The Statue of Dependence

Calif. town becomes flashpoint for national immigration debate

America Lost?

The Southern California town of Murrieta that gained national prominence when a crowd of protesters blocked buses carrying illegal immigrants being flown in from overwhelmed Texas facilities has become a flashpoint in what has become an intense national debate over immigration.
Earlier this week, approximately 200 protesters blocked buses carrying 140 illegal immigrants sent from a Texas to a US Border Patrol station, where they were to be processed before being moved to await deportation or asylum.
Days later, residents packed into a fiery town hall meeting, expressing their objections to the government sending any more illegal immigrants to Murrieta.
Rumors had swirled among anti-immigration activists near a U.S. Border Patrol station in Southern California that the agency would try again to bus in some of the immigrants who have flooded across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Instead, by late Friday afternoon, they got dueling anti- and pro-immigration rallies.
The crowd of 200 outside the station in Murrieta waved signs and sometimes shouted at each other. One banner read: "Proud LEGAL American. It doesn't work any other way." Another countered: "Against illegal immigration? Great! Go back to Europe!"
Law enforcement officers separated the two sides, leaving enough space for a bus to drive into the station.
Because of security concerns, federal authorities have said, they will not publicize immigrant transfers among border patrol facilities.
"This is a way of making our voices heard," said Steve Prime, a resident of nearby Lake Elsinore. "The government's main job is to secure our borders and protect us -- and they're doing neither."
Immigration supporters said the immigrants need to be treated as humans and that migrating to survive is not a crime.
"We're celebrating the 4th of July and what a melting pot America is," said Raquel Alvarado, a high school history teacher and Murrieta resident who chalked up the fear of migrants in the city of roughly 106,000 to discrimination.
"They don't want to have their kids share the same classroom," she said.
"What we're saying is right now [illegal] immigration needs to stop," Patrice Lynes, a retired nurse from neighboring Temecula who has organized the protests, told The Wall Street Journal.
"This is not just a Murrieta situation. This is a national situation," she said.
In recent months, thousands of children and families have fled violence, murders and extortion from criminal gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Since October, more than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been detained.
The crunch on the border in Texas' Rio Grande Valley prompted U.S. authorities to fly immigrant families to other Texas cities and to Southern California for processing.
Burke Hinman, who has lived in the city for over 22 years, told The Wall Street Journal he wants to protect his community from being a "dumping ground" for migrants. As vehicles drove past the station, and Mr. Hinman raised his fist or shouted "U.S.A."
Protester Melinda Ward says Murrieta's processing station isn't equipped to handle such a large group of people, and worries that costs of housing and medical care will eat away at tax revenue.
"It all comes down to the tax dollars. We're paying for it," she said. "The government has dropped it on us and now we have to pay for it."
The crunch on the border in Texas' Rio Grande Valley prompted U.S. authorities to fly immigrant families to other Texas cities and to Southern California for processing.
The Border Patrol is coping with excess capacity across the Southwest, and cities' responses to the arriving immigrants have ranged from welcoming to indifferent.
In the border town of El Centro, California, a flight arrived Wednesday without protest.
In Nogales, Arizona, the mayor has said he welcomes the hundreds of children who are being dropped off daily at a large Border Patrol warehouse. Residents have donated clothing and other items for them.
In New Mexico, however, residents have been less enthusiastic.
At a town hall meeting this week, residents in Artesia spoke out against a detention center that recently started housing immigrants. They said they were afraid the immigrants would take jobs and resources from U.S. citizens.
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Biz executives pay fines for Florida vet facing eviction over flower pot flag

In an act of patriotism this Fourth of July, a pair of business executives has paid the fines for a Florida veteran who faced foreclosure for displaying a small American flag in a flower pot on his front stoop.
The two senior executives for Los Angeles-based Lear Capital had read the story of 73-year-old Larry Murphree, of Jacksonville, whose homeowners association at Tides Condominium at Sweetwater began hitting him with fines of $100 a day last year for violating his homeowners association’s flag display rules, and have offered to pay the bill which has climbed into the thousands.
“When we read his story  it offended our sensibilities,” Scott Carter, CEO of Lear Capital said to FoxNews.com. “The thought of him losing his home, we felt it was wrong. We wanted to help.”
Along with Lear Capital founder Kevin DeMerritt, the executives paid the $8,000 plus another $2,500 for tax adjustments.
“They [homeowner’s association were using the strongarm of money to get him to get rid of the flag,” Carter said. “They were skimming the money from his [paid] dues to pay the fines which created a lien on his house.”
“What was a small contribution from a company was a significant gesture in his eyes,” Carter added.
Instead of paying the fines for violating the association’s rules, Murphree let them pile up -- and kept his flag on display owing thousands.
FULL COVERAGE: PROUD AMERICANS
“The flag is worth fighting for,” Murphree, who served six years as an Air Force air traffic controller during the Vietnam War, said to FoxNews.com in June.
“If they want to foreclose, bring it on. I’m getting calls from all over the county to stand up. That’s what I'm going to do.”
The flag battle between Muphree and the association started back in 2011 and landed in court a year later where the two sides reached a settlement. Murphree had agreed to display his flag in compliance with association rules. But two weeks later, the board changed the rules, saying flags could only be displayed and that flower pots were only for flowers.
Murphree ignored the new rules and, in 2013, he started getting fined. He took the board to court again, this time to federal court where he claimed he had a right to fly his flag under the 2005 Freedom to Display the American Flag Act. A judge dismissed the case last March on technical grounds.
The board claimed Murphree owed $8,000 and had attached a foreclosure lien for nonpayment. 
An attorney for the condo board, Michelle Haines told FoxNews.com last month under Florida law the homeowner's association can fine a condo owner $100 a day, but the maximum amount is $1,000. She said the board is foreclosing on Murphree for being delinquent on his monthly assessment.

Ellis Island Immigrants to America

Jack E. Kemp
This Independence Day, my thoughts return to a tourist visit I made over decades ago to Ellis Island, the place where new immigrants were examined and processed roughly twenty million immigrants from the late Nineteenth to the early Twentieth Century in New York Harbor.

The most startling thing seen on that visit was the peeling paint of the main building, a problem not based on years of  age but on more recent neglect of the plumbing system. The old pipes had broken and flooded the building before anyone could realize what happened. The Ellis Island museum was then asking American citizens for - and they did receive - voluntary funds to fix the pipes and other structures as well as repaint the water damaged walls.

Ellis Island is, of course, a National Park Museum and if you go to the website http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/people.htm ; you can read about inspectors, doctors, nurses who did a quick check of potential immigrant's paperwork to enter the U.S. and their health condition. Some were quarantined on the Island and would later enter into the United States. Others were sent back to their home country, failing to gain entry to the U.S. because of their poor health for such conditions as tuberculosis. The left keeps screaming about "white privilege" but if you contrast Ellis Island to the Central American illegal immigrants now flooding over the U.S. Southern Border, it is these Central Americans who are being allowed entry and the ability to move around the U.S. in a privileged state, with neither legal paperwork (as was required on Ellis Island) nor being required to pass any health inspection requirement of not having communicable diseases. The Central Americans should now be given the same "privileges" as the European and British Isle immigrants who came to Ellis Island around a century ago.

In the tour, our guide told us a funny story of an Eastern European Jew who was flustered by his meeting with stern looking uniformed immigration inspector. When asked his name, he said in Yiddish, "Shoen Fargessen" which means "(I) already forgot." The immigration inspector, wrote down what he heard - "Sean Ferguson" - and that was the new immigrant's legal name in his new country!

The large Ellis Island complex of inspection stations and employee housing and quarantine hospital facilities was not placed on Governor's Island, which was an actual nearby New York Harbor military base and Civil War prison in the Nineteenth and - in the Twentieth Century, it was a Coast Guard base. There was ample housing space on Governor's Island, but in those days the government felt they should keep immigrants, some of them quite ill, far away from the military base and its housing.

So if someone tells you that you are "old fashioned" to want the sanitary and legal safeguards of the Nineteenth Century, ask them if they think disease conditions, such as those that cause tuberculosis, are operating in an "enlightened, modern" way today or whether they operate very much like they did in earlier times - and would operate in that "outdated" fashion when the children carrying those diseases are given "temporary" asylum and placed in public schools and walk in the shopping malls where their own children congregate. Although some people will make an angry face and walk away, others will listen. Over a decade ago, there was a news story in New York City about a school bus company working for some fancy private schools had hired the lowest cost immigrant drivers, some of whom had tuberculosis. And the children who rode those buses had to be tested for the disease because apparently the disease did not have any regard for the family wealth or political convictions (be it liberal or conservative) of the children involved.

There is a similar immigration center on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, now a museum, a place ofter referred to informally as "The Ellis Island of the West Coast." The immigrants arriving there between 1910 and 1940 were largely from Asia (mostly China). And they  were processed in the same manner as those on Ellis Island in a center with its own hospital. You can read about it at http://aiisf.org/

So on this Independence Day, it is worth taking a moment to consider what it took, in the last steps of their journey, for many of our ancestors to be officially allowed to enter the United States. Last week Lower Manhattan in New York City was full of tourists standing in line in Battery Park to get on the tourist boat going to both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, all to retrace the steps of perhaps their own ancestors who first saw the Lady in the Harbor and then had to pass her agents' inspections on Ellis Island before being allowed into the United States. No society can care for the health and well being of its citizens - and their children - by relying solely on the sentiments of Emma Lazarus' poetry written on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty's base.Would Lazarus write the same poem if new immigrants with tuberculosis were walking around her neighborhood coughing on Emma and her family?

Uncle Sam Cartoon

Tahmooressi's mother makes Fourth of July appeal to US ambassador to Mexico

On the eve of Independence Day, the mother of a Marine jailed in Mexico for three months appealed to America's top diplomat south of the border, asking for help winning the freedom of her 25-year-old son, Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi.
Jill Tahmooressi, of Weston, Fla., sent a letter June 30  to E. Anthony Wayne, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, requesting his help in getting a Mexican federal judge to give an expedited review to her son's case, after his representation had been botched by two previous attorneys who failed to submit any evidence for the court to review.

"If any consideration can be made to expedite the reviews before the federal judge so that he will be closer to probable freedom, those actions would be much appreciated," Jill Tahmooressi wrote Wayne.
Her son has been held in Mexico since March 31, when he was arrested after accidentally crossing into Mexico with three legally-purchased guns in his pickup truck. Fox News has highlighted how poor signage, as well as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Tahmooressi got from serving two tours in Afghanistan, could have contributed to his mistake.

Tahmooressi hopes to have her son's case fast-tracked, but according to attorney Fernando Benitez, the Mexican judicial system will have to run its course, regardless of efforts made by the Marine's supporters.

But given a recent incident along the U.S.-Arizona border where a Mexican military helicopter allegedly fired upon U.S. Border Patrol agent mistaking them for drug smugglers, mistakes and apologies take on a different meaning.
Tahmooiressi was in San Diego receiving treatment for PTSD when he drove into Mexico. His apologies and explanation for the wrong turn into Mexico fell on deaf ears, resulting in his imprisonment.

FoxNews.com attempted to contact Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. A spokesman said he had received the media request and would provide a statement, but has not.
In her letter to Wayne, the worried mother appealed to sentiment of the Fourth of July.

"This Independence Day will be a bitter one for Andrew, his family and supporters as his freedom is bound by his felony arrest," Tahmooressi wrote.  "Freedom he valiantly fought for others to have, willing to die to combat the evil of oppression and violence, Andrew is experiencing captivity for the first time, in a foreign country as a result of one wrong turn."

Iran opposition compares its struggle to the American Revolution

The leader of the Iranian opposition likens its goal to overthrow the regime in Tehran to the war for American independence from Britain, the struggle to abolish slavery in the U.S. and the birth of the civil rights movement in the 1960's.
"I am confident that the Iranian resistance, which seeks the proven values of advanced societies, will reach its goal of a free, prosperous, democratic, just and non-nuclear Iran," declared Maryam Rajavi, the head of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, in an exclusive Fox News interview.
"The experience is out there, including in the history of the United States, such as George Washington and the people of America who decided to stand up to colonialism to gain independence, such as Abraham Lincoln and the price he paid and the war he waged to abolish slavery and the price the people of America paid during the time of Dr. Martin Luther King for civil rights and the struggle of the people of America for the freedom of women," she says.
"These are all historical experiences and I am, therefore, confident. My experience and that of the Iranian people tell us that when a people, a nation, decides to fight and pay the price for the rights it deserves, such as democracy, freedom and equality, when it decides to fight for these and pay the price, for values which shine in history of all human societies and in the progress of human society, it will certainly achieve it."
Rajavi, based outside of Paris, is the leader of the largest Iranian resistance group that opposes the current Tehran regime. She is calling for regime change, free, democratic elections, and a non-nuclear Iran. The group held a massive hours-long rally last week, in which a variety of speakers, including many prominent former U.S. government officials, also called for a democratic Iran and tougher restrictions on Tehran in advance of the looming July 20 nuclear agreement deadline.
It was Rajavi's group that first exposed the extent of Tehran's clandestine nuclear program back in 2002.
"If it weren't for the revelation of the Iranian resistance, the mullahs would have gotten the bomb right now," says Rajavi. She also says Iran should not be given the right of uranium enrichment, which is expected to be part of the agreement, despite six United Nations Security Council resolutions specifically prohibiting that.
"I believe any possibility left at the hands of the mullahs paves the way for them to quickly obtain what they want (nuclear weapons) at a time they so choose."
The Iranian government has branded the Council as a" terrorist group," a "cult," and has claimed that its allegations regarding its nuclear program have been fabricated.
In the aftermath of the Council’s rally in Villepinte, France, the spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry was quoted by the Associated Press as criticizing the group for "its violent and non-democratic inspirations," ''cult nature" and "intense campaign of influence and disinformation."
Rajavi reportedly called the comments, "a gift to the mullahs." Former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who attended the rally, told the AP that he was “ashamed” by the government’s statement.
In her Fox News interview, Rajavi rejected the Iranian government's criticism of her group, calling it "ludicrous."
"My call to the Iranian people has always been not to surrender to the religious dictatorship," she declares.
"We have an expression in Farsi that says, 'a viper never gives birth to a dove.’ No moderate will emerge from the mullahs and the clerical dictatorship. The Iranian resistance has said this repeatedly over the past 25 years, and it has been proven correct every time."
Follow Eric Shawn on Twitter: @EricShawnonFox

Supreme Court ruling revives ObamaCare backlash

Any time ObamaCare is in the headlines -- especially when its various mandates are concerned -- it reminds opponents why they don't like the law. 
This week's Supreme Court decision limiting the law's requirement on employers to provide free contraceptive coverage was no different. 
"I think it's a reminder of how many things ObamaCare regulates it would never have occurred to you a federal law should regulate in the first place," said Avik Roy, of the Manhattan Institute. 
The 5-4 decision ruled that certain "closely held" for-profit businesses can opt out of the mandate by citing religious objections. 
Two years ago, the court upheld the law's so-called "individual mandate" -- the requirement on individuals to buy health insurance. But together with a prior decision reining in the law's Medicaid expansion, the decision in the case brought by arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby and other businesses marked a blow for the law and a reminder for critics of its reach. (Hobby Lobby provides coverage for 16 of 20 forms of contraception, but objected to those it claims can work after conception.) 
Joe Antos, of the American Enterprise Institute, said it "touches on issues related to what is the power of the president versus the power of the Congress to decide how we run our lives." 
Kellyanne Conway, who polls on issues affecting women, noted the health care law has struggled to win public approval. 
"The majority of the Americans in everyone's polling rejects the Affordable Care Act as way too intrusive and invasive and also way too expensive for them," she said. 
Several polls have uncovered deep skepticism about the law. A Fox News poll from late June found a 56 percent majority disapprove of President Obama's handling of health care while only 41 percent approve. 
A poll from early June found 55 percent wish the law had never passed, compared with 38 who said the opposite. 
In the same poll, 44-29 percent said the country will be worse off under the law, while 24 percent say it'll make no difference. 
The court case once again raises the issue ahead of looming midterm elections. Democrats are using the ruling to highlight the impact on women, and defend the law's intent of providing contraceptive coverage to female employees. 
But Republicans are likely to highlight the rebuke to the law itself. 
"The election isn't for another few months," Antos said, "and I think there will be other issues that will come up that will remind people that this is not the law that they would have hoped for." 
Roy added that "this whole case was really about showing that ObamaCare's ability to regulate every aspect of the way the private sector and private economy works was not appropriate." 
In mid-week, a poll by Bankrate.com found 68 percent of Americans say ObamaCare will play a role in deciding how they vote this fall. Thirty-two percent said they're more likely to vote Republican, while 26 percent said they're more likely to vote Democrat. 
And 52 percent, according to the poll, would like to see the new Congress make changes in the law, while only 12 percent of Americans want to keep it exactly as it is.