Free Republic

Barack Obama is a "decidedly liberal" senator "who was finding his feet, and then got diverted by his presidential ambitions", according to a frank verdict delivered to Gordon Brown by the British ambassador to the United States.

WASHINGTON – Congress approved a shift of $400 million from technology accounts to construction of the U.S. border fence despite a Customs and Border Protection admission that it cannot be completed by year's end, officials said Monday. The House Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security agreed to a CBP proposal to transfer funds from other accounts to build the remainder of the 670 miles of border fence. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, voiced disappointment over Congress' decision to continue to fund “the border wall.” “It won't work. It is lethal to people and wildlife and...

Completion of fence along U.S.—Mexico border hinges on Congress approving the transfer of $400 million in existing infrastructure and technology funding Washington, D.C. – U.S. Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) today commended the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) proposal to reprogram available border infrastructure and technology funding for the completion of physical fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border. Congressman Hunter also received confirmation from DHS that such action, if approved by Congressional Appropriations Committees, will not impede the fence construction project at “Smugglers Gulch” in San Diego, California. I strongly support the proposal by DHS to take money from virtual fence and...

It is interesting to note the wording about the issue of national security and immigration in the Republican Party platform for this election cycle. By adding a misbegotten phase to the end of some pseudo reassuring sentences, the Republicans have sent an alarm through a group of hold outs that they may have been hoping to win to their side. What did the Republican platform committee intend as the exact meaning of the fragment that was tucked at the end of one of a sentence; “except as provided by federal law”? The complete sentence appears to be strong and nationalist:...

HEAVY-METAL superstar James Hetfield of the band Metallica has erected a metal fence on his property on a Terra Linda hilltop, closing off a popular trail and angering hikers, bikers and equestrians. Someone scrawled "SHAME DISGRACE" on the 300-foot-long, 8-to 10-foot-high corrugated metal silver fence adorned with barbed wire at its far edges. "Look at the barbed wire. This a serious fence," said hiker Tom McMillan of San Rafael, as he walked along the shiny behemoth late last week. The fence, at the end of a fire road in the Terra Linda-Sleepy Hollow Divide open space preserve, went up in...

The sea crashes on to the rocky beach, with the marbled sand black and white, looking like paradise with the sound of norteño music lingering in the background, but this view is violently interrupted by a metallic wall, penetrating the sea, salted water responding to the aggression by corroding the metal sheets. Here, right under the light house, thousands of families have gathered for summer days, weekends and holidays, meeting to share, kiss, and hold hands, for over 30 years. Lone men coming from the US side to see their kids grow across the fence, while they cry in their...

Just west of El Paso, near where Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1598, construction crews have completed a steel fence authorities say is a new model for border security. The five-meter (18-foot) tall fence has a mesh woven so tightly that feet and fingers cannot grab hold, but it still allows people to see through. Steel pylons are set close enough to stop a truck from bursting through, and two meters of reinforced concrete underground deters any tunneling. The structure is designed to push would-be illegal immigrants and drug smugglers out into the...

Crews could begin filling in Smuggler's Gulch as early as this week for the border-fence construction project that environmentalists had opposed for years. The gulch is a deep canyon west of the San Ysidro port of entry. Yesterday, Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, and Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad, held a news conference there to announce the expected start of the cut-and-fill phase. “This is the last hole in the border fence,” Hunter said. “It's important to get this done.” Earth-scraping equipment was scheduled to arrive yesterday, he said. A Border Patrol spokesman later confirmed that the contractor handling the fence project is...

“All the illegal border crossings are down. It looks like the border patrol is doing their job. There’s really no need for a wall like that,” said Mark Abeyta from east El Paso. The El Paso sector has reported that they have apprehended 25,500 illegal border crossers during the first nine months of this fiscal year. This is the lowest since 2000, and it was made possible because of more barriers, increased agents and the zero-tolerance policies. Currently the Department of Homeland Security has completed around 300 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing and they expect to have a total...

EDINBURG -- Hundreds of people chanting "No border wall" marched to the Hidalgo County Courthouse on Saturday evening seeking to persuade local politicians to abandon their support for the planned barrier. Protesters specifically targeted Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas and other county officials for linking the building of the wall to the repair of the county's deteriorating levee system. Salinas has consistently said he opposes the border wall. But when it began to seem the barrier's construction was inevitable, he and other officials started lobbying the federal government to combine the project with levee repairs to better leverage federal money...

Just months from now, either John McCain or Barack Obama will be our President. Neither of these men are strong on stopping the flow of illegal aliens, so this truly is our best--and possibly last chance to get a REAL border fence built.

Presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee John McCain told Mexican leaders security at the border is a precondition of immigration reform. McCain ended a visit to Colombia and Mexico Thursday, The Arizona Republic reported. I believe we must have comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want our borders secured first, McCain said at a Mexico City news conference. That will require some walls. It will require virtual fences. It will require high-technology equipment. We must secure our borders, and then we will address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. McCain was one of the authors of an immigration reform bill that...

The fence around the public demonstration zone outside the Democratic National Convention will be chicken wire or chain link, authorities revealed in U.S. District Court today. That may allow protestors to be seen and heard by delegates going in and out of the Pepsi Center during the convention. But the American Civil Liberties Union and several advocacy groups have filed an amended complaint to their lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service and the city and county of Denver that says protestors and demonstrators may have their First Amendment rights violated by security restrictions. The ACLU has said it wants to...

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to take up the appeal lodged by environmental groups that focused on a two-mile stretch of border fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area near Naco, Ariz. The fence, which has been built since the petition was filed, is a vital part of the Bush administration’s drive to secure the border between the United States and Mexico. The Supreme Court’s decision is a welcome and needed victory in the war against illegal immigration and efforts to preserve the unique character that is America. The environmentalists based part of their challenge on claims...

PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico, The first of 400,000 trees are being planted to form a ``green wall' in protest of the fence the U.S. is building along the border with Mexico. The treeline will eventually stretch for 512 kilometres along the border between the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. Coahuila Gov. Humberto Moreira Valdes says ``our wall is of life, and it competes with shame and hate.' The U.S. government says the fence is critical to security. Critics say it fuels animosity between the two countries and raises environmental and private property concerns. The mayor of a Texas border town...

Protest against security fence being constructed near Na'alin turns violent as Israeli, Palestinians, foreign nationals clash with IDF troops A reported 150 people participated Sunday afternoon in a demonstration near the West Bank village of Naalin, west of Ramallah to protest the security fence being built in the area. The protestors accused IDF soldiers of using tear gas to disperse them while the latter claimed that rocks were thrown in their direction. The demonstrators - Left-wing Israeli, Palestinian and foreign nationals - have gathered on land due to be confiscated to allow for a fence to be built around the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court rejected on Monday a legal challenge by two environmental groups to the U.S. Homeland Security secretary's decision to waive 19 federal laws so a fence could be built on the Arizona-Mexico border. The high court refused to hear an appeal by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club challenging a 2005 law that Secretary Michael Chertoff invoked on the grounds that it violated the constitutional separation of powers principles. The Republican-led Congress in 2005 gave Chertoff the power to waive environmental and other laws to build fences and other border barriers in an effort...

Bo (woof) In Commentary: I consider myself an above average escape artist. I’ve dug out beneath a fence, eaten the slats off of a fence and run through a fence but I’ve never flown over one. I thought you need to be a bird to do that. Well, Harvey the Bull Terrier has just proven me wrong. (One moment Harvey, a three-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier, was alone in the garden, the next he disappeared. “He couldn’t get over the fence on his own and must have used the trampoline to...

When the border fence is constructed along the Rio Grande, Fermin Leal will watch as the barrier slices through the backyards of his neighbors, bypassing his 500-acre farm in San Pedro. The fence's trajectory, incontiguous and largely unexplained, has left many border residents suspicious of the federal government's plans. "I'm still not sure how my land is different than theirs," Leal said. "They still haven't given us any answers." The fence will run nearly unabated through Brownsville before stopping at River Bend Resort and golf course. It will break again for nearly seven miles in San Pedro, where the federal...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday he had attended the funerals of too many Border Patrol agents killed in the line of duty to permit environmentalists to block construction of barriers and all-weather road along the Texas... Chertoff pitted the safety of Border Patrol agents against the efforts of environmentalists to stymie Bush administration plans to complete a border fence before leaving office in January. Some 670 miles of pedestrian fencing or vehicle barriers are planned along the 1,947-mile U.S.-Mexico boundary.Chertoff, who has set aside some environmental restrictions to speed fence construction, said he didn't want to "get enmeshed...

With 670 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border fence slated for completion by year's end, construction companies in Texas are questioning the feasibility of completing such a project without immigrant labor. The irony is not lost on businesses that have come to rely heavily on foreign-born and Hispanic workers to fill vacancies left by a shrinking domestic labor pool. "Is it possible to construct a wall without undocumented workers?" asked Perry Vaughn, executive director of the Rio Grande Valley Chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America. "It's probably borderline impossible to be honest with you." In recent years, the construction...

The latest threat assessment prepared for special border enforcement teams says pleasure boats are among the increasingly inventive means used by crafty couriers to slip illicit cargo — including drugs, guns and people — from one country to the other. The marine environment “is viewed as particularly vulnerable and porous to smuggling activity” due to the many challenges in keeping tabs on lakes, waterways and tiny coves, says the August 2007 report, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. One American criminal group has children carrying bags of tobacco swim across the St. Croix River between...

One of the unfortunate paradoxes of the post-September 11 environment is that the further in time we move from that horrible day, and the more effective our security agencies become at preventing another successful terrorist attack on American soil, the more susceptible many Americans become to the notion that the terrorist threat has receded. Taking false comfort in the absence of a successful 9-11 scale attack or worse during the past seven years, many already pre-disposed to distrust the Bush administration have long since decided that it can do no right when it comes to terror prevention -- that every...

This is why we keep close watch on Congress.  In a bipartisan effort accomplished quickly and virtually under the table, Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) -- in Senate Appropriations markup of the War Supplemental bill -- obtained approval of an amendment that would create an amnesty for illegal alien farm workers.  The measure, called the Emergency Agriculture Relief Act, was added to the War Supplemental bill in a 17-12 vote last Thursday. Known as the AgJob amendment, the Feinstein-Craig measure revived instantaneously the controversy that caused conservatives to lash out at the White House and Congress last summer. ...

Members of the Texas Border Coalition yesterday said Department of Homeland Security officials "lied" about reaching out to Texas landowners over the U.S.-Mexico border fence, and filed a class-action lawsuit against Secretary Michael Chertoff demanding he give landowners more say before the fence is built. Under the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, the group of border mayors, county judges and community leaders said the federal government violated the rights of landowners and intimidated them into signing away, for a $100 payment, rights to come on their land and prepare for building the fence. "What's being forced upon...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Texas mayors and business leaders filed a class-action lawsuit Friday alleging Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff hoodwinked landowners into waiving their property rights for construction of a fence along the Mexican border. Members of the Texas Border Coalition said Chertoff did not fairly negotiate compensation with landowners for access to their land for six-month surveys to choose fence sites. The coalition of mayors and business and community leaders is seeking an injunction to block work on the fence. They also want a federal judge to rescind all the agreements with landowners and to order Chertoff to start...

Texas Border Coalition Members to Meet During Global Border Security Conference on Border Alternatives at Technology Expo AUSTIN, Texas, May 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With security technology highlighted at the Global Border Security Conference & Expo as its backdrop, members of the Texas Border Coalition will meet May 21 to discuss issues that directly affect the Texas-Mexico border region and build on strategies to recommend technological alternatives to erecting a physical border fence, which coalition members say will cede privately owned land to Mexico and disrupt economic development in the region. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of the Texas Border...

It's not surprising that the national media has taken to covering the border fence on a fairly regular basis. What is surprising is that the country's most well-respected news outlets manage to consistently misunderstand one of the issue's important nuances. There will be-as The Herald has pointed out-houses and businesses on the south side of the border fence. But will they be on the "Mexican side of the fence?" No. The Department of Homeland Security is not selling a sliver of the country to Mexico. The land south of the fence will not be abandoned or informally ceded. But the...

WASHINGTON -- At a cost of up to $4 million a mile, the concrete and steel fence rising along the Southwest border constitutes one of the most ambitious public works projects in years, encompassing legions of federal bureaucrats and a lineup of blue-ribbon contractors. But as it slices through forbidding terrain, tribal lands, private property and sensitive wildlife habitats, the barrier faces its own towering wall of challenges, raising doubt that the projected 670 miles of pedestrian fences and vehicle barriers will be in place when the Bush administration comes to an end in January. Facing a deadline of Dec....

Congressman, Texans clash over border McALLEN, Texas (AP) - South Texas officials who oppose a border fence are stepping up their criticism of a Colorado congressman who favors the divider. The mayors of Brownsville and Eagle Pass said Friday that U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo falsely suggested that they believe there is no border between the two countries. In a letter Friday, Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada and Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, who is also chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, called the suggestion "ridiculously juvenile," and noted that the Rio Grande is a clear border between the United States and...

CNSNews.com) - Two years after President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law, requiring 700 miles of double-layer fencing to be constructed along five stretches of the southern U.S. border by May 2008, only 90 miles of fencing have been built -- and just 12 miles of it is double-layered. "By eliminating the double-fence requirement, the Democratic Congress is going to make it easier for drug and human smugglers to cross our Southern land border," Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who wrote the original fencing specification in the Secure Fence Act, said when the U.S. House passed a...

Congressmen debate merits of border fence in public hearing at UTB-TSC Construction of the U.S.-Mexico border fence might only be a few weeks away, but in Washington, D.C., the barrier continues to be a hot button issue. The fence's significance - and its divisiveness - became clear on Monday, when eight congressmen and a number of local, state and national officials met at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College for a congressional field hearing. U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., introduced the hearing, titled "Walls and Waivers," as a forum on the expedited construction of the border...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. fence along the Mexican border is less a wall than a stuttering set of blockades: half barrier, half gaps. Americans are split pretty much the same way: half in favor, half against, passionate on both sides when it comes to the idea of erecting a wall to keep people from entering the country illegally. It can seem a shaky foundation as the United States rushes to complete the fencing on nearly 700 miles of the border by the end of the year. That's when a new administration arrives in the White House with its own...

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — One of Congress' strongest border fence proponents received a hostile reception Monday in the city that has become the epicenter of fence opposition. Boos and hisses emanated from the audience for a congressional field hearing when Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado dismissed residents' concerns that the effort to build 670 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border by year's end would damage the environment and destroy a centuries-old bond between residents on both sides of the Rio Grande. Late in the five-hour hearing, Tancredo returned to a comment made earlier by panelist Betty Perez, a...

I was chagning stations on my car radio, using that function that let's you listern for a few seconds than goes on to the enxt station, when I thought I heard that we, the US tax payers, had sent 1.6 billion dollars to Mexico to build a fence on the Mexican southern border.

BROWNSVILLE - Members of Congress will be here Monday to talk about the planned security fence along the U.S. border with Mexico. The hearing comes several weeks after U.S Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff waived more than 30 federal laws - most dealing with preservation of natural, cultural and historic resources - to expedite the fence's construction. "The decision to invoke a waiver for fence construction will devastate the region and is an insult to those of us who live near the border," wrote Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, one of the representatives expected to attend the...

Washington, D.C. – In commending the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to terminate its Project 28 virtual fence initiative, Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) once again called for the construction of physical, reinforced fencing in place of technology-only alternatives. The decision to abandon Project 28 in the Tucson sector of Arizona was the result of multiple system failures, significant cost over-runs and project delays. “The decision to terminate the Project 28 initiative underscores the fact that technology alone is an unreliable and ineffective border enforcement tool,” said Congressman Hunter. “I hope that DHS has learned from this experience and will begin...

TUCSON, Arizona (AP) -- The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said. The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson. Boeing is to replace the so-called Project 28 prototype with a series of towers equipped with communications systems, cameras and radar capability,...

Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division and Multi-National Division - Baghdad, presents an impact Bronze Star Medal to Sgt. Shawn Griffith, a native of Richwood, W.Va. Griffith, who serves with 769th Engineer Battalion, 35th Engineer Brigade, was one of six of the battalion's Soldiers recognized for their hard work and dedication in installing approximately 130,000-square feet of rocket-propelled grenade fencing and sniper-screen material over a 1,200 foot distance, with heights measuring up to 40 feet, at Joint Security Station Ur in the Sadr City District of Baghdad to veil the aerostat and its docking...

TUCSON -- The debate over the fence the United States is building along its southern border has focused largely on the project's costs, feasibility and how well it will curb illegal immigration. But one of its most lasting impacts may well be on the animals and vegetation that make this politically fraught landscape their home. Some wildlife researchers have grown so concerned about the consequences of bisecting hundreds of miles of rugged habitat that they have talked of engaging in civil disobedience to block the fence's construction. "This wall is so asinine, and so wrong, I am one of a...

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has issued two waivers of laws hindering barrier construction and security improvements on the border with Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has already built 309 miles of border obstacles, and these waivers will facilitate improvements on about 500 miles of border infrastructure. One waiver addresses environmental and land management laws that applied to about 470 miles across four border states; the other addresses a 22-mile levee-border project in Hidalgo, Texas. The waivers were issued on April 1, 2008, and will become effective upon their publication in the Federal Register.These DHS efforts...

COLUMBUS, N.M. - Illegal immigrants armed with torches, hacksaws, ladders and even bungee cords are making it around a section of the border fence hailed as the most efficient way to stop them. In the 10 months since the section was put up, a tunnel is the only method federal agents haven't seen - "yet," added Victor Guzman, the supervisory Border Patrol agent responsible for the stretch of 15-foot, concrete-filled steel poles, planted close together and three feet into the ground. Agents responsible for guarding that stretch of border almost immediately started seeing cuts in the fence. The towering posts,...

Build the U.S. Border Fence Now! Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and the Bush administration are deservedly under assault for not keeping their promises. After a long public outcry over promises broken, the government says they have agreed to construct a border fence. But this is Washington, promises aren't meant to actually be honored. Chertoff and the Bush administration are creating needless public controversy about the fence over what must be done to and with the land, and they are exploiting a backdoor Democrat Party and Open Borders Lobby effort that provides a smoke screen for the feds to...

MEXICALI — He traveled from afar, 1,800 miles from where tropical beaches and mountains pervade the topography, arriving in this grimy industrial town Tuesday morning. SNIP Like his older brother did three years before him, Garcia intends to cross into the U.S. somewhere into the Imperial Valley and find his way to Phoenix to work in a restaurant, where his brother earns a salary that is more than four times Garcia’s was back in Veracruz. Garcia picked corn, beans and chiles on the terraces and foothills of Veracruz for $9 a day. SNIP Humberto Leal, director of Guadalupe’s social services,...

COLUMBUS, N.M. -- Illegal immigrants armed with torches, hacksaws, ladders and even bungee cords are making it around a section of the border fence hailed as the most efficient way to stop them. In the 10 months since the section was put up, the only method federal agents haven't seen is a tunnel _ "Yet," said Victor Guzman, the supervisory Border Patrol agent responsible for the stretch of close-together 15-foot cement-filled steel poles planted three feet into the ground. Agents responsible for guarding the stretch of border here "almost immediately" started seeing cuts in the fence. The towering gray and...

COLUMBUS, N.M. — Illegal immigrants armed with torches, hacksaws, ladders and even bungee cords are making it around a section of the border fence hailed as the most efficient way to stop them. In the 10 months since the section was put up, the only method federal agents haven't seen is a tunnel — "Yet," said Victor Guzman, the supervisory Border Patrol agent responsible for the stretch of close-together 15-foot cement-filled steel poles planted three feet into the ground. Agents responsible for guarding the stretch of border here "almost immediately" started seeing cuts in the fence. The towering gray and...

Three years after Congress granted the federal government unprecedented waiver authority, 14 congressmen are challenging how that authority is being used to construct a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. On Monday, U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., led a group, including Rio Grande Valley U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, to file a brief in Supreme Court which questions the constitutionality of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's waivers. Last week's waivers filed by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would suspend more than 30 laws, which Chertoff said could interfere with "the expeditious construction of barriers." It was the fourth set of...

Click here to sign In a backroom deal just prior to the Christmas break, Congress passed the omnibus Appropriations bill which included the Hutchison Amendment that gutted the Secure Fence Act. Her amendment essentially guaranteed that the DHS didn't have to build the fence! For more click here. After Grassfire broke the "Secure Fence Hoax", key members of Congress took action in an effort to "undo" what the Hutchison amendment did, by restoring deadlines and double fence mandate for the entire 854 miles of border. Two bills have already been introduced that Grassfire is supporting. Each of these bills...

ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson, in a news brief on Tuesday’s "World News," spun the Bush administration’s decision to fast-track the construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, focusing almost entirely on the "more than 30 laws and regulations to be bypassed," as the graphic accompanying the brief put it. "The Bush administration today announced plans to speed up construction of the fence along the Mexican border by sidestepping more than 30 laws that now stand in the way. The administration says it will use its authority to bypass those laws in an attempt to finish 670 miles of...