicted criminals. "This operation more than doubled the number of known or suspected human rights...

Is that a change from a hard-line immigration position, or an endorsement of it? The deport-then-immigrate position has long been the hard-line position on immigration on the Right, although it does have one twist that’s outside the orthodoxy. Donald Trump explained this to CNN’s Dana Bash in an exclusive interview last night, along with his thoughts on health care, which are decidedly less hard-line:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Trump said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that as president he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then allow the “good ones” to reenter the country through...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told a Hispanic audience on Monday that illegal aliens must be given U.S. citizenship, and encouraging them to “self-deport” is not an American value. Bush made his remarks at church in Orlando, where he discussed his Christian faith and support for amnesty for illegal aliens, the same day a CNN poll showed that 64 percent of Republican voter support deporting illegals. Self-deportation is another matter: Since the vast majority of illegal aliens commit felonies in order to forge their documents, something like E-Verify could halt fraud in its tracks. No fake Social Security Card, no...