Free Republic

550 California residents, representing labor unions and civil rights groups, are marching in unity for Mexican-Americans. Protesters can be seen in this video wearing the trademark purple shirts of the SEIU, green shirts of AFSCME and blue shirts of the Teamsters..

In the largest such operation in U.S. history, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 286 foreign nationals in California with criminal records in a three-day enforcement surge that ended Thursday night. Of those taken into custody, 119 were from Northern California and 24 were from the San Jose area. ICE reported that about 80 percent of the immigrants taken into custody had prior convictions for serious or violent crimes such as rape, armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Also arrested were 30 convicted sex offenders, many of whom had been convicted of sexual assaults on children. At...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. yesterday overturned a Bush administration ruling in January that immigrants do not have a constitutional right to effective legal counsel in deportation proceedings. In vacating the decision his predecessor, Michael B. Mukasey, issued two weeks before President George W. Bush left office, Holder restored one of the most common grounds cited by immigrants for appealing removal orders: that their attorneys were incompetent. ....immigration courts are separate from the judicial branch and operate under the Justice Department, which makes the U.S. attorney general the final arbiter for immigration proceedings. Immigrants are not entitled to public...

Police officials in Prince George's and Montgomery counties are warning officers that a Salvadoran street gang is plotting to ambush and kill them when they respond to service calls.The warnings have been issued based on intelligence gathered from the Langley Park area, a known base for members of the MS-13 gang, officials said. The area straddles two counties.'snip'In July 2002, The Washington Times reported that MS-13 had dispatched about 20 gang members from California to Fairfax County to kill a county police officer at random.There were two confirmed cases in which MS-13 members tried to lure officers behind buildings in...