Free Republic

Additional staff will help the government start to reduce the backlog of court cases, said Attorney General Jeff Sessions The United States is on the verge of reversing an immigration court backlog that has been building for years, Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified Tuesday. Immigration hawks long have pointed to the backlog, now about 600,000 cases, as a factor in undermining enforcement. Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee that the backlog has barely grown during the past two to three months as a result of 50 additional immigration judges who have started working since President Donald Trump took office. Sessions...

Cards Against Humanity, an irreverent card game company known for its attention-seeking pranks, says it bought land on the U.S.-Mexico border to block President Trump from building his wall. The Chicago company said on its website that this was part of a holiday promotion, for which customers could contribute to the wall-blocking project with $15 purchases for surprise gift packages. On Wednesday morning, just a few hours after the launching the program on Tuesday, Cards Against Humanity said it was sold out. "Donald Trump is a preposterous golem who is afraid of Mexicans," said Cards Against Humanity on its web...

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday named immigration hardliner Tom Homan, who has served nearly 10 months as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to run ICE on a permanent basis. Homan has run the agency since Obama appointee Sarah Saldaña — the former U.S. attorney in Dallas — stepped down when Trump took office in January. He has been a public face of the administration's crackdowns on immigrants and border security, a tough talking law enforcement careerist who is unapologetic about being "heartless" when it comes to deporting even the most sympathetic longtime U.S. residents. "I get asked...

A Bay Area refugee group is suing the Trump administration as part of a national lawsuit challenging the White House’s latest attempt to ban some refugees from entering the U.S.

Only four percent of ‘DACA’ recipients have completed college, far below the roughly 17 percent of similar-aged young Americans who have college degrees, according to data released by the Migration Policy Insitute, which favors immigration. The data means that average DACA beneficiaries are far less educated and less productive than Americans, and if ever awarded an amnesty, will be far more likely to rely on taxpayers’ aid throughout their lives. According to the MPI report: While DACA recipients are almost as likely as U.S. adults in the same age group (15-32) to be enrolled in college (18 percent versus 20...

Two years ago, as others in California were limiting cooperation with federal immigration agents, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department welcomed them into its jail. Sheriff Margaret Mims gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unrestricted access to databases and private rooms to interview inmates. She reorganized release times so agents could easily pick up people who had served their sentences. The policy sparked outrage among immigrant rights groups, who called it a pipeline from incarceration to immigrant detention, one that they said disproportionately and unfairly affects Latinos. “We are not anti-immigrant for working with ICE,” Mims said in defense of the...

One of the issues in the recent Virginia election was the Salvadoran MS-13 gang which thrives in the state, practically outnumbering the police in some counties. MS-13 is not a new arrival in the region, and one of its members, Ingmar Guandique, is the only person ever convicted for the murder of Chandra Levy of Modesto, California. In 2001, the University of Southern California graduate, 24, was living in Washington and working as an intern at the federal Bureau of Prisons. On May 1, 2001, Levy disappeared without a trace. Fingers quickly pointed at congressman Gary Condit, 53, a Modesto...

"According to its authors, the new GOP tax bill will strip illegal immigrants of their ability to claim and collect several major tax credits. Doing so will save the federal government an estimated $23.1 billion over the next decade. The bill will do this by closing IRS loopholes and requiring all taxpayers to submit work-eligible Social Security numbers in order to claim tax credits. This may come as a shock to some who take for granted the assumption that illegal aliens don’t receive state benefits—especially tax credits. However, it’s an open secret that the IRS has allowed illegal aliens who...

In a little-noticed move recently, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed a policy adopted by his predecessor that made it easier for foreigners with terrorism ties to get into the United States. Former President Barack Obama’s administration had instructed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers to withhold decisions — and give the Homeland Security secretary an opportunity to grant a waiver — regarding certain foreigners who otherwise would be inadmissible under U.S. law. [snip] A policy memo issued in 2009 instructed USCIS officers to withhold decisions in four categories of foreigners to give the secretary of the Department of Homeland...

A federal judge in Seattle, Washington, ruled that illegal aliens receiving amnesty under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) cannot have their status revoked without due process. Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, appointed by President George W. Bush, said illegal aliens have due process rights and that DACA cannot be canceled justification, The Washington Times reported. “While the Court recognizes and acknowledges that DACA does not confer lawful status upon an individual, the Court also finds that the representations made to applicants for DACA cannot and do not suggest that no process is due to them, particularly in Plaintiff’s...

<p>An immigrant who had been shielded from deportation but was sent back to Mexico has been arrested for returning to the United States for the second time this year, authorities said Wednesday.</p> <p>Juan Manuel Montes, 23, was taken into custody near Calexico for illegally re-entering the United States late Monday night, the U.S. Border Patrol said in a statement.</p>

The Justice Department moved Monday to strip citizenship from four Somali immigrants who prosecutors say lied about being a family, and managed to defraud the Diversity Visa Lottery program that Republicans are aiming to nix. The government says one woman, Fosia Abdi Adan, won the lottery in 2000 and then brought in two other people as her husband and children, using a fake marriage certificate. The prosecutions come a week after the Diversity Lottery was in the news as the immigration program used by the suspect in last week’s terrorist truck attack in New York City. “The current immigration system...

The Patterson High School soccer player pulled off his hoodie to reveal a dark blue jersey bearing the name of Neymar, his favorite player, and joined his teammates on the sunny practice field. While the jersey offers the 17-year-old a connection, if mostly in his dreams, to the Brazilian superstar, the sport itself provides the undocumented immigrant from Guatemala something more tangible: a respite from anxiety at a time of stepped-up immigration enforcement. “Maybe they can separate me from my mother. That makes me afraid,” said the player, who asked to be identified only as “Duglas” because of his immigration...

Tom Tancredo is back. As Colorado’s gubernatorial primary fills with an ever-larger set of ambitious Republican chancers, the logic of a Tancredo comeback based on name recognition becomes obvious. Especially when the GOP seems to have moved in his direction since he left. From one angle, Tancredo looks like a John Wycliffe to Donald Trump’s Martin Luther, the morning star of the Republican Reformation. Tancredo put forward some of the same complaints about the Republican party and tried to weaponize his plainspokenness about them. He emphasized the same issues in the same combative way. He just did it first. Read...

In a press release filed Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that they apprehended an individual illegally entering the United States across the southern border who had previously been convicted in the States for sexually assaulting a minor. Border patrol agents at the Ajo station near Tuscon, Arizona apprehended the pervert sneaking into the country on Thursday. After running a background check, authorities discovered that 29 year-old Raul Cano-Garcia had been convicted in Fresno, California for having sex with a child under the age of 14. Cano-Garcia was sentenced to three years, but it is unclear if he ever actually served...

There are two very different pictures of the students roaming the hallways and labs at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. At the undergraduate level, 80 percent are United States residents. At the graduate level, the number is reversed: About 80 percent hail from India, China, Korea, Turkey and other foreign countries. For graduate students far from home, the swirl of cultures is both reassuring and invigorating. “You’re comfortable everyone is going through the same struggles and journeys as you are,” said Vibhati Joshi of Mumbai, India, who’s in her final semester for a master’s degree in financial engineering....

U.S. environmental organizations are perceived by many as independent voices within policy and political debates. They have historically championed land and resource protection, air and water pollution standards, and conservation of unique plant and animal species.In recent years, however, many environmental organizations have raised their profiles by actively combating development and resource extraction, even in cases when it is lawfully permitted by federal and state governments and regulators. So who is behind this tidal wave of activity? When the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) pulled back the curtain in a new report, the answers were startling.E&E Legal released...

New York magazine contributor Andrew Sullivan has a well deserved reputation as being an unhinged liberal anti-Trumper. However, unlike most leftists, Sullivan does experience brief moments of mental clarity. Such a moment occurred today when Sullivan experienced extreme foreboding about the outcome of next weeks gubernatorial election in Virginia. He fears that the Democrat stance on immigration has a good chance of leading to the defeat of Ralph Northam in How the Democrats Are Failing the Resistance:

The visa lottery has triggered a hidden wave of chain migration, and has delivered almost 5 million foreign nationals to the United States since 1994, says a new analysis. New research by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals the enormous chain-migration impact of the visa lottery program, where 50,000 visas every year are given to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries. The countries include those with terrorist problems, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan. Foreign nationals from eligible countries can win the visa lottery if they...

During her interview with president Trump, Laura Ingraham repeatedly brought up the issue of chain migration.