Free Republic

Lizandro Claros Saravia was supposed to be at college in North Carolina by now. At soccer practice. At the library. Instead, the 19-year-old soccer star from Germantown is hundreds of miles away, in a sweltering Central American nation he barely recognizes and sometimes fears. U.S. immigration officials swiftly deported him and his older brother, Diego, on Aug. 2, days after Lizandro told them during a routine check-in that he had a scholarship to attend Louisburg College. Lizandro and Diego, now 22, used fraudulent visas and passports to come to the United States in 2009 and reunite with their family; some...

The last time a president visited the border in Yuma, Arizona, was 2007, when then-President George W. Bush came to oversee the massive fence-building campaign he’d begun a year earlier, hoping to get a handle on the sea of illegal immigrants flowing north. Ten years later, as President Trump visits Yuma on Tuesday, the region is considered one of the border’s clearest success stories. A surge in fencing and Border Patrol agents and a get-tough approach to prosecuting illegal immigrants have produced results that once seemed unimaginable. The number of illegal immigrants arrested — a rough yardstick for the overall...

It’s called the Central American Minors Parole, or CAM. It was in response in 2014 to a wave of children fleeing gang violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the U.S. The Obama administration gave them a two-year reprieve from deportation to prepare their amnesty cases, as long as they had at least one parent living in the U.S. legally. Under the direction of the Trump administration, Homeland Security abruptly canceled the program last Wednesday. That means almost 3,000 children between the ages of 11 and 17 who were admitted under CAM are now subject to deportation. Opponents of...

Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez, the undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant who has found sanctuary from deportation in a church downtown, might face a prolonged stay at First & Summerfield due to a new directive that limits the ability of members of Congress to halt removal orders. Federal legislators have regularly introduced “private immigration bills,” which, if passed, would grant permanent legal residency to a person who entered the country illegally. More importantly, while the private immigration bills were being considered, federal agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used to hold off on deporting the individual. If a U.S. senator was...

WEYMOUTH - The man suspected of murdering a Weymouth woman over the weekend came had been deported to Jamaica in 2012 after spending time in prison for transporting marijuana and using someone else’s personal information to apply for a U.S. passport, according to state and federal court documents. Kerro Florizel Bailey, a Dorchester resident who turned 44 today, is wanted in connection with the murder of 33-year-old Michele Clarke, a Weymouth mother who was found dead in her rented townhouse on Lake Street around 4 a.m. Bailey, who is believed to be driving a stolen ford pickup truck, had not...

Sixty illegal immigrants who were comingled within a tractor holding produce were rescued by Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol Agents on Saturday. Agents referred a tractor trailer driver to secondary inspection after a dog alerted officials to the people who were laying on and within pallets of broccoli. The trailer's doors were secured with a padlock and the subjects had no means of escape. The trailer's temperature was 49 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Trump administration on Wednesday shut down yet another Obama-era program — this one created to give Central American minors fleeing poverty and gang violence in their homeland temporary legal status in the United States. The “CAM parole” program was established in 2014 in response to a surprise spike in the number of unaccompanied minors and families entering the country from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The program allowed minors who did not make the cut for “refugee status” to enter the U.S. on a two-year, renewable parole if they had a parent already legally in the country.

SAN FRANCISCO — The much-publicized saga of Highland Hospital nurse Maria Sanchez and her husband Eusebio, who for the last 15 years had sought to obtain green cards and remain in the U.S. legally, ended with hugs and tears Wednesday night before the undocumented couple boarded a flight bound for their native Mexico. They had booked their flight Tuesday after receiving word that a final attempt to delay their deportation had been denied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The couple is now prohibited from returning to the U.S. for a decade, when they can begin the process all over...

The GOP’s plan to cut the number of immigrants and increase the percentage of highly educated workers within that pool would decrease GDP by 2 percent over the long term and cost 4.6 million jobs, a new study finds. The RAISE Act, introduced by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue and endorsed by President Donald Trump, would use a “merit-based” system for evaluating applicants, prioritizing those with college degrees, English-language skills, and employment prospects, among other criteria — an approach favored by politicians in both parties. But by combining this with measures that would cut the approximately 800,000 legal immigrants...

On Monday, The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates passed a resolution demanding that Congress let undocumented immigrants practice law. The bar suggests that lawmakers should add this block of text to 8 U.S.C. 5 § 1621(d): "A state court vested with exclusive authority to regulate admission to the bar may, by rule, order, or other affirmative act, permit an undocumented alien seeking legal status to obtain a professional license to practice law in that jurisdiction". This wouldn’t require state courts to license undocumented lawyers, but it would make it clear that the federal government won’t get in the way....

After being bussed into sanctuary city Montreal after illegally crossing the Canada-U.S. border, illegal refugees are now complaining about lack of housing there. The illegals are provided with a tent upon entering Quebec from New York state and are then sent to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium or another temporary refuge, like a hotel or even a former convent. But the illegal migrants say they don’t like being moved around so much and are looking for accommodation in Canada’s second-largest city. Ahmed Iftikhar told The Canadian Press that he has been in three temporary shelters since he and his wife and four...

About half of Quebecers surveyed in a new poll say they'd be in favour of preventing migrants from crossing illegally at the Canada–U.S. border. The numbers, gathered this week in a poll commissioned by SOM-Cogeco Nouvelles, show that 51 per cent of respondents were in favour of blocking direct access at the border. The results indicate that younger people, university-educated people and those living in the Montreal area were less likely to agree with the idea of tighter controls at the border. Meanwhile, 56 per cent of all people polled said they don't believe it's acceptable that migrants bypassing normal...

EXCLUSIVE: President Trump may soon issue a pardon for Joe Arpaio, the colorful former Arizona sheriff who was found guilty two weeks ago of criminal contempt for defying a state judge’s order to stop traffic patrols targeting suspected undocumented immigrants. In his final years as Maricopa County sheriff, Arpaio had emerged as a leading opponent of illegal immigration. “I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” the president said Sunday, during a conversation with Fox News at his club in Bedminster, N.J. “He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and...

EDINBURG, Texas (KTRK) -- We're following breaking news in Edinburg, Texas, where several undocumented immigrants have been found inside a trailer. Edinburg police told Eyewitness News the trailer was "full of people," but was unable to give us an exact number.

The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit Friday charging that the Trump administration is wrongly accusing young illegal immigrants of gang affiliations as a way to short-circuit their rights and force them into speedy deportations. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in California, opens yet another legal front against President Trump’s goal of stepped-up immigration enforcement, with advocates hoping to blunt a new effort by Homeland Security to find and deport some of the Central Americans who jumped the border during the Obama era. Immigrant-rights advocates said the government has started to fabricate broad accusations of gang membership or...

As the number of migrants crossing the border illegally into Canada has increased, the well-meaning Canadians have decided to send in the troops to back up the Mounties at the New York-Quebec border. Canada announced that the 100 plus “soldiers will help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canada Border Services Agency at the site.”It is stated that they will be doing construction work on migrant centers…But does anyone actually believe that’s why they’re really there? With border crossings coming in at an estimated 250 souls per day (with a record 400 on Sunday), this is a real crisis....

Humboldt County leaders are shedding light on an issue that has many community members scared for themselves and their children. Sheriff Honsal and 4th District Supervisor Virginia Bass attended a meeting at the Multigenerational Center in Fortuna Wednesday regarding undocumented citizens and fears of mass deportation. "There's people last night that were saying during this meeting that they were afraid to send their kids to school, they were afraid to go to the doctor, they were afraid to go out in public,” said Sheriff William Honsal, “They're in fear that one day they are going to be gone or their...

llegals living in Los Angeles County were handed almost $1.3 billion in welfare payouts between the months of 2015 and 2016, Fox News reported, citing data. That’s billion with a capital “B.” That’s a quarter of what the county distributed to its entire needy population in those same months. Liberals and government elitists always like to make the case that citizens ought to support some cheap-sounding fee- or tax-paying cause by grandly pronouncing, “It’s just the cost of a cup of coffee,” or “If everyone just gave up their Starbucks lattes, it’d pay for itself.” Well, guess what $1.3 billion...

A day after being released by federal immigration authorities on Tuesday, Yuba City resident Baljit Singh ran his dogs along the river, played with his sons and started thinking about what may be his last three months in America. Singh, 39, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in Sacramento during a required check-in with federal authorities on Aug. 1. After being held for a week at Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center near Elk Grove, he was granted a three-month reprieve to get his affairs in order and make arrangements to leave the country. Singh, from India, is undocumented...

Maria and Eusebio Sanchez are not exactly high priority targets for deportation. They aren’t drug lords, convicted criminals or the “bad hombres” the president wants to be rid of. But the couple are undocumented immigrants. And, after moving to the Bay Area in the early 1990s from a small town in Mexico, they have worked hard to embrace the American Dream. Over the years, Maria, 46, rose from being a housekeeper at an East Bay nursing home to become a registered nurse at Highland Hospital today, caring for patients with cancer, heart, and kidney disease. Eusebio, 47, graduated from construction...