Tag: immigration

A Third Of All DC District Judges Were Not Born In United States

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the source of many of the cases interfering with President Donald Trump’s authority, has 15 judges, (Counting Chief Judge James Boasberg) and five of them were born outside the United States.

While country of origin doesn’t come up in most jobs, it is worth asking if judges with ties to foreign nations and cultures are the right ones to make decisions affecting the U.S. military or immigration.

The concept of foreign-born judges is a newer phenomenon in this district. In addition to the 15 main judges, the D.C. District has 10 older, senior judges who still occasionally hear cases in the district. This group, nominated as far back as Ronald Reagan the 1980s, were all born in the U.S.

But starting in 2014, former President Barack Obama appointed Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was in the U.S. by 1979, attending George Washington University. Before sitting on federal court, she had no experience as a judge. Chutkan is overseeing the legal challenge to DOGE’s work to slash excess government spending.    

Obama also appointed Judge Amit P. Mehta to the D.C. court. Mehta also had no previous experience as a judge. Mehta was born in Patan, Gujarat, India. He and his parents came to the U.S. when he was a baby, age one. He was raised in Maryland. Mehta will oversee four January 6 civil cases that aim to blame Trump for injuries and squeeze money, court time, and political embarrassment out of him.

The other three foreign born judges were nominated by former President Joe Biden.

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New York Court Strikes Down Law Allowing Noncitizens to Vote in Municipal Elections

In a landmark decision, the New York Court of Appeals has struck down a controversial law that would have allowed noncitizens and illegal immigrants to vote in municipal elections. 

The court ruled 6-1, declaring the law unconstitutional and reaffirming that only U.S. citizens have the right to vote in New York’s elections, effectively ending a contentious legal battle.

The law, passed in 2021 by the New York City Council during the final days of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, was automatically enacted in 2022 after neither de Blasio nor his successor, Mayor Eric Adams, vetoed it. Designed to extend voting rights to over 800,000 noncitizens, including legal immigrants, in municipal elections, the law quickly faced fierce legal opposition, according to Trending Politics. 

Critics, including Republican lawmakers, argued that it violated the state constitution, which explicitly limits voting rights to U.S. citizens.

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Danish Prime Minister: VP Vance is Right, Mass Migration Threatens Europe’s Way of Life

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is one of the few socialist leaders in Europe who hasn’t completely betrayed their nation’s blue-collar, working-class base. She recently stunned establishment politicians by agreeing with Vice President J.D. Vance’s assertion that mass migration is destroying the social fabric of Europe.

In an interview with Politico Europe published on Thursday, Frederiksen—who, unlike many of her social democrat counterparts in Europe’s political establishment, has curbed the rise of Denmark’s populist right by firmly opposing mass migration—conceded that Vice President J.D. Vance “had a point” in his Munich Security Conference speech when he warned of the threats posed by migration.

“I consider this mass migration into Europe as a threat to the daily life in Europe,” the prime minister said, echoing the position Vance voiced weeks earlier at the Munich Security Conference.

As Politico Europe points out, Frederiksen “stands out in a sea of conservatives in Europe as one of the only socialist leaders remaining in power across the bloc, in large part due to her severe policies on migration.”

At the conference, one of Europe’s most important, Vance stunned and outraged Europe’s globalist political elite by declaring, “Of all the pressing challenges faced by the nations represented here, none is more urgent than mass migration,” emphasizing that it poses a far greater threat than Russia.

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Taxpayer-Funded Immigration Group Chaired by DOJ Employee Wants To Abolish ICE, Defund Police

A left-wing group battling the Trump administration to maintain lucrative taxpayer-funded immigration contracts has called to defund police departments and abolish the federal agency that deports illegal aliens.

Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a nonprofit chaired by Department of Justice employee Marisa Arrona, has received $17 million in federal funding since last year to provide legal services to illegal aliens facing deportation, according to federal records. ImmDef is a subcontractor for a $769 million program to provide services to minors apprehended at the border without parents.

ImmDef and its allies are desperately fighting against the Trump administration in an attempt to maintain funding for that program and others that provide services to illegal immigrants. ImmDef has accused the Trump administration of “playing games with children’s rights and their safety” and says the program is needed to “protect due process” rights for illegal immigrants facing deportation.

But ImmDef has gone far beyond merely providing legal services to illegal immigrants facing deportation. The group, founded in 2015, has called for the government to “dismantle the systems that seek to deport our clients.” During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, ImmDef called for dismantling “the police state by defunding and decreasing police budgets.”

ImmDef says it is “high time we abolish the immigration prison system and abolish ICE” and sold “Abolish ICE” face masks during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In September 2020, ImmDef circulated the since-debunked MSNBC report that a doctor at an ICE facility in Georgia performed unnecessary hysterectomies on female detainees. “#AbolishICE,” ImmDef wrote on a social media post at the time.

According to former federal immigration judge Matt O’Brien, funding for groups like ImmDef highlights Democrats’ efforts to “funnel taxpayer funds into the coffers of these radical groups” in support of an “anti-borders agenda.”

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Prince Harry’s U.S. Visa File to Be Made Public Amid Accusations of Lying About Drug Use

An American judge has ordered the release of Prince Harry’s immigration files amid longstanding questions over whether he lied on his visa application to the United States about past drug use.

Prince Harry’s status in the U.S. may be in jeopardy as Judge Carl Nichols ruled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must release at least a redacted version of the Duke of Sussex’s visa application by Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported.

The conservative Heritage Foundation think tank had sued the DHS under the Biden administration after it had rejected a Freedom of Information request to publicly reveal the prince’s immigration files.

Heritage argued that it was in the public interest to know whether Harry had lied about his past drug use in order to gain entry to the U.S. after he abandoned his Royal duties in Britain in favour of money-making ventures with his wife in Hollywood.

Although having used illicit drugs in the past does not necessarily preclude one from gaining a visa to the United States, lying on a visa application can result in its termination.

In his ruling, Judge Nichols said: “The government has provided the court with its proposed redactions to the documents…those redactions appearing appropriate, the government is ORDERED to lodge on the docket the redacted versions of those documents no later than March 18, 2025.”

It remains to be seen if the redactions will include the section in which Harry was asked if he had ever taken illegal drugs.

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Italy Could Be Forced To Grant Citizenship To 2.5 Million Foreigners After June Referendum

Italy will hold a referendum on June 8-9 to decide whether to halve the waiting period for foreigners applying for Italian nationality, the government announced on Thursday.

If approved, the reform would reduce the required residency period to five years, potentially granting citizenship to around 2.5 million foreign nationals.

The referendum was triggered after opposition parties and pro-migrant organizations, including Oxfam Italia, collected more than 500,000 signatures last September, meeting the legal threshold for a public vote.

Despite strong opposition from the ruling Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the government was obligated to set a date for the vote after a ruling from the Constitutional Court in January approved its admissibility.

Currently, foreigners must reside in Italy for at least 10 years before applying for citizenship through naturalization. Children born in Italy to foreign parents are also unable to obtain citizenship until they turn 18.

Proponents of the reform argue that the existing system is restrictive and out of step with other European countries such as Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Portugal, where the naturalization process typically takes five years. 

In France, naturalization is permitted after two to five years, depending on individual circumstances.

The proposal has sparked a heated debate within the Italian government. Prime Minister Meloni, who came to power in 2022 on an anti-migration platform, has consistently opposed changes to the nationality law, calling the 10-year requirement “an appropriate length of time for nationality.”

Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the co-governing League Party, shares this stance.

However, the issue has created tensions within the governing coalition. Antonio Tajani, leader of the center-right Forza Italia party and also a deputy prime minister, suggested an alternative proposal last year to grant Italian nationality to children who have completed a continuous 10-year education in the national school system, rather than waiting until they turn 18. However, this idea was never formalized into legislation.

Reviewing the proposal earlier this year, Italy’s top court noted that the change would only affect the required residency period for foreign nationals to apply. Other conditions for naturalization, including a minimum B1 level in Italian, continuous and legal residency in the country, and the absence of a criminal record, will still apply.

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VP Vance Says Germany ‘Is Killing Itself’ With Unchecked Mass Migration

As Donald J. Trump’s administration shocks the world with its America First agenda, a rejection of all Globalist thesis and a firm commitment for peace, his top advisers are going round and reinforcing these policies and principles all over the world.

A shinny example is Vice President JD Vance, who has tackled Foreign Policy matters head on, both in his speeches and interviews.

It’s still reverberating around the geopolitical world his speech in the Munich Security Conference on February 14th, where he said: “The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

Vance claimed free speech is ‘in retreat’ across Europe, but alerted against the catastrophe of the EU Unchecked Mass Migration Policies: “Of all the pressing challenges… there is nothing more urgent than mass migration… No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”

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Yes, The Trump Administration Has The Power To Deport Mahmoud Khalil

Federal authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Hamas coalition at Columbia University, last weekend on the charge that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and posed a threat to national security and foreign policy.

Since that time, politicians and pundits, particularly on the left, have tried to lionize this anti-West terror-supporting radical as some kind of liberal icon and have questioned whether the government has the right to deport someone of his ilk. For the record, of course it does.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) codified at 8 U.S. Code § 1182 applies to all aliens, meaning “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.” This term includes both visa holders and green card holders like Khalil. 

The INA contains a number of activities for which a person can be deemed ineligible based on security and related grounds. The relevant subsection contains nine grounds related to terrorism, the majority of which are not controversial at all: members of terrorist organizations, people engaging in terrorism, etc. 

The current debate concerns § 212(a)(3)(b)(i)(vii), which allows for the deportation of any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Some have claimed that deporting someone for these reasons violates the First Amendment. That is incorrect.

The premise of the question rests on the assumption that an alien (even a legal alien) has First Amendment rights that are exactly the same in every situation as the rights of a U.S. national or citizen. That is not the case. As the Supreme Court has made clear, sometimes the government may impose distinctions and conditions.

See, for example, Citizens United v. FEC (2010):

The Government routinely places special restrictions on the speech rights of students, prisoners, members of the Armed Forces, foreigners, and its own employees. When such restrictions are justified by a legitimate governmental interest, they do not necessarily raise constitutional problems. … [T]he constitutional rights of certain categories of speakers, in certain contexts, ‘are not automatically coextensive with the rights’ that are normally accorded to members of our society. (Emphasis added.)

The question then becomes, how might speech rights be applied differently to foreigners? For example, could such a condition involve not advocating for certain groups that the government, for good reason, considers dangerous and a threat to national security? 

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Green Card-Holding Palestinian Trump’s Deporting Gets Even Worse News as Justice Finds Him

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student detained by immigration authorities over the weekend, appears to have violated explicit federal immigration laws.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil, a permanent resident with a green card, on Saturday.

The agents originally told Khalil his student visa was being revoked, according to The Associated Press, which quoted Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer.

Greer told the AP she spoke on the phone with the agents during the arrest and said her client had a green card. The agent then told her the green card was being revoked instead, Greer said, according to the AP.

On Sunday, in a post on the social media platform X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the federal government will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” because he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” according to the AP.

On Monday, however, a federal judge in New York blocked Khalil’s deportation. Judge Jesse M. Furman said that Khalil must remain in the United States “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction” as the court considers his case, according to NBC News.

A hearing for the case is scheduled in federal court for Wednesday.

Other protesters have assembled in New York City to demand the release of Khalil.

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Rubio Revokes Student Visa For Alien Who Was Cited For Criminal Behavior in Connection with Hamas Protests

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department has revoked the first visa for an alien cited for criminal behavior in connection with “Hamas-supporting disruptions.”

This marks the first such case since President Trump’s order to expel foreign Hamas supporters studying in the U.S. on student visas.

Since the Hamas terror attacks on civilians in Israel on October 7, Hamas sympathizers have taken to the streets and taken over college campuses to cheerlead for the terrorist organization.

In a fact sheet issued by the White House, President Trump made it clear that terror supporters who are guest in America are not welcome.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”

“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Reporter Bill Melugin reports the individual cited was “a university student,” and “ICE will proceed with removing this person from the country.”

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