Free Republic

During a speech at the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) last Thursday[Oct. 12, 2017], Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that U.S. asylum policies are open to “rampant abuse and fraud” and must be reformed to ensure the integrity of our immigration system. (Department of Justice, Oct. 12, 2017) The nation’s top law enforcement officer called on Congress to reform immigration laws to ensure that only credible claims are granted in the asylum review process. (Id.)Although federal law requires the government to keep asylum applicants in custody until their claims are processed, former President Barack Obama fostered...

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said the U.S. is facing “decay” and called President Trump a “spoiled child” after the president said he’s no longer willing to deal on granting permanent legal status to illegal immigrants under the Obama-era DACA program. Mr. Fox, who as president of his country from 2000 to 2006 oversaw a massive exodus of people to the U.S., praised the DACA program that protects hundreds of thousands of them from deportation. “Acting like a spoiled child, won’t get you anywhere in politics!” Mr. Fox said via Twitter. “DACA is not only a program, it’s a way...

"Betrayed." Victor Avila is a survivor. Soft-spoken but iron-willed, he dedicated his life to law enforcement and to his country. Yet, the feds are now fighting tooth and nail to bury the full truth about the 2011 ambush by Los Zetas drug cartel thugs in Mexico that left him gravely wounded and his partner, special agent Jaime Zapata, dead. This week, two of the Mexican gangsters convicted in the horror on Highway 57 between Mexico City and Monterrey were sentenced to double life terms in prison. "HSI Special Agents Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila were in Mexico to protect and...

EXCLUSIVE – The cartel member suspected of shooting and killing Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010 with a gun supplied by the U.S. government was arrested in Mexico Wednesday, senior law enforcement, Border Patrol, and congressional sources told Fox News. The suspect, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, was apprehended by a joint U.S.-Mexico law enforcement task force that included the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals and the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). A $250,000 reward had been sought for information leading to the arrest of Osorio-Arellanes, who was captured at a ranch on the border of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and...

For a few years, a wide-spread effort by the Mexican military to arrest or kill cartel leaders, most notably Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, seemed to be making progress. But as Cartels began to fight for the territory of military-weakened rivals, the homicide rate once again exploded. Now, a disturbing video shows the extreme length that participants in the emerging all-out gang war will go to retain or take power. The graphic video shows two Los Zetas gunmen insulting rival gangs behind a shirtless, kneeling man. The gunmen claim that their victim is part of a rival gang who was sent...

Educated Colombians also know the FARC will see no purpose in laying down its weapons and encouraging peasants to change crops from white gold to something mundane like coffee There have been some curious recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize such as terrorist Yasser Arafat. Yet somehow it’s managed to lower its prestige even further with its award to Colombian President John Manuel Santos for his efforts in negotiating a “peace accord” to end “a half-century war with communist guerrillas.” As educated Colombians seem to know with their rejection of the treaty (albeit narrowly) there are no “communist guerrillas” nor...

If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market. The scariest part: this might not have happened with El Chapo in charge.

The Mexican Los Zetas cartel controls portions of the Texas-Mexico border and has proven to possess Russian rocket-propelled grenade launchers and the grenades (RPGs). This is significant in that the Mexican transnational group has shown a willingness to fire upon U.S. aircraft, such as they did on June 5, 2015 in the Laredo Sector along the Texas border. Another significant consideration pertains to the group’s ability to smuggle persons, narcotics, or any other item they wish into the U.S.–for the right price. The RPGs could easily end up in the hands of someone or a group within the U.S. The...

"Homeland Security Official: ISIS Training Terrorists South of Border With Help from Mexican Drug Cartels" A top ranking Homeland Security official says Mexican drug cartels are helping ISIS sneak across the southern border to scope out targets for terrorist attacks. ISIS operative Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir has reportedly been training militants near the US border near Ciudad Juarez for the past year.

The two most recent victims of the raging wave of violence that continues to strike this city were tortured and had their throats slit. Almost a day after the murder, the Tamaulipas government had not issued a public statement about the murders.

The U.S. government is fighting to keep details of how its own federal gun agents let Mexican drug cartels buy rifles in Arizona illegally out of an upcoming murder trial in which two men will be tried for the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry who died after he ran into men carrying those same illegal guns. In a court filing Monday, prosecutors are trying to keep some details about the guns found at the slain agent’s murder scene away from the jury. Terry, 40, was part of the Border Patrol’s elite BORTAC unit. In December 2010, the...

“Neither the government nor priests can handle El Chapo” was a warning sent by Joaquin Guzman (El-Chapo) to what he considered his two biggest threats at the time: Christian priests and the government. To ensure he was taken seriously, the note accompanied two corpses: soldiers that he arranged to be killed so everyone gets the message: you need to fear the drug cartel of Sinaloa, especially the infamous El Chapo. The message was sent in response to Hector Gonzalez, the archbishop of the northern state of Durango, who raised fears of attacks on the clergy. Indeed, according to the Catholic...

(Reuters) Vladimir Putin with Jose Maria Aznar, then Spain's prime minister, at Moncloa Palace on June 13, 2000. One of Russia's largest organized-crime syndicates allegedly operated out of Spain for more than a decade with the help of close allies of President Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors in Madrid have filed a 488-page petition to charge 27 people with money laundering and fraud in connection to the St. Petersburg-based Tambov crime syndicate's setting up shop in Spain in 1996. Vladislav Reznik, now the deputy head of the finance committee in Russia's lower house...

President Obama will announce Wednesday that the U.S. and Cuba have reached an agreement to open embassies in Havana and Washington, an administration official confirmed to Fox News. The announcement marks a major step in ending hostilities between the longtime foes and an opportunity to re-establish formal diplomatic relations. The U.S. and Cuba have been negotiating the reestablishment of embassies in each other’s capitals following the Dec. 17 announcement that they would move to restore ties. …

The congressman who tried silencing federal law enforcement sources from exposing terrorist camps in Ciudad Juárez is contradicting the U.S. government’s assessment of the famously crime-infested Mexican city by proclaiming that it’s “far safer” than it was years ago. It appears to be a frantic effort on the part of Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who represents El Paso Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives, to counter reports of Islamic terrorists operating in the area and joining forces with the sophisticated drug cartels that have long controlled the region. Judicial Watch broke that story last fall after receiving detailed...

ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, according to Judicial Watch sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector. The exact location where the terrorist group has established its base is around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas, targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to the United States, the same...

Mexico’s warring drug cartels helped orchestrate the massive influx of unaccompanied alien children that streamed through the Rio Grande Valley last summer, according to a leaked report from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Contrary to the narrative articulated by the Obama administration and promoted by major news organizations, the children did not enter the country entirely “unaccompanied.” How, when, and where the alien children crossed into the United States appears to have been determined by transnational criminal organizations who exercise control over much of the southern border, according to the leaked report first obtained by the Houston Chronicle. Intelligence...

LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities arrested nine people and seized about $90 million Wednesday in raids in the fashion district of Los Angeles, marking an unprecedented crackdown on Mexican cartels' increasing reliance on international trade to launder money from drug sales in the United States. About 1,000 law enforcement officers fanned out across the city's downtown to search dozens of businesses suspected of taking bulk cash funneled by drug cartels for clothing exported to Mexico. The raids came after three separate federal indictments in the biggest investigation to date into trade-based drug money laundering, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for...

HOUSTON, Texas--The massive influx of adults and minors crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador has brought the Customs and Border Protection agency (CPB) past its capacity to provide security at the U.S./Mexico border, according to the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). In an interview with Breitbart Texas, NBPC Vice President Shawn Moran revealed that the Mexican cartels control the flow of illegal immigrants across Mexico through the monopoly on coyotes, otherwise known as human smugglers. “Mexican cartels are exploiting this crisis to get their shipments through. They know our schedules, our shifts, our manpower, and...

Authorities have confirmed that one gunman has been wounded and that five kidnapping victims have been rescued following a Wednesday afternoon shootout in a busy downtown Reynosa shopping district. Mexico's Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA) confirmed that a shootout took place in the "peatonal" or "pedestrian shopping area" of downtown Reynosa on Wednesday afternoon. SEDENA officials reported that soldiers were in the area when they came under fire from an unknown number of men. Reynosa residents reported the gunfire on the social media network Twitter. SEDENA officials reported that shootout ended with one gunman being wounded and five alleged kidnapping...