Free Republic

Next Tuesday is a day many Cuban migrants in Costa Rica have been waiting for ever since they left the island to try to reach the United States and got stuck at the border with Nicaragua. The Costa Rican government announced that the first flight of Cuban migrants will leave on Jan. 12 for El Salvador - the first stop on their journey north - out of Daniel Oduber International Airport in Liberia. Under an agreement among Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.N. International Organization for Migration, Cubans with transit visas in Costa Rica - nearly 8,000...

LAREDO, TEXAS (KGNS) - Congressman Henry Cuellar says a large wave of Cuban immigrants are moving through the Laredo ports of entry. He says that will continue until the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act is changed. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, over 43,000 Cuban migrants crossed into the united states in 2015 and around two-thirds, have crossed through the Laredo field office on the Texas-Mexico border. "The continued number of Cubans are coming to the United States where they get preferential treatment under that law", said Cuellar. Cuellar says he anticipates it will be a while until Congress...

Honduras called on the U.S. to exercise “respect and consideration” when dealing with undocumented Honduran migrants Tuesday, announcing that the government is preparing to receive deported migrants, including children, over the coming days. President Juan Orlando Hernandez stressed that Hondurans travelling to the U.S. in search of work “give back to the economy” while they live there, calling on immigration authorities to respect Hondurans’ rights. Local authorities are expecting the wave of returnees to continue over the coming days, including 16 mothers and 21 minors set to be deported back to Honduras Wednesday. The deportations come as part of a...

Cuban migrants in Costa Rica are nearly set to make a notoriously dangerous trek north to the United States, but officials from the region’s human rights agencies say they are coordinating to provide a safe chain of travel for the estimated 8,000 Cubans with temporary visas here. National institutions that oversee human rights will keep tabs on the treatment given to the Cubans by each country along the planned route, according to the council’s statement. Once on U.S. soil, Cubans can claim refugee status and gain permanent residency. The United Nations International Organization for Migration is overseeing the operation to...

Federal immigration enforcement agents last weekend arrested 121 migrants for deportation, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on Monday, starting a wave of removals of parents and children, mainly from Central America, who came during the border surge in 2014 and failed to win asylum in immigration courts. Most of the arrests were in Georgia, Texas and North Carolina, officials said, and were of migrants who had lost their cases and were ordered deported by immigration judges. The deportations are part of “concerted nationwide enforcement operations” to achieve a “greater rate” of deportation of parents who crossed the border illegally...

Some 121 people in the U.S. illegally were arrested this past weekend and are currently in the process of being deported back to their home countries, the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday. The arrest of the immigrants marks the first major offensive since a wave of families and unaccompanied children flooded the nation's southern border in 2014, which prompted a renewed debate about U.S. immigration laws and led to accusations from conservatives that the Obama administration has been too weak on protecting the border. This weekend's efforts "should come as no surprise," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in...

Donald Trump claims that Ted Cruz is copying his idea of building a border fence, but the reality may be the opposite. First, here's what Trump says:...But if we go back to May 9th, 2013, we find that Ted Cruz was not only speaking in favor of a border fence, he was pushing hard for it legislatively:...And what was Donald Trump talking about during this time? Not a border fence, that's for sure. Instead, just a few months earlier Trump was saying that Mitt Romney's self-deportation program was "mean spirited," further adding...In fact, as recently as June of 2015 Trump was still...

A massive airlift of refugees will begin in Central America next week after regional countries agreed to help thousands of stranded Cubans who have been driven by the threat of normalised relations to migrate to the United States. Fears that talks between Washington and Havana may soon curtail favourable US migration policies have prompted the biggest rush from the Caribbean island since the "raft exodus" of 1994. More than 40,000 Cubans have entered the US this year, almost double the number in 2014. Many more are stranded, after travelling via Ecuador, which offered visa-free entry for Cuban arrivals, and then...

Bernie Sanders allegedly told a group of Latino activists and politicians in Chicago on Christmas Eve in a closed meeting that as president he would do an end-run around Congress and grant amnesty and then a path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens in the U.S. In 2013, Senator Sanders voted for the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate but was unable to clear the House. Sanders, an independent socialist from Vermont, is running for president as a Democrat and reportedly trails front-runner Hillary Clinton among Hispanic voters based on polling data. Apparently the premise among...

Jeb's dead. At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and has been for a few months. The man who would be America's third President Bush in as many decades never quite had a good night in the Republican debates. His polls numbers have continued to stagnate, and in some cases, plummet. Bush's initial blitz may have scared away Mitt Romney, but nobody else is frightened of him. Donald Trump calls him a "nice guy" in a way that seems designed to torture him. We haven't even gotten to Bush's heresies on immigration and education policy - that's how secure his rivals...

An E. coli epidemic in Seattle and Kansas City and 19 other states? TB in New York and Manassas, Virginia? Leprosy in New Hampshire? Dengue Fever in Laredo? What's going on here? If you think data about illegal alien crime is hidden from public, just try to find information on the contagious diseases brought across our borders by illegal aliens from nearly 100 countries. If we survey the anecdotal and sporadic official data of the past fifteen years, there is no doubt we are being invaded daily by dangerous diseases.

The number of migrants and refugees who have entered Europe by sea and land this year has passed the one million mark, a long-expected but symbolically significant capstone to a year in which displaced people flocked to the Continent in historic proportions. The huge influx - the largest movement of people on the Continent since World War II - has strained the resources of Germany, which has been the ultimate destination for most of the migrants; prompted a right-wing backlash there and in much of Europe; and exposed the European Union's inability to coordinate an effective response. As of Monday,...

Mexico's Foreign Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu said the U.S. should “embrace migration as an opportunity,” arguing that migrants are wrongly being portrayed as “security concerns.” “These narratives are simply unsustainable and these narratives sell among some audiences due to misinformation about the impact of migration,” Ruiz Massieu said at a Migration Policy Institute event. She also said it is often easier for people to focus on the costs of migration rather than the “countless contributions” immigrants make to their “countries of destination” such as the United States. “Now imagine this figure: $11.8 billion. This is the amount of dollars that...

Last week’s Crystal Ball repeated its refrain that Donald Trump is very unlikely to get the Republican presidential nomination. However, it issued the caveat that “[i]t would be easier to make our argument if we could explain precisely how and by whom the real estate tycoon will be dethroned.” Who can and will defeat Trump? The answer is obvious, but also not obvious because the question seems to beg the name of another candidate. The “who” that will defeat Trump is not another candidate but is most likely to be the Republican voters who actually turn out in Iowa, New...

Published on Dec 16, 2015 BACKGROUND: In the dead of night after 2am this morning, Congressional leadership unveiled a more than 2,000 page 'omnibus' year-end funding bill which would, among other things: fully-fund the President's refugee expansion; fully-fund sanctuary cities; fully-fund the resettlement of illegal aliens youth and their families crossing the border; lock-in tax credits for illegal aliens; and quadruple the highly controversial H-2B foreign worker visa being used to replace Americans as truck drivers, construction workers, theme park employees, and in blue collar jobs across the nation. Sessions, the Chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee, issued a statement about...

GOP candidates debate for first time since terror attacks.

Immigrant rights activists have vowed to sign up 1 million immigrants — mostly Mexicans — for citizenship and then quickly register them to vote in time to punish Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans at the polls in November for their harsh rhetoric. The advocates say the new voters could make a difference in the presidential race, where most of the Republican field has tacked to the right in word and policy, and in key Senate races in Illinois and Florida, where Republicans will be reaching to hang on to critical seats. With nearly 9 million legal immigrants already eligible...

If you've never heard of leishmaniasis, you're lucky — and you probably live in a developed country. It's an illness caused by parasites that are carried by tiny blood-sucking insects called sandflies. The painful, hard-to-treat sores it leaves on skin and internal organs can be disfiguring and even sometimes deadly. And while leishmaniasis mostly occurs in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia for now, it's moving north into the United States, as Maryn McKenna reports in a blog post. In a story for National Geographic News, McKenna describes how about half of the members of an...

Selecting San Francisco's former police chief to head the U.S. Border Patrol would encourage more illegal border crossings because she has a record of not enforcing federal immigration laws, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., argues. Heather Fong advocated San Francisco's "sanctuary city" policy of non-cooperation with federal immigration officials, Johnson said in a letter Monday to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske. "The selection of such a candidate would send a strong message-both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.-that enforcing our immigration laws is not a priority of U.S. Customs and Border Protection," Johnson wrote.

A Texas sheriff expressed concerns that the federal government plans to bring large numbers of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) from the border to the campsite located southwest of Dallas will become a small city.