Free Republic

Travelers can be taxed at the airport for bringing two portable computing devices into MexicoWhether traveling for business or pleasure, most feel the need to remain tethered to the digital world in some capacity. Some travelers are discovering the hard way that Mexican customs agents in Cancun will tax them at the airport for bringing multiple electronic devices into the country. While tourists feel like they are suddenly being extorted, the law has always been on the books but just selectively enforced. Mexico’s law only allows one portable computing device to be brought into the country tax-free. The levy can...

Several cities throughout Mexico have been forced to cancel their traditional Independence Day celebration due to widespread cartel violence. Historically, every September 15 at night, the president, each governor, and each mayor hold a celebration at their Plaza Square where they remember the start of Mexico’s Independence. During that celebration, they ring a bell while shouting a call to arms, death to a bad government, and the traditional “Viva Mexico.” The party is meant to commemorate the same call to arms known as “Grito de Dolores” given by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla on September 15, 1810, when he called on...

Does San Diego, California have a 'Hamas' problem? No, not the ignorant student protestors at universities being directed by Hamas's proxies. No, not the terrorists rolling into the area from Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's open border. They may be seeing actual tunnels, dug by Hamas itself or its clients the Mexican cartels, coming in through Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol has discovered more than 200 of them since 2003, according to the Department of Customs & Border Protection. The most recent one found, that there's any news on, at least, was a 2022 Tijuana-to-San Diego tunnel , complete with...

A longtime state resident born in Florida and naturalized citizens are among the victims of Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen’s effort to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, according to a lawsuit they and others filed Friday in federal court in Birmingham. Allen announced last month that 3,251 registered voters were issued noncitizen identification numbers, prompting him to tell boards of registrars in Alabama’s 67 counties to immediately take steps to remove any non-citizens from the voting rolls. It is illegal for people who are not citizens to register to vote in Alabama. A federal law enacted in 1996...

Some parents who lost children to fentanyl say Trump’s tough talk resonates, even as many experts say his policy proposals are misguided.Dawn Allen wasn’t just a voting booth Democrat — she knocked on doors and donated money, including to President Joe Biden. But after her son died from fentanyl poisoning last year, she grew frustrated by what she viewed as Biden’s hands-off approach to the opioid crisis. Now she says she won’t vote for a Democrat, and she finds herself more in line with the candidate who has focused sharply on the deadly fentanyl epidemic: former President Donald Trump. “It...

Another high-ranking official in the George W. Bush administration endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, calling former President Donald Trump “perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation.” Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez revealed his support for Harris in an op-ed for Politico, saying he couldn’t “sit quietly” as Trump “eyes a return to the White House.” “The American presidency is the most powerful position in the world. Of course, our constitution and laws, as well as institutions such as Congress and our courts, act as guardrails to that power,” wrote the 69-year-old former...

Former President Donald Trump, during Tuesday’s presidential debate, repeated a baseless and sensationalist claim about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and other pets. "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump said during an answer to a question about immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." Trump's answer was among the most extraordinary of the first 30 minutes of the debate: a former U.S. president spreading an internet rumor — one labeled by some of his critics...

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of wealth-shifting illegal immigrants “is not good policy,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at a political event in Texas on Friday. Mayorkas doubled down on his business-first extraction migration economic policy at the Texas Tribune event but lamented public opposition to elite demands for more cheap immigrant labor, saying, “[I] speak to state leaders, senators, House members on both sides of the aisle, and they will speak of visa [worker] programs and the need to expand the number of visas … [and yet] nothing, nothing is accomplished.”

Concerns over the Biden-Harris border crisis have surged amid a wave of horrific news stories of crimes conducted by suspected illegal immigrants, and a new poll shows that Americans blame “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris. In the survey for the National Sheriffs’ Association provided to Secrets, just 29% approved of the job Harris has done to fix the “root causes” of illegal immigration, with 49% grading her a “D” or “F.” And support for a border wall, started during the Trump administration, has grown to 65%. Surprisingly, 50% of Democrats want the border wall completed or expanded. ... The...

Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy released a white paper breaking down the scale of the ongoing border crisis taking place under the Biden-Harris administration. Millions of illegal migrants have been released into the interior United States since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris entered the White House, a record number of suspected terrorists have reached the border and hundreds of Americans have died on average from fentanyl poisoning every day, according to a report compiled by Roy’s staff and exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Republican lawmaker is calling on Congress to take more permanent...

A woman who owns a business adjacent to the apartment complex taken over by Venezuelan gangs in Aurora, Colorado, said she has been forced to put up bulletproof glass to protect her business, describing the chaos in her community caused by migrants to Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater. “It’s horrible. Mike, I run a business right adjacent to that apartment complex,” she said, describing the current situation as “overwhelming.” “It’s out of control. Denver is just a sanctuary city. They’re just, they’re just flooding them into the smaller communities. Now they’re busing them out here. They’re busing them to...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened two of the state’s most populous — and Democratic-leaning — urban counties with lawsuits over their plans to register voters by mail. Paxton wrote letters Monday to Harris and Bexar counties, claiming their mailing of voter registration forms would either “confuse” noncitizens about their eligibility to vote, or “induce” them to fraudulently register. “Either way, it is illegal, and if you move forward with this proposal, I will use all available legal means to stop you,” Paxton wrote. The attorney general pointed to his 2020 suit against a similar effort to send out vote-by-mail...

Oklahoma’s Republican governor wants to help import low-wage migrants for local work that would otherwise provide decent wages and salaries needed by Oklahomans and their children. “I want to create opportunities to bring the best [foreign] talent to Oklahoma,” Gov. Kevin Stitt said Thursday on Twitter, just before Labor Day weekend, after a state-funded task force recommended the state legislature pass legislation to help employers hire migrants instead of Americans:

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the United States has a “crisis at the border” that needed to be addressed by immigration reform. Host Jonathan Karl said, “On immigration, when Harris ran for the Democratic nomination against you and others in 2020, she said she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossing. She even suggested she would be in favor of abolishing ICE. Now, of course, she’s taking, at least rhetorically, a much tougher line on border security.”

An illegal immigrant from Mexico allegedly raped a 10-year-old boy in Mississippi. The Pontotoc County Sheriff’s Department said its deputies arrested “illegal alien” Filiberto Gonzalez, 34, at his area home Aug. 12 for the alleged rape. Gonzalez remains in the sheriff’s custody pending his upcoming hearing on two charges of rape. It remains unclear when and where Gonzalez entered the US. The sexual assault is only among the latest in a slew of alleged migrant-perpetrated sex crimes. Over a recent two-week period, there were at least three such reputed migrant crimes in New York City alone. Senegalese migrant Papa Diop,...

A diplomatic row is gaining steam between Mexico and the United States. Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has accused the US of sponsoring opposition NGOs such as the group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) through USAID programs. Obrador said his Foreign Ministry had sent a diplomatic notice, while he would personally write to US President Joe Biden about it. The US government has sent nearly $5 million to MCCI since 2018, with private donors including the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, Mexico’s Financial Crimes Unit (UIF) said.

The federal government is processing U.S. citizenship applications at its fastest pace in decades, with thousands of immigrants becoming newly minted citizens every week, possibly helping sway the result of November’s election. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USIS) is taking an average of 4.9 months to process naturalization applications in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, a pace not seen since 2013 and 2014, according to a report from the New York Times. The under five-month average processing time is a far cry from that pace set just three years ago, when it took roughly 11.5...

The United States managed to arrest Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord, but Mexican prosecutors — and the president — now say they are considering bringing treason charges against those who handed him over. It’s part of the long, strange trail of Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who unexpectedly appeared on a flight that landed near El Paso, Texas in July. That private plane flight was arranged by another drug capo who decided to turn himself in. U.S. officials say Joaquín Guzmán López — a son of imprisoned cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — flew to the United States...

Caravans are gone and agents taking stowaways off trains, but criminals still preying on those lacking clear path to US asylumPolice in Chihuahua, Mexico, say they have freed 1,245 migrants from criminal gangs in the past seven months. The kidnapping, extortion and violence inflicted on the foreign nationals who come to the border looking for a way into the United States is rising even though overall migrant traffic has dropped dramatically in recent months, a law enforcement official says. “We have diminished migration flows in terms of caravans and people arriving on trains. But I must point out we are...

Authorities seize 50 homemade weapons, transfer 76 cartel members to other jails; police chief says violence not related to arrest of 'El Mayo' Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the finding of illegal weapons and the transfer of inmates to other prisons.Seven inmates at a prison in Juarez, Mexico, were injured during a fight between rival factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel on Sunday, Chihuahua state police said. The fight stemmed from “personal issues” between the gang members and is not part of an internal war over last month’s capture of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo”...