Free Republic

WASHINGTON — (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration this week provided deportation officials with personal data -- including the immigration status -- on millions of Medicaid enrollees, a move that could make it easier to locate people as part of his sweeping immigration crackdown. An internal memo and emails obtained by The Associated Press show that Medicaid officials unsuccessfully sought to block the data transfer, citing legal and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, two top advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the dataset handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, the emails show. Officials at the Centers for...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Emery Eversoll and her mother shared a good laugh when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that some autistic children will never write poems.The 16-year-old’s bedroom is full of notebooks featuring her verses. Sometimes, she quietly recites poetry to get through an outburst of anger. Her mother began suspecting she may have autism, in part, because she had memorized every word from a favorite book by age 2.Still, this Kansas family is optimistic about Kennedy’s plans to launch a broad-based study of what causes autism, the complex developmental disorder that impacts the brain...

Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the death of a young Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill shows the consequences of Donald Trump's actions. Amber Thurman's death, first reported Monday by ProPublica, occurred just two weeks after Georgia's strict abortion ban was enacted in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn nationwide abortion rights. Trump appointed three of the justices who made that decision and has repeatedly said he believes states should decide abortion laws. "This young mother should be alive, raising her son,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The social media posts are of a distinct type. They hint darkly that the CIA or the FBI are behind mass shootings. They traffic in racist, sexist and homophobic tropes. They revel in the prospect of a “white boy summer.” White nationalists and supremacists, on accounts often run by young men, are building thriving, macho communities across social media platforms like Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, evading detection with coded hashtags and innuendo. Their snarky memes and trendy videos are riling up thousands of followers on divisive issues including abortion, guns, immigration and LGBTQ rights. ... They signal...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nina Jankowicz, like so many millennials, was excited to share a social media post announcing her new job on Twitter late last month when she was named executive director for a new disinformation board established by the Department of Homeland Security. But instead of well-wishes, Jankowicz’s tweet set off a torrent of sexist profanities across social media and menacing emails filled with rape or death threats that continue to follow her even after she resigned from that new job on Wednesday morning following the disastrous rollout of the program. It’s a familiar scenario. A crush of online...

The reports of hateful and violent posts on Facebook started pouring in on the night of May 28 last year, soon after then-President Donald Trump sent a warning on social media that looters in Minneapolis would be shot. It had been three days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd … […] But it wasn’t until after Trump posted about Floyd’s death that the reports of violence and hate speech increased “rapidly” on Facebook across the country, an internal company analysis of the ex-president’s social media post reveals. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory...