Free Republic

On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders. I live in a...

Last spring, as Central American children flooded into Texas in a way he had never seen in his three-decade career, Border Patrol agent Robert Harris decided to experiment. His intelligence analysts estimated that 78 percent of the guides smuggling other migrants were Mexicans younger than 18 — teenagers often hired or conscripted by drug cartels that knew they would not be prosecuted if caught — and he wanted to attack this loophole. “Why don’t we remove these juveniles from the smuggling cycle?” Harris, the outgoing commander of the Laredo sector of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, recalled thinking. Now, as...

Obama administration officials are rushing to explain photos from 2014 that went viral this weekend showing locked-up immigrant children Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children resurfaced on Twitter over the weekend and went viral. Former Obama administration officials tried to explain the context behind the photos, which appeared to show migrant kids locked up in cages. The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump's presidency. The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump's immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government...

Appearing to take the show's host by surprise, Henry Cuellar, a Democrat in Texas's congressional delegation contended Saturday on CNN that in 2014, the conditions at detention centers holding unaccompanied and separated illegal-immigrant children were "kept quiet under the Obama Administration." That's probably correct, but it should also be noted that enough info had leaked out that that the press, if it had been genuinely interested, could have investigated matters further, and clearly didn't. That Cuellar raised this point now shouldn't be a surprise. In 2014, he bitterly criticized Obama's handling of the surge of children crossing the U.S-Mexico border....

Former White House stenographer Beck Dorey-Stein has made salacious claims in her upcoming memoir, From the Corner of the Oval. Dorey-Stein says that drug-fueled flights aboard Air Force One made “awkward intimacy with colleagues suddenly just funny and bizarre. She and one of Obama’s senior staffers, Jason Wolf, had hot sex in various hotel rooms before he broke her heart. Obama’s traveling staff was comprised of mostly women, dubbed “the Vigiants”. While we’re way beyond debating whether or not Obama had a “scandal-free” administration as he claimed last January, the former President’s stenographer, Beck Dorey-Stein, has come out of the...

Where did the current policy of separating children from the parents during Illegal border crossings originate? All I find when I search are it's all the Trump Administrations fault. Every search engine seems to come up nothing but the Left's viewpoint here. Yet I have read someplace that these policies predate Trump. So any help appreciated on information on this.

Barack Obama, former president and Republican sleeper agent who successfully destroyed the Democratic Party in eight years, is back in the news after hosting a series of private, one-on-one meetings with Democratic hopefuls who may end up running in 2020. The former president has been meeting with a lot of names that have been tossed around in national media as potential opposition to Donald Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 after Obama had completely destroyed the Democratic Party’s bench to the point where an actual, avowed socialist and a politician whose political expiration date passed in 2005 were the...

Remember Afghanistan? The longest war in American history? Ever? When it comes to wars, we Americans have a selective memory. The Afghan war, dating from October 2001, has earned the distinction of having been forgotten while still underway. President Trump’s Inaugural Address included no mention of Afghanistan. Nor did his remarks last month at a joint session of Congress. For the new commander in chief, the war there qualifies at best as an afterthought — assuming, that is, he has thought about it all. A similar attitude prevails on Capitol Hill. Congressional oversight has become pro forma. Last week Gen....

The Center still has a series of approval steps to go through, including a federal review, but has also faced a lawsuit by Protect Our Parks, which alleged that the city was engaging in a “short con shell game” to get the 12-story museum and library built on parkland. The lawsuit argued that while the purpose of transferring the land was to house the official Obama presidential library, the center will not include his presidential papers, only a digital copy. "Defendants have chosen to deal with it in a classic Chicago political way, known as a short con shell game,...

Dan Bongino slammed former resident Barack Obama for past comments he made denying early knowledge of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. ... Obama said in a 2015 interview with CBS News that he first learned of Clinton's use of the private server "at the same time everybody else learned it through news reports." "That's nonsense," Bongino said Saturday on "Fox & Friends." "Obama's clearly not telling the truth here." ... According to Horowitz's report, Obama was one of only a few people who had "direct contact" with Clinton through her private email account. "FBI analysts and Prosecutor...

Public works projects surrounding the proposed Obama Presidential Center will cost taxpayers nearly $200 million, according to a report published Saturday. The state of Illinois approved a $224 million budget, allotting $174 million for road work around the presidential center and an additional $50 million to renovate an above-ground railway station two miles away from the center, according to a report from the Washington Examiner.

The two Kansas sheriff's deputies who were fatally shot while transporting an inmate between jail and a court hearing both leave behind children. Deputy Theresa King, 44, died from her injuries Saturday after being shot in the line of duty in Kansas City on Friday. (Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office ) Deputy Theresa King had three children and Deputy Patrick Rohrer had two, Wyandotte County sheriff's Maj. Kelli Bailiff said on Saturday. King, 44, was a 13-year veteran of the Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office while Rohrer, 35, was with the department for seven years. Deputy Patrick Rohrer, 35, was killed in...

I’m going on a picnic today,The Picnic, James Tissotso I suggest you take a break from the FBI as well and instead contemplate reasons # 587-89 why Democrats should never be allowed to be in charge of anything. (Shot/Chaser/Hangover format borrowed, with attribution, from the Instapundit)Shot: “WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF FISCAL PROFLIGACY?” Philadelphia’s government has the worst accounting practices among the nation’s 10 largest cities, with $924 million in bookkeeping errors alone last year…That’s on top of the now-infamous missing $33 million, the discrepancy between what the city’s records say it has and what is in...

Barack Obama was born in the U.S. It was his own book publisher that started the false rumor that he was born in Kenya. NPR later repeated the false claim. Barack Obama was born in the U.S.According to this 2012 article from ABC News, in 1991 Obama’s own book publisher printed a paper pamphlet which said that Obama was “born in Kenya.” An employee of the publisher said that it was a “fact checking error” of hers that caused this to happen, and that the false information did not come from Obama. The bolding is mine:https://web.archive.org/web/20120518040015/http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/born-kenya-obamas-literary-agent-misidentified-birthplace-1991/story?id=16372566#.WDjC8FxHR_k‘Born in Kenya’: Obama’s Literary Agent...

Thursday's Inspector General's report reviewing FBI and Department of Justice actions before the 2016 election effectively concluded that former President Barack Obama lied to the American people and committed illegal acts in emailing then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private-server email addresses. The IG also found that former FBI Director James Comey scrubbed all hints of Obama's prior knowledge from his July 2016 statement explaining why Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted for her illegal acts. Despite these indisputable facts, reports at the nation's three gatekeeping establishment press outlets have not mentioned Obama's name in connection with any of this. Joy...

You've heard of skunks at the garden party? Such as still-ruling Nicaraguan socialist strongman, Daniel Ortega, who got his famous nickname from none other than the great Ronald Reagan? Well, now we have pigs at the garden party of democracy, the Organization of American States' Summit of the Americas, and this time, quite literally. At the globally watched summit, locals released a bunch of pigs through the streets of the Peruvian capital of Lima, around the Plaza San Martin, which is one of its main public spaces, spray-painted with the names of Venezuela's dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and Cuba's dictator, Raul...

The Singapore summit actually made the world a safer place. The president’s critics won’t admit it. For congressional Democrats, it’s payback time. Ever since 2015, when Barack Obama struck a nuclear deal with Iran, prominent Republicans—including Donald Trump and his top foreign policy advisers—have accused Obama and his Democratic supporters of, in Mike Pompeo’s words, “surrender.” They’ve accused Obama of signing a deal that doesn’t meaningfully restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions and, by seeking a warmer relationship with its regime, of betraying Iran’s long-suffering people. The irony, therefore, is nearly irresistible. In his nuclear summit this week in Singapore, Trump gave...

Dan Pfeiffer, former assistant and senior adviser to President Barack Obama, thinks he knows the exact date the modern era of fake news was born: April 27, 2011. “I had walked into the briefing room that morning with 50 copies of Barack Obama’s birth certificate,” Pfeiffer recalls in a memoir, “Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump,” set to be published next week. “So we could prove once and for all the man who was in his third year as president after winning an historic electoral landslide was an American citizen and eligible to...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Friday that he “doesn’t give a shit” about critics who don't like him working with President Trump. “If you don’t like me working with President Trump to make the world a better place, I don’t give a shit,” Graham told CNN’s “At This Hour.” Graham, who unsuccessfully ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 and blasted Trump throughout the primary, said he trusts and likes the president. “I’ve got a relationship with the president at a time when he needs allies,” Graham said. The South Carolina senator has praised Trump for conducting missile strikes...

President Trump’s descriptions of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un included language that he usually reserves for himself. Kim is “very talented,” Trump said at a news conference. Kim’s people have a “great fervor” for him — not entirely voluntarily — and Trump trusts him. Kim is a “rough guy,” but he is also “smart” and “wants a lot of good things” because he “loves his people.” Trump said he had a “great chemistry” with Kim. He would “love to have him at the White House,” but meeting him in Singapore was a “great honor.” Such language is not unusual...