Free Republic

Federal immigration authorities plan to build a separate unit for transgender detainees in a new facility under construction in Alvarado, Texas .... One other facility in Santa Ana, California also has a separate unit for transgender women and gay men. The Human Rights Watch report notes that transgender women have previously faced violence and been subject to attacks when they were housed alongside men.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, back from the campaign trail, have something productive to do in Washington. They’ve taken the lead against President Obama’s plan to give up U.S. protection of the open Internet. The Obama administration announced in 2014 it would end U.S. oversight by canceling the Commerce Department’s long-standing contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. Despite enormous effort over the past two years by the multi-stakeholder community of network engineers and developers, no one found an alternative to U.S. stewardship that would protect the global Internet from censorship by authoritarian regimes. The...

The officer should not have been charged in the first place. The second officer to be tried in the Baltimore prosecutions arising out of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015 has been acquitted in a bench trial. The case against the officer, Edward Nero, was among the most inane brought by the incompetent, race-baiting prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby. As we’ve previously recounted, Gray died after suffering a severe spinal injury while in custody in a police van. Back in December, the first officer to be tried, William G. Porter, got a mistrial after a hung jury and is to be retried...

The head of the Transportation Security Administration's security division was fired Monday for "mismanagement," according to the House Oversight Committee.

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.” Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the...

Condit's alleged secret sex life is now in the spotlight after defense attorneys for Ingmar Guandique, the man sentenced to 60 years in prison for killing 24-year-old Levy, filed a new motion last week. Guandique, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted by a jury in 2010 based on a jailhouse confession to other inmates. However, his conviction was later set aside. Last year, prosecutors dropped their opposition to Guandique's attorneys' request for a new trial. Guandique is facing a new trial this fall. The new motion filed by Guandique's lawyers claims that "aggressive sex involving bondage" may have...

Israel has been “infected by the seeds of fascism,” former prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak said during a TV interview on Friday night. Responding to the resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon earlier in the day, Barak said that it “should be a red light for all of us regarding what’s going on in the government.” “Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together,” Barak told a Channel 10 interviewer. …

The Democratic Party relies too heavily on superdelegates to pick its presidential nominees, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday — though she downplayed the current dispute between party leaders and Sen. Bernard Sanders. Mrs. Pelosi called the fight between Mr. Sanders and party leaders a “family disagreement” and insisted it won’t dent the eventual nominee in the general election. She also dismissed comparisons to the riot-fueled 1968 Democratic convention. “This is an incident. That was a colossal … clash of people,” she said.

Below is Colin Flaherty's review of David Horowitz’s new book, “Progressive Racism," which is volume 6 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz's conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-6 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author. Cometh the hour: Never in our lifetimes has there been a greater gap between truth and fairy...

The U.S. Embassy in Venezuela has temporarily stopped scheduling appointments for first-time visa seekers because of the consular staff is insufficient to serve the overwhelming demand, the consular office announced. The measure applies to all new tourist and business visas, for which an average of 1,800 applications were being filed daily. "We had to make this decision because in the last eight months [Venezuela's] Foreign Ministry hasn't responded to various requests to increase personnel," said Lola Petrova, the embassy spokeswoman. She said that with the current number of employees they can handle 800 daily appointments at the most. In an...

A Somali citizen tried to run over Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after a high speed pursuit, according to federal investigators. In April, investigators say Ahmed Elni Abdalla drove up to a checkpoint near Amado. When agents approached Abdalla’s car, he drove through the stop sign and tried to get away at a “high rate of speed."

Two internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) committees secretly control how billions of dollars are spent, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found. Congress appropriates about $1 billion annually for EPA’s Superfund program, and the agency has accumulated nearly $6.8 billion in more than 1,300 slush fund-like accounts since 1990. Two committees consisting entirely of EPA officials meet behind closed doors twice annually to decide how the agency spends those funds on highly polluted – and often dangerous – Superfund sites. All reports to and from the groups, as well as the minutes of their meetings and all other details,...

The Romanian hacker who claimed he easily breached Hillary Clinton’s personal email server is finalizing a plea deal with the FBI and U.S. attorney, Fox News has learned. Marcel Lehel Lazar, the 44-year-old hacker also known as “Guccifer,” first gave indications he wanted to cooperate with the U.S. government in mid-April, during an interview with Fox News. Lazar, in a subsequent discussion, said he was working on a plea deal – he then suspended media contact earlier this month. On Monday, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia confirmed that a change of plea hearing...

The lid may finally blow off the Fast and Furious cover-up by the Obama administration, as a federal judge ordered the release of thousands of emails showing how then-attorney general Eric Holder obstructed, stonewalled, and misdirected congressional investigators looking into the program. People in the Nixon administration went to jail for less. ... The documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials — including Attorney General Holder — intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” he asserted. They also indict Holder deputy Lanny Breuer, an old Clinton hand, who had to step...

Presumably Hillary's hack of voter rolls, mentioned as one of the original crimes in Monicagate House Prosecutor David Schippers' "Sellout", will be fed into her enemies list. So that anyone who voted against her will be kept track of.The first item of legislation in the new, Clinton-Castro administration should be, that anyone on Her Eminence's enemies list will have freedom from being hacked by: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan's ISI, former Saddaam Bathist officer shadow puppetmaster ISIS, Cuba, Venezuela, Bangladesh, MexiCartel, BLM (not bureau of land management).

New Mexico today sued the Environmental Protection Agency and the owners of the Gold King Mine for more than $136 million over economic setbacks and environmental damages suffered by the state due to the Aug. 5 dumping of more than 3 million gallons of toxic waste into the Animas River. The suit was filed on behalf of the state by Attorney General Hector Balderas and the New Mexico Environment Department. It demands reimbursement of $889,327 for short-term emergency-response costs paid by the state, more than $6 million to pay for long-term monitoring of the Animas and $130 million for lost...

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Monday compared the length of time veterans wait to receive health care at the VA to the length of time people wait for rides at Disneyland, and said his agency shouldn't use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn't either. "When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what's important? What's important is, what's your satisfaction with the experience?" McDonald said Monday during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. "And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind...

A group of North Carolina parents are joining forces to fight the Obama administration over its policy that forces public schools to allow transgender students into restrooms, showers, and locker rooms that are opposite from their biological sex. “It’s not safe for my daughter,” Tammy Covil, a mother from Wilmington, N.C. told The Daily Signal. The parents, part of a nonprofit called North Carolinians for Privacy, allege in a lawsuit filed May 10 against the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that the federal government is forcing them to choose between their children’s privacy and educational future.

Obama has asserted, by pure fiat, on no legal, medical, scientific, or commonsense grounds whatsoever, that he can dictate how children use school bathrooms around the country. This is an obnoxious and dangerous abuse of federal power, and it looks suspicious. What is Obama's motivation? Adults may not remember the deep shame and embarrassment children often feel, as early as age four, around toilet training. Sibling rivalry can get pretty intense. Being called a "poopy kid" by your brother or sister might look pretty harmless to parents, but young children can experience it as a sink-through-the-floor feeling of overwhelming shame....

The tide of red tape that threatens to drown U.S. consumers and businesses surged yet again in 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation study we released on Monday. More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.