Free Republic

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump Administration from revoking the legal status of international students nationwide while their legal challenges are going through the court system. According to the AP, California-based US District Judge Jeffrey White, a George W. Bush appointee, said Trump’s immigration actions “wreaked havoc not only on the lives of Plaintiffs here but on similarly situated F-1 nonimmigrants across the United States and continues do so.”

A federal judge in Puerto Rico issued a scathing order last week accusing Democratic prosecutors on the island of plagiarizing nearly their entire 241-page complaint that blamed oil companies for causing global warming. In the order Wednesday, district court judge Aida Delgado-Colon outlined how David Efron, the lead attorney representing Puerto Rico's capital city San Juan, appears to have plagiarized a similar but separate complaint that 16 Puerto Rican municipalities filed a year earlier. A side-by-side comparison of the two complaints shows large blocks of text are copied word-for-word. Delgado-Colon wrote that the situation should serve as a cautionary tale...

U.S. District Judge John A. Woodcock, a Bush appointee, has sided with Maine’s far-left government, forcing the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture to unfreeze federal funds despite the state’s open defiance of Title IX protections for women and girls. The case stems from a fiery conflict between the Trump administration and Maine’s Democrat leadership after Governor Janet Mills refused to comply with Executive Order 14201, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” issued by President Trump in February.

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump Administration from firing intel agency officials who worked on DEI programs. US District Judge Anthony Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, said the fired officials are entitled to appeal the firings and seek reassignment for other jobs in the agency. Last month Judge Trenga rejected a bid to block the Trump Admin from firing the 19 intelligence officials. “In effect, they are at-will employees,” Judge Trenga said last month during a hearing, according to Politico. .... Snip.... Reuters reported: A U.S. judge on Monday blocked the firing of 19 intelligence officers who...

Anyone with common sense can tell when there’s a setup for a big problem, and the Supreme Court keeps setting things up. ... We have watched the fruition of Obama’s diabolical change unfold for years. College tuitions have soared, causing these loans to become a yoke around the neck of young adults, delinquency has become commonplace, and ... my perplexity in 2005 when I found myself wondering why G.W. Bush had appointed Roberts, the “new guy,” directly into being Chief Justice of our Supreme Court rather than elevating a more experienced judge to that position. At the time, he seemed...

Judge Anthony J. Trenga, an appointee of George W. Bush, has temporarily blocked President Trump’s move to clean house in the intelligence community—specifically targeting agents involved in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that have compromised national security in favor of leftist ideology. This ruling comes after a group of anonymous intelligence officers, who had been temporarily reassigned to roles implementing controversial Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) programs, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the CIA. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of...

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy may continue to consider race when evaluating candidates to attend the elite military school, even after the U.S. Supreme Court last year barred civilian colleges from employing similar affirmative action policies.

BALTIMORE (AP) — A federal judge on Friday ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy can continue considering race in its admissions process, ruling that military cohesion and other national security factors mean the officer training school should not be subjected to the same standards as civilian universities. During a two-week bench trial in September, attorneys for the school argued that prioritizing diversity in the military makes it stronger, more effective and more widely respected. The group behind the case, Students for Fair Admissions, also brought the lawsuit challenging affirmative action that resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last...

The military contractor known as “Fat Leonard,” the mastermind behind the worst public corruption scandal in U.S. Navy history who was three weeks away from being sentenced in the case, is on the run. Leonard Glenn Francis, who has been under house arrest, cut off his GPS monitoring ankle bracelet and absconded from his San Diego home sometime Sunday morning, said Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Omar Castillo. Pretrial Services, the federal agency monitoring Francis, was alerted to an anomaly with Francis’ bracelet, and Francis’ defense team went to check on him, knowing he has a history of health issues. An...

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday dismissed the criminal indictment against a dive boat captain charged with manslaughter in the deaths of 34 people when the vessel caught fire and sank off the California coast three years ago. The 75-foot (23-meter) Conception caught fire while most of those onboard were sleeping, killing 33 passengers and a crew member. It is considered one of California’s worst maritime disasters. U.S. District Judge George Wu said in a ruling that the indictment, handed down on December 2020 against captain Jerry Nehl Boylan by a federal grand jury, must be thrown out...

Days after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, the Biden Administration is fighting a court-ordered $230 million verdict for the victims of a different Texas mass shooting. The Justice Department filed an appeal in an attempt to not pay the multi-million dollar verdict to the families and victims of the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting by former Air Force airman Devin Kelley, said Texas attorney Thomas J. Henry. “That federal judge found that the United States government was at fault for allowing the gunman to acquire a gun because the...

US District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Walton made the comments Thursday following the conviction of a January 6 defendant. Walton was appointed by former President George W. Bush. A federal judge on Thursday called Donald Trump a threat to democracy, accusing the former president of instigating a mob of "weak-minded" followers to attack the US Capitol on January 6, Politico reported. "I think our democracy is in trouble," US District Judge Reggie Walton said, "because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy...

Brown was sentenced in 2017 to five years in prison. She was let out last year due to COVID-19 concerns in the federal prison where she as serving her time.The appeal was based on arguments about a juror that Brown contended was improperly removed from her 2017 trial because he said the “Holy Spirit” told him Brown was not guilty of fraud and tax charges.

SAN FRANCISCO — A divided U.S. appeals court late Friday refused to immediately allow the Trump administration to enforce a ban on asylum for any immigrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The ban is inconsistent with an existing U.S. law and an attempted end-run around Congress, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 decision. "Just as we may not, as we are often reminded, 'legislate from the bench,' neither may the Executive legislate from the Oval Office," 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, a nominee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote for...

The chief justice is just about as believable insisting that politics doesn't affect the judiciary as Iran's President Ahmadinejad was when he told a Columbia University audience that there are no gays in Iran. Groucho Marx articulated the dilemma with the immortal line, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" Or, as Mark Levin posted on Facebook: "It appears John Roberts doesn't live in the real world. A few decades ago he understood that there are, in fact, too many progressive judges and justices who legislate from the bench. Indeed, when it came to Obamacare, Roberts...

A federal judge declared the Obama administration's health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia's attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson is the first federal judge to strike down the law, which has been upheld by two others in Virginia and Michigan. Several other lawsuits have been dismissed and others are pending, including one filed by 20 other states in Florida.

Conservative Kenneth B. Bell replaces the Florida Supreme Court's most liberal justice. TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush named his third Supreme Court justice Monday, picking a young, conservative Pensacola judge to replace the court's most liberal and senior justice. Bush selected Circuit Judge Kenneth B. Bell to succeed the retiring Leander Shaw, one of two African-Americans on the seven-member court. Bell's judicial philosophy appears to match the governor's but is the opposite of his predecessor's. Shaw, who will end 19 years on the bench next week, is considered one of the most liberal and active Florida justices ever, having written...