Free Republic

There are now 340 sanctuary cities -- and the list is growing. All of them choose to ignore federal immigration law by refusing to report detained undocumented immigrants to federal authorities under most circumstances. Partly as a result, deportations of those who entered the U.S. illegally are at a 10-year low -- even according to the Obama administration's new rigged redefinition of deportation as also occasionally preventing illegal entry at the border. Some of the 1,000 undocumented immigrants who go unreported to federal authorities each month and are thereby shielded by sanctuary cities from deportation have been accused of violent...

Donald Trump isn't the only Republican presidential candidate prepared to talk smack about Latinos to win the White House. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father hails from Cuba, accused Democrats Monday of helping "violent criminal illegal aliens." Cruz said Senate Democrats have worked to protect immigrants with criminal records because they are “willing to stand in pure party line vote” in support of releasing undocumented immigrants who are “murderers and rapists” to protect the president, BuzzFeed reported. “The Democrats are getting more and more open that they are the party of illegal immigration,” he said during an interview with Iowa...

At an event in Norwood in August, real estate mogul and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump embraced Maureen Maloney, the mother of Matthew Denise of Milford. In August 2011, Denise was killed on his motorcycle when he was hit and dragged by a pickup truck driven by a drunken man, here in the country illegally. Denise was dragged a quarter mile, authorities said. His death became a lightning rod on the subject of undocumented immigrants. “Will you close the borders?” an emotional Maloney asked Trump at the event via an arranged meeting. Trump replied, “We’ll get them closed, believe...

You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won it once by narrow margins, understood. Your right- or left-wing stances in the primaries can hurt in the general. As happened to George McGovern, the leftward-tacking Democratic nominee in 1972, whom Nixon beat with 61 percent of the vote. In the four decades since only...

“There’s nowhere they want to go further backwards than on immigration”, said the president, who noted his administration’s progress on reducing the Latino unemployment rate and providing more health care to the minority group. Obama is using the speech to highlight differences with several of the Republican presidential candidates on the issue. Like Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said he does not support a path to citizenship, and stirred controversy for using the term “anchor babies”. Thats not leadership, turning against whats right the moment the politics of your base gets tough. President Barack Obama promised Hispanic leaders...

A roughly 2,000-mile fence on the Mexican border would cost tens of billions.If Donald Trump were to build a wall along the United States' southern border, it would cost billions. The U.S. border with Mexico is roughly 2,000 miles long and underlines four states from California to Texas. It is a massive stretch of land — the Berlin Wall spanned just 96 miles comparatively, and it cost about $25 million to build in 1961, or around $200 million with inflation. Building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants is not a novel plan. About 670 miles of fencing on the...

Can Kate's Law succeed in Congress? The American left’s contemptuous disregard for laws it doesn’t like is metastasizing. Despite the public outrage that attended the murder of Kate Steinle by Juan Francsico Lopez-Sanchez, a seven-time convicted felon who had been deported five times, the number of illegal alien protection centers known as sanctuary cities has increased. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports the number of these law-obstructing entities has grown to 340, compared to only 276 identified as recently as last July. CIS’s analysis is based on new information released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that covers the...

A better option than exclusion would be to restrict migrants’ eligibility for benefits.Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are once again searching for better ways to curtail immigration. In America, Republican candidates are pondering bigger, better border walls. In Europe, leading politicians are hoping someone figures out a way to end the Syrian refugee crisis by bringing peace to the Middle East. In the midst of these passionate debates about how to curtail immigration, almost no one is talking about whether immigration should be curtailed in the first place. This is the debate we should be having. Some of...

In an interview with Terry Gross for her "Fresh Air" program on NPR Monday, Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos provided a glimpse into his reasoning on immigration. As seen in the excerpts below, Ramos makes no distinction between "undocumented immigrants" and legal immigrants. He believes that since Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are Latinos whose parents immigrated to the United States they should support illegal immigration. It is irrelevant to Ramos that that their parents came legally. Here it is clear that Ramos's argument benefits from the change in terminology for the national immigration discussion. The term "immigrant"...

The Arizona Border Recon - made up of veterans former private security officers - guard the US-Mexico border They stop illegal immigrants, drug smuggling and human trafficking while providing intelligence to border agents Photographs were captured by Johnny Milano, who followed the men as they patrolled near the town of Nogales

Current House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican congressman for California's 23rd Congressional District, announced his bid to succeed Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, as Speaker of the House of Representatives. With Boehner resigning, calls have reemerged to vote on comprehensive immigration reform, but what has been McCarthy’s immigration record? First, in an email to colleagues, McCarthy, representing a congressional district where 35 percent of the population is Latino, announced his bid for the speakership. "We have made real progress towards shrinking an overgrown federal government and reforming our broken entitlement system," McCarthy wrote. "But our work is far from done. We...

The candidates atop the GOP presidential field are ramping up political attacks aimed at Muslims, a move designed to appeal to hardline conservatives. But party elders worry that escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric could cost Republicans the White House in 2016. The aggressive words, in particular from front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson, have exacerbated a widening rift between the GOP's pragmatic and ideological wings as the party tries to avoid losing a third consecutive presidential election. His relationship with the nation's Hispanic community already strained, Trump vowed on Wednesday to deport any Syrian refugee taken in by the U.S. Most likely...

If no Republican politician communicates to Spanish-speaking groups in their language of choice, the Republican Party will have a harder time earning their support. Every night, Ellen’s bar is filled with the chatter of people speaking foreign languages. There’s some French, some German, but mostly English. Donald Trump would be able to find a lot of people to chat with there, but most locals wouldn’t, because Ellen’s is located in China. Living in China for the past three years has given me a unique vantage point from which to view the “English-only” debate Trump’s candidacy has raised. Trump has attacked...

Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money. My legislation will change that. It says...

He's not expecting a vote, though. Many undocumented immigrants who pay taxes would be able to access Obamacare under a long-shot bill introduced Wednesday by Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.). The Affordable Care Act currently limits access to its exchanges and subsidies to those "lawfully present." That means the approximately 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are not eligible for Obamacare, nor can they shop on the exchanges if their employer does not provide them with coverage. Gutiérrez's bill would open the exchanges and extend the subsidies to undocumented immigrants who provide proof of state residency and tax filings. It...

In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly. During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were “dumped” after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home. This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they...

This is a general outline to how you would deport 20-30 million illegal aliens. Phase 1: Voluntary Paid deportation, If you turn yourself in for free deportation the US government will pay for their plane/bus/boat ticket back to the country of their origin. In exchange for paying for the person’s fare home you take their finger prints and bio-metric data and picture, etc. You put it in a database and they have to wait 10 years and pay a $5,000 fee before they can legally apply to come into this country again, all future travel visas are denied as well...

Is Carly Fiorina a liberal chameleon wearing conservative colors? And if she is, will it give Clinton what she needs to win the White House? Carly Fiorina, candidate for the Republican party’s nomination for president, has enjoyed quite a bounce in the polls since the most recent Republican debate. Ironically, however, Fiorina’s policy positions more closely mimic those of Democrats than those of Republicans. Fiorina will not be able to draw a distinct line between her and the Democrat candidate, which will lead to a repeat of 2008 and 2012 when millions of conservatives chose not to vote and a...

A senior Republican official is urging Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to resign from his job as the Republican leader of the Senate. “Mitch is a good and honorable guy, but the base is leaving our party,” Roger Villere, the chairman of the Louisiana GOP... “I’ve worked for 12 years as chairman to build this party, and I just don’t want to see it all go down the drain because the [leaders] aren’t willing to fight for what we believe… Our base is demanding we do something or they’re going to leave us,” said Villare, who also holds a position...