Free Republic

Tren de Aragua members arrested in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin.. Members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), continue to expand criminal operations nationwide, including in the midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Wisconsin. In Illinois, Chicago has long been plagued with illegal border crosser crime, serving as a major hub for drug trafficking operations run by the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel and transnational criminal organizations working with street gangs, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has reported. As the border crisis escalated over the past few years, a record number of Venezuelan illegal border crossers, more than...

Investigative journalist Huey Freeman has written a compelling book challenging the notion that Border Patrol Agent Nick Ivie was killed by friendly fire. In Who Shot Nick Ivie?, Freeman lays out the case that contrary to the government’s claims, smugglers, probably from the Sinaloa cartel, shot Ivie in an ambush of him and two other agents. And he explains why the Obama administration put that spin out there. While working one night in October 2012, Ivie was dispatched to check out a sensor alarm that had been tripped near the border between Arizona and Mexico. Two other agents followed him...

One year ago, Dasha Oratovska and Sasha Zakhovaieva fled from Kyiv's Independence Square as riot police launched an assault on anti-government protesters, firing flares and rubber bullets into the crowd. Sasha lost consciousness and was dragged by a friend to a makeshift hospital in the nearby Trade Unions building. The building soon caught fire, forcing doctors and wounded protesters to evacuate. As the Euromaidan Revolution reached its bloody crescendo, Dasha found Sasha sitting, dazed, on St. Sophia Square, a short distance from Independence Square. Six months later, Dasha left Ukraine, likely permanently. Sasha remains in Kyiv but has begun formulating...

Its owner had dreamed of a liberated Ireland and perhaps even an Irish-controlled Canada. But the rare antique rifle -- carried by a renegade American Irishman 140 years ago during the failed Fenian invasion of Canada -- was instead seized by the defenders of British North America and is now set to be auctioned in the U.S. The battered rifle, the highlight of next month's sale of vintage firearms by Bonhams and Butterfields of San Francisco, is expected to fetch $12,000 because of its association with the famous episode from Canadian history. The lever-action Henry model, manufactured in 1860 pre-dates...