Free Republic

Not exactly Je suis Charlie, but it’s also not entirely different from it either. The Santa Barbara News-Press found its offices vandalized yesterday morning, spray painted with slogans such as “THE BORDER IS ILLEGAL NOT THE PEOPLE WHO CROSS IT.” The attack has not changed the minds of the newspaper’s editors, who plan to keep using the term: A California newspaper will continue to use the term “illegals” to describe people who enter the U.S. without permission, despite an attack on its building by vandals believed to object to the term.The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with...

A California newspaper will continue to use the term “illegals” to describe people who enter the U.S. without permission, despite an attack on its building by vandals believed to object to the term. The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with the message “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it” in red paint, sometime either Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the newspaper’s director of operations, Donald Katich. The attack came amid wider objections to a News-Press headline that used the word “illegals” alongside a story on California granting driver’s licenses to people in the...

48 second Video at link. (CNSNews.com) - House Speaker John Boehner (R.-Ohio) vowed today to fight “tooth and nail” against President Obama’s unilateral amnesty of up to five million illegal aliens—an amnesty the administration has been able to move forward with because Boehner’s House permitted funding of it. The 1,603-page omnibus spending bill that Boehner pushed through a lame-duck Republican-controlled House last month put no prohibition on Obama using government funds to implement the amnesty. That omnibus funded almost all the government through the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30 and the Department of Homeland Security through Feb....

Hypocrisy: Mexico's president tells ours that his country will supply any documents needed for illegal aliens to qualify under Barack Obama's executive amnesty. At the same time, Mexico deports more illegals than we do. In an Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said that his administration "is ready to give (support) to the Mexican population living in the United States so that they can show the documentation that is necessary to prove that they have been in the United States prior to 2010" to meet the five-year requirement of Obama's amnesty plan and...

Federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to be the next attorney general, failed Wednesday to convince Sen. David Vitter that she wouldn’t be an accomplice to the president’s executive action that could granted deportation amnesty for up to 5 millions of illegal immigrants. “I didn’t get any straight answers during our meeting today, and I’m not convinced Ms. Lynch will put any stop to it,” Mr. Vitter, Louisiana Republican and a member of the SenateJudiciary Committee that will cast the first votes on her confirmation. Ms. Lynch, who Mr. Obama tapped to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, has...

The Obama administration said Monday that illegal immigrants already in the U.S. who try to aid their relatives in sneaking across the border won’t be eligible for the president’s new deportation amnesty, as federal officials try to head off a new surge of illegal immigrants hoping to take advantage of lax enforcement. Homeland Security and State Department officials are teaming up on the campaign, which is aimed at Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and which tries to convince would-be illegal immigrants that they won’t qualify for the new amnesty, so they shouldn’t try to come. Mr. Obama earlier in...

On his way out of the door, his final day as a U.S. Senator, Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) released a blistering oversight report that finds the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) isn’t “successfully executing any of its five main missions.” Coburn’s criticisms include, but also predate, the Obama administration. Among the key findings: · DHS spent $50 billion over the past eleven years on counterterrorism programs but cannot demonstrate if the nation is more secure as a result. · 700 miles of the Southern border remain unsecured. · DHS is not effectively administering or enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Only...

Many illegal immigrants at a Northern California DMV reportedly were failing the written exam when applying for driver’s licenses on Friday. Under the AB 60 law that Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed in 2013 and took effect at the start of 2015, illegal immigrants were able to apply for driver’s licenses on Friday. And nearly 1.4 illegal immigrants are expected to apply for licenses in California in the next three years. At a DMV in south Sacramento, Veronica Oropeza, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant who has reportedly been driving without a license for six years, reportedly failed her written exam twice....

Less than 3 percent of illegal immigrants will ever be deported, and more than 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border remained unsecured as of 2014, according to Sen. Tom Coburn’s final oversight report released Saturday morning, which found the Homeland Security Department failing in several of its top missions. The report also said corruption is a serious problem in the Border Patrol, but said agency officials actually told internal affairs investigators to cut down on the number of cases they were pursuing, according to the former division head. In another finding Mr. Coburn’s staff on the Senate Homeland Security Committee...

Welcome to 2015, with the usual hopes for new beginnings and fresh starts. Along with that, there is the expected flood of new laws going into effect all across the nation as proof of the various legislative bodies getting the work of the people done. The people of California in particular will see the fruits of their elected officials’ labors if they show up at the DMV. (As if the lines weren’t long enough already.) Millions of illegal immigrants will now be able to show up without fear of arrest or deportation and get themselves a shiny new driver’s...

The California Department of Motor Vehicles is training some 900 new employees and opening four new license processing centers to deal with the expected onslaught of undocumented immigrants who will be eligible for a driver’s license this new year. Starting Friday, under a new law requiring the California DMV to provide illegal immigrants driver’s licenses, the state DMV is bracing for the newly eligible applicants.

As the year comes to an end, two disturbing stories illustrate how the Obama administration is deliberately compromising national security by drastically expanding a fraud-infested program that lets rich foreigners buy U.S. visas and losing track of 96% of the illegal immigrants recently ordered deported. This is outrageous by any standards. In the first case, an obscure program known as EB-5 that lets wealthy foreign investors essentially buy their way into the United States has skyrocketed under Obama. The capital area’s conservative newspaper published a distressing story this week that reveals the visa program has mushroomed under Obama despite its...

For the first time on record, more non-Mexicans than Mexicans were apprehended at U.S. borders in 2014 by the Border Patrol, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of more than 60 years of Border Patrol data. This shift is another sign that unauthorized immigrants from Mexico are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border significantly less often than they did before the Great Recession. About 229,000 Mexicans were apprehended by the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2014 compared with 257,000 non-Mexicans during the previous year, according to recently published Border Patrol data. Taken together, total apprehensions of Mexican and non-Mexican unauthorized immigrants...

Once again, local-TV investigative reporters are showing up their national counterparts. Recall that this summer the administration insisted the thousands of Central American illegal immigrants it was waving across the border would be put into deportation proceedings and those who did not qualify for asylum would be removed. You’d think, then, that there’d be bigshot D.C. journalists interested in finding out how many actually bothered to attend their immigration hearings. You’d be wrong. But the investigative unit at Houston’s KPRC, Channel 2, decided to ask. And when they didn’t get an answer, they persisted. And persisted. And finally got some...

Christmas Greetings from Obama Claus, and from the left, Nora, Aife, Jack and Ruarc.

Elionardo Juarez-Escobar, a 42-year-old Honduran landscaper, was driving through a Pittsburgh suburb one evening last April when he saw a police sobriety check ahead. Drunk and without a license, he tried to avoid it. New Sewickley Township police managed to pull him over anyway. When they did, they found empty beer cans in the back seat, a minor named Henry Gomez on the passenger side and an inebriated driver. Escobar failed a field sobriety test, blowing 0.18, more than twice Pennsylvania's legal limit. He was arrested and charged with two counts of driving under the influence, corruption of minors, furnishing...

New York Rep. Michael Grimm pleaded guilty to a single count of tax fraud Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court. The guilty plea comes one month after the congressman, a Republican who represents Staten Island, was elected to a third term. In April, Grimm was named in a 20-count indictment that accused him of under-reporting the payroll and earnings of his Upper East Side restaurant, Healthalicious, which he ran from 2007 to 2010. He pleaded not guilty in federal court and was released on bond. Prosecutors alleged Grimm employed a number of immigrant workers who did not have legal status to...

Two-thirds of the George Washington University students who were asked to sign a petition calling for Americans to be deported in order to make room for illegal immigrants to reside in the country did so. “The ones we’ve labeled as ‘illegal immigrants’ have just as much right to be here as anyone,” said political science major Adelle Pated. “I mean, as a nation of immigrants, the recent arrivals are probably more representative of what this country is all about than the people born here.” “Deporting anti-social segments of the citizenry to balance out the population flow makes ecological sense,” contended...

As of Jan. 1, 2012, an estimated 13.3 million lawful permanent residents lived in the United States, and 8.8 million of them were eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship but had not done so. In California, 2.48 million out of 3.4 million green-card holders were eligible to apply but chose not to. And, of course, not all non-citizens residing in this country are “lawful.” An estimated 11 million people live here without permission, though President Obama recently took action to defer the deportation of as many as half of them. .

While watching Fox and Friends yesterday morning, there was a story about asking college kids if they would be okay with trading U.S. citizens for illegals. Naturally, most of them agreed with that. However, turning to my wife I said I would be okay with that if I could pick who to trade. Holder for an hard working Mexican. Sharpton for a hard working Mexican. And then I came up with this idea. I would trade Obama, his family, his cabinet, and his entire White House staff for just one hard working Mexican. The Mexican government probably would not do...