Free Republic

The Pentagon has donated hundreds of MRAP vehicles to police departments nationwide. Snip: Historians looking back at this period in America’s development will consider it to be profoundly odd that at the exact moment when violent crime hit a 50-year low, the nation’s police departments began to gear up as if the country were expecting invasion — and, on occasion, to behave as if one were underway. The ACLU reported recently that SWAT teams in the United States conduct around 45,000 raids each year, only 7 percent of which have anything whatsoever to do with the hostage situations with...

'Boys and girls forced to cut off the fingers or cut off the ears of other boys and girls' Only days after the stunning report from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, of threats and torture illegal alien children endure en route to the southern U.S. border, a member of Congress is charging that President Obama, through his statements and actions, is complicit. Cruz’s statement came in a news conference after he, Rep. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas, and others visited a dorm at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas that serves as a temporary home to some of the tens of thousands...

Immigration: A federal employment ad posted in January showing that 65,000 unaccompanied minors will enter the U.S. illegally shows that the administration expected this cross-border child abuse and encouraged it. Concrete evidence has shown up proving our earlier assertion: The breach of our border by waves of unaccompanied alien children was orchestrated by the administration based on a strategy straight out of the playbook President Obama studied as a community organizer. His goal is to get his way on immigration reform by overwhelming the U.S. Border Patrol and collapsing an already weakened system. The evidence comes in the form a...

HOMESTEAD, FL — EXCLUSIVE — A Florida couple was traumatized after a dozen heavily armed SWAT agents crashed through their front door, flash-banged their cat, aimed rifles at them and searched their home without explanation. * * * * * The raid took place in the pre-dawn hours of June 10th, 2014. At approximately 6:16 a.m., Kari Edwards and her live-in boyfriend were intruded upon by men dressed in full SWAT gear and wielding rifles. After smashing down the couple’s front door, agents tossed concussion grenades and proceeded into the home. “They busted in like I was a terrorist or...

A leading adviser at the Department of Homeland Security has jumped from the frying pan into the fire, following up comments about the Constitution being “Islamically compliant” with an even more head-turning tweet — that America is an Islamic country. In October, adviser Mohamed Elibiary sent out a Twitter message that said, “Yes, I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution. Move on!

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home. “Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green. “It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore...

The Obama administration’s claim to have been surprised by the wave of children flooding over out borders may turn out to be another political lie of the year. Sundance of Conservative Treehouse noticed a very peculiar advertisement: On January 29th of this year, the federal government posted an advertisement seeking bids for a vendor contract to handle “Unaccompanied Alien Children“. Not just any contract mind you, but a very specific contract – for a very specific number of unaccompanied minors: 65,000. • Why would DHS and ICE be claiming “surprise” by the current influx of unaccompanied minors on the border...

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.

HOUSTON, Texas—Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson to secure the border and put an end to the "humanitarian crisis." Cruz’s letter to Johnson comes less than twenty-four hours after the top three Texas lawmakers sent a letter to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director, Colonel Steve McCraw. The letter directed McCraw to conduct an immediate surge of Texas law enforcement resources along the border. The outcry over the crisis has continued to build steam since Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby released over 40 leaked internal government photographs...

Apparently, Homeland Security has been planning for this for months. Amazing how they knew this crisis would erupt 2 months before the surge began across the border.

Affiliates of the Iraqi terror group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as ISIS, are praising and potentially recruiting extremists based on controversial tweets by a senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) adviser who recently claimed that ISIL is proof that a Muslim “caliphate” is making an “inevitable” return. The recent tweets by Mohamed Elibiary, a controversial figure who serves as a senior member of DHS’ Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), were recently picked up in the Arabic press and widely disseminated on Twitter by multiple Islamic extremists. Elibiary’s tweets—which disparaged Americans as showing “belligerence” after...

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison “Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout.”—Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be...

Mohamed Elibiary, a member on the Obama administration's Homeland Security Advisory Council, is at the center of a controversy involving allegations that former DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano gave him secret clearance which led to him downloading classified information. According to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Elibiary later shopped that classified material around to a reporter.

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison “Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout.”—Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be...

A controversial senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is receiving criticism for tweeting that the recent takeover of Iraqi cities by a violent terror group is proof that a Muslim “caliphate” is making an “inevitable” return. Mohamed Elibiary, a controversial figure and member of DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), discussed what he described as the “inevitable” return of a Muslim caliphate Friday on Twitter. “As I’ve said b4 inevitable that ‘Caliphate’ returns,” Elibiary tweeted in response to a question about the terror group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as ISIS, or the...

A federal judge in Texas is accusing the Department of Homeland Security of hand-delivering children smuggled into the United States to their illegal immigrant parents. SNIP Hanen claimed that, in more than one case before his court, immigration officials are arresting human traffickers smuggling children into the U.S. -- and then "delivering the minors to the custody of the parent illegally living in the United States." SNIP Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council union, told FoxNews.com the judge's claims are "absolutely correct." "This is exactly what's happening," he said, describing how agents "can't keep up" with the number...

Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson suggested Thursday he would not block the growing wave of illegal immigrants who are crossing the Texas border until the GOP agrees to pass the Senate immigration rewrite that is backed by President Obama. He twice refused to set any limit on the number of foreign youths who would be given the opportunity to ask the administration’s immigration judges for permission to live in the United States. Johnson and several deputies delivered the threat to GOP legislators during a brief June 12 press conference. The threat was offset by statements........

The Obama administration is releasing inside the United States some immigrants who have crossed illegally into the country amid a surge in traffic across the Mexican border in southern Texas. But how many remains a mystery because the government won’t disclose the number. The Homeland Security Department started flying immigrants to Arizona from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas last month after the number of immigrants, including more than 48,000 children traveling on their own, overwhelmed the Border Patrol there. […] The administration would not say Friday how many immigrants were affected—hundreds or thousands—or how many of those immigrants subsequently...

Alice Hill, senior advisor for Preparedness and Resilience to the assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, spoke at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on June 5, 2014 in Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – A top Obama advisor said at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on Thursday that climate change threatens our national security, including military bases that could be misplaced by rising sea levels. “It could, for example, affect our military mission,” Alice Hill, senior advisor for Preparedness and Resilience to the assistant to the President for...

My trip to the desert southwest two weeks ago helped me understand practically, even more than physically, why most of us in the East don’t really know what it is like to live in the West. Yet we desperately need to learn about the increasing obstacles to the pursuit of happiness in the West if we hold our liberties dear. Fortunately, help is on its way. The urban elites of California, Washington State, and Oregon are hard at work growing government debt and inventing new schemes to shrink our liberty, but urban progressives are similar throughout America. The western lifestyles...