Free Republic

The Trump administration proposed new regulations Wednesday that would deny asylum protections to immigrants with criminal convictions — including some low-level offenses and misdemeanors — measures that would raise new legal barriers to those seeking refuge in the United States. The proposed change from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security would disqualify asylum applicants found guilty of serious offenses such as driving while intoxicated and domestic battery, as well as lesser violations such as the use of false documents and reentering the United States illegally. The Trump administration has made multiple moves in recent months to make...

What will Americans face if southern countries fall into chaos? When President Trump proclaimed “Build the wall!” in 2015, pundits mocked the slogan as an empty promise, a simplistic non-solution, or a dog whistle for racist nationalism. But astute observers of Central and South American geopolitics heard something different. Rather than a call for a more robust physical barrier or even a byword for immigration reform, “Build the wall!” suggested that candidate Trump grasped the cataclysmic threat to U.S. stability evolving in the south. Unlike President Trump, however, few Americans think about what a multi-national breakdown of order among our...

Nearly three years into the Trump administration, almost no border wall has been built in Texas. Local property owners ranging from ranchers to a Catholic diocese and institutions have resisted federal efforts to claim their land. The resistance in South Texas, where most land is privately owned, illustrates the challenges in building a border wall, even if funding is available. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been sending letters and holding meetings for two months asking about 120 landowners with riverfront property around Laredo, to survey their land, the first step in building a wall on it. Some around the...

RIO BRAVO, Texas — Chaos erupted in a small Texas border town as Los Zetas smugglers launched a complex smuggling operation. Border Patrol agents responded to an illegal crossing that quickly tied up agency resources in the area, enabling smugglers to move higher-value cargo elsewhere. What had only moments earlier been a quiet neighborhood became a scene of chaos as Laredo Sector Border Patrol agents and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Air and Marine Operations (AMO) helicopter aircrew leaped into action following the illegal crossing of a few migrants. Agents captured at least one in the presence of...

The Owner of Fisher Industries, who is behind the border fence project in Mission, spoke with CBS 4 on Tuesday and wants to clear up the misconceptions about his border security plans. Tommy Fisher, president and CEO of Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., which is based out of Tempe, AZ, purchased three miles of river front in Mission from landowner, Lance Neuhaus. Despite there being a state and federal temporary restraining order against Fisher Industries, Fisher said they are allowed to prepare for the construction of the border fence. "We're allowed to dig the trench, where eventually the wall will...

A Guatemalan woman who spent eight years in prison for causing a fatal school bus crash, and was later deported, is facing federal charges for returning to the United States. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota announced an indictment against 35-year-old Olga Marina Franco del Cid Friday for illegal re-entry, identification document fraud and false representation of social security account number. Franco del Cid will appear before Magistrate Judge Katherine M. Menendez on Monday. In 2008, Franco del Cid ran a stop sign and crashed a van into a school bus in Cottonwood, Minn., killing four children under the age...

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Trump from using Defense Department funds for the construction of his border wall. Judge David Briones of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled in favor of El Paso County, Texas, and Border Network for Human Rights, which had argued Trump’s national emergency declaration using billions in Pentagon funds for the wall was an overreach. The plaintiffs also accused the White House of using the funds for a situation that did not meet the bar for an “emergency” under the National Emergencies Act. "The President's emergency proclamation was a...

In a bid for Latino votes, Democratic presidential candidate South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg proposed that "we end the artificial immigration crisis by returning the land stolen from Mexico by US aggression during the mid 1800s. It's unconscionable that the Trump Administration is persecuting Mexicans who are only trying to recover their own stolen property." "If California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were to be ceded back to Mexico there would be no incentive for Latinos to try to illegally enter the United States," Buttigieg claimed. "And all of the buildings Americans erected on the stolen lands could be...

Arrests of people crossing the southwestern border have plummeted by 75% since May, marking one of the most dramatic drops in recent history and a sign that policy changes by the Trump administration and Mexico are reducing migration to the U.S. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Monday that 33,510 people were arrested after illegally crossing the border in November, marking the sixth straight monthly decline since May, when 132,000 such apprehensions marked a 13-year high. The majority of those apprehended last year were families and unaccompanied children from Central America, nearly all of whom surrendered to border officials seeking...

The numbers of African migrants heading to the U.S. through its border with Mexico have more than doubled in the past year, recent data from the federal government showed. In 2019, about 5,800 African migrants headed to the U.S. by way of Mexico, according to data cited by the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. Last year, that figure was 2,700, the report said.

Construction of a private section of border wall in Mission, Texas, is continuing despite a district judge's Tuesday decision to temporarily block the work, The Guardian reported Saturday. The expected 3.5-mile-long private section of border wall is being funded by We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization founded by U.S. Air Force Veteran and Purple Heart recipient Brian Kolfage that has raised more than $25 million since its start in December 2018. Workers were moving soil, digging trenches and positioning the physical wall on Thursday and Friday after Vasquez's ruling

President Trump pleaded with Congress to do something as illegal immigration across the southwestern border soared this spring. Republicans seemed willing, but it was a nonstarter for Democrats. Party leaders even accused Mr. Trump of manufacturing the crisis. So the president turned to Mexico with a combination of negotiations, controls, threats and even an explicit quid pro quo: Do something to stop 4,000 people from crossing Mexican territory each day en route to the U.S. or face crippling tariffs. Mexican negotiators ran to Washington to make a deal. Mr. Trump didn’t get everything he wanted, but he got enough. By...

On Thursday’s broadcast of ABC’s “The View,” co-host Joy Behar questioned the outrage over Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan’s reference to President Donald Trump’s 13-year-old son, Barron during the impeachment inquiry. Whoopi Goldberg said, “I mean, think about all the things his father said about different people, but excuse me. I just —maybe they missed this part, but she was not speaking about the child. She was speaking about his name and how it played into what he could not do. You cannot take a title. She was not being disrespectful or nasty.”

Last time we checked in with Brian Kolfage and We Build the Wall, they were moving ahead with construction while facing multiple lawsuits from environmentalists and open borders advocates. Several months have gone by, but not much has changed except for the location and the specific groups trying to stop them. This time they’re moving ahead with a new section of wall in Texas. The work crews are ready to go, but a judge has ordered a halt to the construction on behalf of a butterfly sanctuary.

So the United States has “the world’s highest rate of children in detention.” Is this worth reporting? Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, Agence France-Presse, or AFP, and Reuters did report it, attributing the information to a “United Nations study” on migrant children detained at the US-Mexico border. Then the two agencies retracted the story. Deleted, withdrew, demolished. If they could have used one of those Men in Black memory-zappers on us, they would have. Sheepishly, the two news organizations explained that, you see, the UN data was from 2015 — part of a border crackdown that had begun years earlier. We...

Warren was arrested in January 2018 by U.S. agents who were staking out a humanitarian aid station in Arizona known as “The Barn,” where two Central American men had been staying for several days. “What they needed was a place to hide, and that’s what the defendant gave them, and that is an intent to violate the law,” Michael Bailey, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, said he was disappointed with the verdict, but promised to continue prosecuting people who harbor and smuggle immigrants and those who sneak across the border. The Border Patrol had been investigating The Barn for months,...

New research establishes proof of concept for a long-theorized terrorism threat to physical land borders: that violent Islamic jihadists could infiltrate them while posing as migrants to clandestinely reach targets in a new and unexpected way. In Europe, the new study shows, many dozens of jihadists finally did just that for the first time in contemporary terrorism history, conducting gruesome attacks in nine countries in recent years. Over the next month, this series will explore the implications for U.S. border security of what happened in Europe.  After 9/11, counterterrorism practitioners, intelligence analysts and academics were expected to constantly study one...

The Trump administration is set to harden the rules this week on those allowed to seek asylum in the United States, as it attempts to stem a wave of migration on its southern border with Mexico. In a fast-track regulation set to publish in the Federal Register on Tuesday, the administration has created a framework that will allow asylum seekers to be sent to other nations that have negotiated bilateral agreements to accept them. Previously, officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump have argued that migrants with a valid need for asylum should seek protection in the first...

A Russian national was shot by a Border Patrol agent Thursday night in the Arizona desert near Lukeville, on the Mexican border southwest of Tucson. The individual, whose identity was not released by authorities, was taken to a Phoenix-area hospital... Lukeville is an unincorporated hamlet with a border crossing, and lies within the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in a rugged stretch of desert about 110 miles southwest of Tucson. The area has seen a large number of migrants crossing the border to turn themselves in to federal border agents and request asylum over the past year... The Trump administration...

In front of border wall construction at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument last weekend, our (Center for Biological Diversity) Arizona field campaigner Brytnee Laurette shared a poignant poem about the struggles faced by local wildlife, migrants, and indigenous communities.