Free Republic

Twenty-four children have been reunited with their families, 305 fugitives arrested, and 179 charges filed against defendants in 140 cases in a multi-agency federal operation, says the Justice Department in annoucing a weeks-long, multi-agency operation. The DOJ posted on Thursday that 11 agencies had participated "as part of this first-of-its-kind ‘badgeless’ enforcement initiative in Chicagoland in recognition of our nation’s 250th Birthday that focused on a single mission for roughly 60 days: to set aside barriers and focus exclusively on disrupting violence in the Chicago and Rockford areas by arresting the worst of the worst offenders." [snip] Chicagoland is the...

WATCH: James Talarico Says Bill Banning ‘Gender-Affirming Health Care to Trans Children’ Is ‘Christofascism’ download june 24, 2026, reused 7/2/26AP Photo/Eric Gay Mariane Angela2 Jul 2026574 2:17 Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico was caught on video describing a “Christofascism movement” as he criticized legislation restricting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and the state’s abortion law.

This week, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to radically expand the government’s power to regulate online speech platforms. Framed as a child safety measure, the KIDS Act imposes a litany of restrictions on social media apps and other platforms... The KIDS Act would fundamentally overturn this status quo by allowing the government to decide how platforms can be built and imposing restrictions that will censor the speech of adults and minors alike...

Wall Street Apes@WallStreetApesLeaked recording of Xavier Becerra at HHS under Biden saying he was putting illegal migrant children “in an assembly line”He clearly says the American people will be upset knowing how much Democrats were spending on children who shouldn’t even be here in America, and he’s instructing his staff to place them as quickly as they can without doing the proper checksHow is this guy not rotting in prison“This is not the way you do an assembly line”“We need to get discharges up — Every time we have to go to the Hill and explain why we're spending so...

Family estrangement is becoming more common, but it carries long-term emotional costs for everyone involved.“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s the opening line in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” It’s an eye-catcher, but one wonders if he’d write those words if he were living in 21st-century America. Distinctions marking unhappy families may still apply, but more and more of those families share one thing in common: Estrangement. This phenomenon—siblings breaking all contact with siblings, adult children turning their backs on parents and grandparents, or vice versa—is growing, and growing fast. A 2025...

Rep. Eli Crane@RepEliCraneTeam Biden didn’t even try to keep it from happening.They set up a hotline that only had 1 staffer monitoring, despite receiving over 65,000 inquiries.Check it out for yourself:

A young woman who trusted the medical establishment with her future now bears the scars of its ideological zealotry. Claire Abernathy, subjected to a double mastectomy as a teenager, has written an unflinching open letter to the surgeon who performed it, declaring that he stole her girlhood and left her to live with the consequences. Her damning indictment of a medical industry that rushed vulnerable children into irreversible procedures under the banner of “care” reveals the need for sanity. Abernathy’s story begins in confusion and trauma. At just 14 years old, she was placed on testosterone after a fleeting consultation....

A trans-identified male has lost an employment discrimination case after alleging that he had been wrongfully fired from his job at a childcare center in Letterkenny. The Workplace Relations Commission found that Aleena Starshine had been terminated not due to his gender identity, but as a result of repeat parental complaints and concerns about child safeguarding. . . The first complaint pertained to a “safari game” Starshine had organized with the children, during which he offered an 11-year-old child “a free kiss from me” or a “big kiss” as a prize. The child reported this to a parent, who then...

Schools are letting out, and whether you've got kids or not, something about this time of year still hits differently. Summer stopped being a vacation for most of us a long time ago — but try telling that to the part of your brain still wired to Press Your Luck ("No Whammys!") and the smell of a freshly opened Slip 'n Slide. Core memories are funny that way. Once they're in, they're in for good. '80s Summers Meant Home By the Streetlights, Gone By Morning For a solid ten weeks a year, you roamed your little universe without anyone —...

Carol Rhees is a Democrat lawyer who started Hope for Children in Ethiopia a long-time USAID grant recipient.

Amid a rocket attack launched by Hezbollah on residential homes in the village of Rmeish in southern Lebanon, more than 50 children celebrated their first Communion in a testament to faith, resilience, and hope in the midst of war. In comments to local media, Rmeish Municipality Head Hanna Al-Amil said a missile fell between inhabited homes on Sunday morning and “narrowly avoided causing a major disaster.” Al-Amil stressed that the village contains no military forces, armed groups, or weapons, emphasizing that residents “simply want to live safely on their land, away from confrontation and escalation.” On Friday, several Hezbollah rockets...

This week, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing detailing how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped facilitate and benefited from the historic Biden-Harris border crisis, as well as how far-left NGOs are still working to help inadmissible aliens undermine federal immigration law under the Trump administration. In the hearing, witnesses laid out in detail how NGOs received more than $6 billion from the Biden-Harris administration, including through grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and others. They also testified about how the Biden-Harris administration handed over unaccompanied alien children (UACs)...

Celebrity children identify as trans and non-binary at unbelievable rates. Charlize Theron, Cynthia Nixon, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony — whose 18-year-old recently debuted a new name, changing from Emme to Oskar — are just a few of the stars with children who aren’t living as their birth sex. There’s nothing wrong with being trans. But such an unlikely concentration in a particular community should give one pause — especially when so many of these kids began playing with gender at shockingly young ages. In a geography where having a trans child has a tinge of chicness...

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CBS News in an exclusive interview that his government has evidence that Russia is abducting Ukrainian children and training them to fight against fellow Ukrainians. It is an allegation that may constitute a war crime, according to the International Criminal Court. This is the first time that Zelenskyy has publicly made this accusation, which goes beyond the documented evidence that Russia has a state-sponsored program of taking Ukrainian children to camps for reeducation or "Russification." "When these children grow up and they push these boys to the battlefield," Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy said "yes have evidence...

Brandon Magni says when he asked for a forfeit, he was told he could forfeit himself or call the policeThe travel baseball industry was rocked over the Memorial Day weekend by yet another shocking incident in what is shaping up to be one of the ugliest on record for youth baseball. Did an Oklahoma 11U baseball coach order his pitcher to hit an opponent? Was that boy then ordered to throw a fastball at the opposing team's dugout? Those are the accusations being thrown around by a coach out of Nebraska who says his dugout was targeted at a...

Washington state has agreed to a permanent injunction allowing religious families who refuse to promote gender ideology to serve as foster parents. This comes after the state refused to renew a full foster care license for Shane and Jennifer DeGross, a couple who rejected using a child's "preferred pronouns," citing religious objections to socially "transitioning" children. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is representing the DeGrosses, announced the settlement in a press release. "Washington's policy failed to respect religious diversity because it singled out applicants with traditional religious beliefs on the sanctity of the human body," said ADF Senior Counsel Johannes...

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential nominee, and ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl went back and forth over his past comments about “childless cat ladies,” as the Ohio Republican tried to clarify his previous suggestion that parents who have children should have more power than adults who do not have children. Vance has faced repeated backlash for 2021 remarks during which he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want...

Washington state has agreed to stop forcing Christian foster parents to push the LGBTQ agenda on their foster kids. The Democrat-run state will no longer require Christian parents to fake gender pronouns or socially transition foster children in violation of their religious beliefs. That comes under a settlement reached with a couple who lost their foster-care license for refusing to compromise their faith and push the trans agenda on their foster children. The agreement, announced May 20, includes a permanent injunction requiring the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families to revise its licensing policies. The department can no longer...

As dawn breaks, hundreds of men gather at a dusty square in Chaghcharan, the capital of Ghor province in Afghanistan. They line the roadside with weary faces, hoping someone will come along offering any work. It will determine whether their families eat that day. The likelihood of success, however, is low. Juma Khan, 45, has found just three days of work in the past six weeks that paid between 150 to 200 Afghani ($2.35-$3.13; £1.76-£2.34) per day. "My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row. My wife was crying, so were my children. So I begged a...

California Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Xavier Becerra went viral yesterday for saying to a local Los Angeles television (KTLA) reporter, after she asked a hard question, “By the way, this is a profile piece, this is not a gotcha piece, right?” Reporter Annie Rose Ramos responded, appropriately, “These questions are fair. It’s in order to learn about you as a candidate.” Progressives responded by criticizing Becerra’s messaging. A progressive Pod Save America co-host and former Obama spokesman, posted on X, “Politicians and candidates…let your staff have these whiny conversations! Or at least don’t do it on camera!” Former Obama strategist David...