Free Republic

A man suspected of arson was arrested at Maxwell Farms Regional Park in Sonoma on Sunday afternoon after he was seen leaving a creek bed where a fire was burning, authorities said. Three Sonoma County Probation officers patrolling the area because of ongoing fires in the region noticed Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, 29, walking out of the creek area and a plume of smoke behind him, Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Crum said. Sheriff’s Deputy John Grohl was called to the scene and extinguished the fire, which was then completely doused by Sonoma Valley Fire Protection District personnel. Gonzalez was wearing a trench...

The U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) issued a detainer request on the Sonoma County Jail for Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, who was arrested Sunday on suspicion of arson in Wine Country fires that have killed at least 40 residents.Breitbart News reported earlier this week that Sonoma County Sheriffs had arrested Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, 29, at Maxwell Regional Park in Sonoma County after a series of reports of ongoing fires in the region. Mr. Gonzalez was observed around 3:00 p.m. PDT wearing a jacket and walking “out of the creek area and a plume of smoke behind him,” according to the Santa Rosa...

A North Carolina teen who decapitated his mother and then walked outside carrying her head had murder charges against him dropped. Authorities dismissed the charge on Wednesday saying Oliver Funes-Machada isn't mentally competent to stand trial. "Specifically, could he appreciate the charges against him and participate in his defense," District Attorney Michael D. Waters said in a statement to WRAL. "The mental health professionals there determined he could not at this time." Funes-Machada, 19, was ordered by a judge to be committed to a state psychiatric hospital. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously said Funes-Machada, from Honduras, was in the...

Representatives from Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's office attended the Tuesday morning St. Francois County Commission meeting to briefly go over the state's new Show It 2 Vote program. Brandon Alexander and Chrissy Peters, directors of election, were introduced to the commission and those in the gallery by County Clerk Mark Hedrick. "We're just going to talk to you real quick about the changes under Missouri's new voter ID law," Alexander said. "Last November, 63 percent of Missourians voted for photo ID to go into effect and we're here to talk about the implementing legislation that puts that into...

Rasmea Odeh was deported Tuesday. The 70-year-old Palestinian immigrant, whose U.S. citizenship was revoked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for not disclosing having served time as a prisoner in Israel, didn’t cry until the end, only after ICE refused her huge crowd of supporters entry into the airport. Before that, Odeh was staunchly defiant, the etched lines of her set countenance only occasionally twitching during a three-hour O’Hare Airport send-off for the political activist who became symbolic of a cause — Palestine liberation — her case gaining notoriety worldwide. “Up until this very moment, I didn’t believe they will throw...

A Palestinian convicted terrorist with a decades-old record of bombings in Jerusalem will be deported from Chicago to Jordan on Tuesday, her spokesman said. Supporters and community activists plan to gather at O’Hare Airport’s international terminal before Rasmea Odeh, 70, departs for Jordan, said Hatem Abudayyeh, coordinator of her defense committee. Odeh pleaded guilty in April to concealing her convictions when she applied for US citizenship in Detroit in 2004. Her record would have disqualified her from entering the US a decade earlier. In 1970, Odeh was convicted of two bombings in Jerusalem, including one that killed two young men...

With the emergence in the last week of Bipartisan Trump, we face the prospect of congressional implementation of a statute that replaces DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) sooner rather than later. Despite some ambivalent tweeting, it now appears as though Trump has agreed in principle with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to enshrine DACA in legislation that also includes additional border security measures (but not border wall funding). Between Democrats and pro-business (and thus pro-immigration) "establishment" Republicans, there is likely majority support in Congress for such a measure.

An alleged member of one of the most violent Mexican drug cartels was found in an American sanctuary city and turned over to Mexican officials on Tuesday. Coahuila state police officers traveled to the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo where they took custody of Juan Rafael “El Cubano” Arredondo Oviedo. U.S. authorities arrested Arredondo, a “foot soldier” in the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel, at an immigration court in Chicago, Illinois, a sanctuary city, where he sought to be a protected as a witness from the Los Zetas cartel who he said is going to kill him.

Alonso Guillen drove more than 100 miles south from his home in Lukfin, Texas, last week, determined to help those trapped by Hurricane Harvey flooding in the Houston area. But he and another man disappeared after their boat capsized in a flood-swollen creek Wednesday ... Guillen moved to Lufkin at age 14 from just across the border in Piedras Negras, Mexico. He later graduated from Lufkin High School, attended St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, worked in construction and at a local club, Rodeo Disko, and radio station, SuperMix 101.9 FM. He was known as “DJ Ocho,” who mixed country and hip-hop,...

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO -- Beatriz Morelos Casillas still can't believe that a few seconds changed her life forever. On July 23, she was driving home on Interstate 90 in Painesville when she saw that an Ohio Highway Patrol officer had pulled over a car. But on Tuesday, Aug. 1, everything changed. ICE agents arrived put her in chains and shackles and told her she would be deported and that she could not attempt to return to America for 20 years. "That was when I learned that I had a deportation record from that first attempt in Nogales," she said. "I...

An Egyptian who posed as a Syrian asylum seeker and arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry was found to have avoided deportation six times before murdering a “kind and peace-loving” care worker. Hani Khalaf, 22, was sentenced at The Old Bailey to at least 26 years’ imprisonment for kicking, punching, and stamping to death 62-year-old Jairo Medina before stealing the dead man’s wallet and mobile phone, reports The Times. The court heard that Khalaf lived on the streets and had been bailed for shoplifting hours before the fatal attack on the carer at London’s Hyde Park.

CLEVELAND -- Imagine spending 48 years in a country, then you are told you are being deported to a country you don’t remember and don’t speak the language. That is what is happening to Stefan Cina. He moved to the United States with his parents when he was 2-years-old from Czechoslovakia. He admits he got into legal trouble when he was young, but says has since lived a quiet, law-abiding life with his kids. Stefan is set to be deported in October. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Cina was ordered deported more than a decade ago.

A prominent Boston man nabbed by ICE last month for overstaying his visa by more than a decade has been sent back to Ireland, and the city’s Irish community is still worried about further deportations, an advocate said. John Cunningham, 38, was a Brighton-based electrical contractor before he was detained for overstaying a 90-day visa that he used to enter the U.S. in 2003. Cunningham left on a commercial flight Wednesday night. “ICE is enforcing the law, it’s simple and sometimes painful but they’re just doing their jobs,” said immigration attorney John Foley, a board member of the cultural center...

FRAMINGHAM – A Framingham man who used a fake name for a decade to get a driver’s license is now facing numerous charges and deportation after an observant police officer noticed the man’s accent was off, authorities said. Police arrested Sergio Alvarado, 32, after Officer Francis Torres pulled him over on Waverly Street at 7:15 p.m. because Alvarado’s car’s windows were excessively tinted, according to a police report filed in Framingham District Court on Friday.

San Francisco taxpayers could soon pay $190,000 in a lawsuit settlement with an undocumented immigrant who claimed he was reported to federal immigration authorities in violation of the city’s sanctuary city ordinance, the City Attorney’s office confirms to KPIX5.

The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered say anything like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Donald J. Trump declared in his first campaign speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” across the border. Now he had come to meet them, the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, and they wanted to tell him he was right. One son had been struck by a truck, another shot just around the corner from home. Different causes of death,...

Full title: In Freeing Illegal Alien Gang Member Obama Judge Says U.S. Violated Rights of Due Process, Family Unity An Obama-appointed federal judge in Virginia ordered an illegal immigrant member of a violent street gang released from prison because immigration authorities supposedly violated his rights when he entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico. The Honduran teen crossed the Rio Grande during the influx of illegal alien minors a few years ago and turned himself into the U.S Border Patrol, according to a lengthy mainstream newspaper article , after acknowledging his gang history. The feds held him without a hearing in...

Ramon Ruiz Ortiz of Moreno Valley went to San Bernardino’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office at 10 a.m. May 11 to interview for a green card giving him permanent residency. By 7 p.m., he’d been deported to Tijuana. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officials said he applied using a false name and that he had been removed previously and then had returned here illegally, making him ineligible for a green card, according to ICE. Now, his family and an attorney representing the Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino are trying to figure out what happened to the man...

...For activists like Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, deportation even of convicted criminals ends up sowing chaos in places with weaker criminal justice systems such as Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. And that, he said, causes more people there, including victims of crime, to flee those countries.

A program to be rolled out at Emory University this fall pledges to pay “100% of demonstrated financial need for undergraduate Undocumented Students (with or without DACA) who are admitted as first-year, first-degree-seeking students,” campus officials state online. Emory, a highly ranked institution located in Georgia, costs about $50,000 annually in tuition and fees for American students and $70,000 for international students, the latter of whom are not afforded the same generous treatment as students in the country illegally. “As an international applicant, you are required to certify that you have sufficient funds to cover your expenses while attending Emory...