A notice from last September by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that a total of 573 “noncitizens” from Guatemala, Venezuela, Honduras, and Mexico intended on traveling to Franklin, Nashville, Davidson County, and Murfreesboro following their release from DHS custody.
The notice, dated as the week ending September 16, 2023, is titled “Intended Destination of Noncitizens Processed at the Southwest Border.”
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Tennessee U.S. Representative and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Mark Green (R-TN-07) joined Thursday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss his efforts in the impeachment process of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Green, who led his Republican colleagues in voting to advance two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas out of committee on Wednesday, told Leahy that Mayorkas not only refused to enforce the law himself, but directed his staff to do the same.
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Governor Bill Lee announced the appointment of Judge Mary L. Wagner to the Tennessee Supreme Court on Thursday.
Wagner is currently a circuit court judge for the 30th Judicial District, which covers Shelby County.
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Trucker convoys that could total as many as 700,000 vehicles are headed south to demand a secure border this weekend.
“We have a trucker convoy coming down to the border,” Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, said in an interview with Fox Business Network, adding: “The American people have had enough. We’re demanding that the Biden administration do its job, enforce the laws on the books and secure our border.”
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Chairman of the Tennessee Young Republicans and former Belmont University study body President Stevie Giorno recently joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss his experience at Belmont University during and after the time he served as the school’s student body president.
Giorno, who was bullied and called a “racist” for posting a pro-American social media message on Instagram on July 4, 2020, said the university used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to bar him, the student body president at the time, from holding regular meetings.
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Chairman of the Tennessee Young Republicans and former Belmont University study body President Stevie Giorno recently joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss how students at Belmont University bullied him during the time he served as the school’s student body president.
While serving as Belmont University’s student body president in 2020, Giorno acknowledged the Fourth of July holiday with a post on Instagram that read, “Proud to be an American, celebrating the sacrifice of those that gave their all so that we may have freedoms and liberties intended for us on this day in 1776.”
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Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones (D-Nashville) refused to lead the House of Representatives in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance during Thursday’s session of the General Assembly.
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Matthew Giffin, reporter at The Tennessee Star and student at Middle Tennessee State University, joined Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss a socialist group’s response to an event scheduled at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) next week featuring Kyle Rittenhouse.
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Many Tennessee universities maintain speech codes that suppress campus free speech, according to a recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Of the six Tennessee schools included in the report, five reportedly have rules restricting free speech.
The Spotlight on Campus Speech Codes 2024 report rates U.S. colleges based on whether their written speech codes do not infringe on protected speech. According to the report, 85.4 percent of schools maintain policies that can or do infringe on free expression.
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Tennessee State Representative and House Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would preserve “critical rights for victims of radical cosmetic gender reassignment surgeries.”
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A federal agency is working with left-of-center nonprofits to increase voting among prisoners and former prison inmates under an executive order from President Joe Biden designed to increase election turnout.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has partnered with and regularly consults on voting issues with the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee.
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The whistleblower group that represented the IRS agents in the Hunter Biden case is warning that the Biden administration is preparing an “unconstitutional“ power grab to regulate private gun sales by requiring a background check.
In a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Empower Oversight said it had learned from two sources that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was directed by the White House to make the change and “has drafted a 1,300-page document in support of a rule that would effectively ban private sales of firearms from one citizen to another by requiring background checks for every sale.”
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The nearly 10,000 border patrol agents eligible for retirement by 2028 and static recruitment numbers threaten to undermine future efforts to secure the Southern border, even as the current immigration crisis escalates.
By 2028, a total of 9,828 current border patrol agents will be eligible for retirement, according to numbers provided to Transport Dive by a Customs and Border Protection official. The agency, which has been plagued by a recruitment shortfalls for years, says it is preparing to deal with the fallout if even a fraction of the eligible agents retire on schedule.
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Two Metro Nashville students were arrested on Wednesday as a result of separate incidents at two Metro Nashville schools involving firearms. Both schools, a middle school and high school, received D grades by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE).
A 14-year-old student was arrested on Wednesday at Hunters Lane High School after another student reportedly told school administrators he suspected a firearm in the other student’s backpack. School administrators searched the backpack and found a semi-automatic pistol, prompting the student’s arrest and transport to a juvenile detention facility.
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According to the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD), four of the city’s residents have been arrested following a methamphetamine and fentanyl bust conducted by local, state, and federal authorities.
“A joint investigation by MNPD narcotics detectives, DEA agents and the TBI’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force led to Monday’s seizure of 12 pounds of pressed fentanyl pills (approximately 120,000) and 27 pounds of meth arriving in Nashville from California,” MNPD said in press release.
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Former President Donald Trump is overwhelmingly leading President Joe Biden on the economy and immigration, which are two top issues to swing-state voters, according to a Wednesday poll.
Voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania said they trust Trump over Biden on both key issues by double-digit margins, according to a Bloomberg/Morning Consult survey. All of the swing states but Georgia saw increases in those who said immigration was the “single most important issue,” while the economy remains at the top of the list in each state.
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A Republican member of Tennessee’s General Assembly is critical of a Democrat colleague’s new bill.
HB 2193, introduced by State Representative Bo Mitchell (D-Nashville), “imposes an additional 15-percent tax on the retail sale of firearms [and] requires revenue from the firearms tax to be deposited into the K-12 mental health counselor fund to be administered by the department of education and used exclusively to provide school counselors in elementary and secondary public schools and public charter schools in this state and for mental health assessments and services for students pursuant to a school counselor’s referral.”
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Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) and other lawmakers joined Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne on Wednesday for a press event to introduce a new partnership between the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) and Prager University, a nonprofit that provides educational resources that hold a positive view of the United States.
Hoffman and PragerU CEO Marissa Streit joined Horne at a press event outside the Arizona State Senate. They said the partnership with Prager University is about giving educators, parents, and students more choice and control in their education.
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In just three years, the number of states with universal or near-universal private school choice programs has grown from zero to 10, and the number of students eligible for these programs has increased by 60%. According to the latest ABCs of School Choice – EdChoice’s comprehensive report about all matters pertaining to educational freedom—32 states (plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) are using school choice as of 2023. Additionally, policymakers in 40 states debated 111 educational choice bills last year alone. Overall, approximately 20 million students—or 36% of all kids—are now eligible for some kind of private-choice program.
But what’s good for children and their families is problematic for the teachers’ unions and their fellow travelers. As such, on January 22—not coincidentally the beginning of National School Choice Week—the Partnership for the Future of Learning released a toolkit, maintaining that “voucher programs are “deeply rooted in segregation, racism, and discrimination.” The PFL, which is comprised of predominantly left-wing outfits—the National Education Association, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Learning Policy Institute, etc.—adds that private schools “do not have necessary accountability measures.”
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Governor Glenn Youngkin announced on Wednesday the Virginia Permit Transparency (VPT) website, expanding a program Forbes hailed as “a model for other states” to include three Virginia agencies with more to follow.
The governor’s office explained in a press release that the VPT provides the public with “a centralized platform” to track daily status of their permit application.
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Audio emerged on Wednesday of a conversation between embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Amanda Timpson, a former subordinate who claims she blew the whistle to Willis about an alleged plan to misuse federal funding by a former member of her campaign who Willis retained as part of her team after taking office.
Timpson recorded the audio on November 21, 2021, according to The Washington Free Beacon, which originally unearthed the clip. This means Willis and Timpson spoke about alleged wrongdoing in at the Fulton County District Attorney’s office just under three weeks after Willis hired her alleged romantic partner, private defense attorney Nathan Wade, to oversee the criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
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As the one-year anniversary approaches of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, President Joe Biden says he will soon visit the area to meet with locals and assess the recovery efforts.
The White House has not confirmed when, but said that a trip to the site near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border would be made in February. The derailment of the Norfolk Southern train, just east of the town center, led to a conflagration when officials decided to burn off vinyl chloride, exposing residents and nature to chemical smoke and fumes.
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Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould filed a lawsuit against Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes over her threat to prosecute him if he voted in favor of conducting a hand count of the 2024 election. He asked the court in the complaint, which was filed on January 19, to rule “[t]hat Plaintiff should not be subjected to threats and intimidation by the Attorney General for voting to have hand counting be the primary initial method of vote tabulation.”
Represented by Wilenchik & Bartness, Gould described the threat, “This case is about an elected official potentially losing his liberty and being jailed as a criminal, if Defendant Mayes is correct, for voting according to his conscience, and pursuant to the will of his constituents, based on election statutes that appear not to bar his intended support for vote counting based on hand counting and not the use of electronic voting machines.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a federal ban on bump stocks later in February, the latest opportunity for the high court to rule on gun violence and 2nd Amendment rights.
The case in question, Garland v. Cargill, came after the Trump administration banned bump stocks, attachments added to semiautomatic weapons to make them fire more quickly, classifying them as “machine guns,” which are banned by federal law.
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An artist that I have featured a few times in the past is Becca Bowen. I love her energy, passion, and big, beautiful voice. The South Carolina native mixes her authentic country charm with her background in gospel music and musical theater to bring us a traditional country sound with a soulful approach.
While Bowen has been releasing singles since 2020 and her debut album in 2022, it wasn’t until recently that she became brave enough to release an entire EP, County Line, where she co-wrote every song.
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In the most recent “Conference of the Parties,” otherwise known as the United Nations extravaganza that convenes every few years for world leaders to discuss the climate crisis, several goals were publicly proclaimed. Notable were the goals to triple production of renewable energy by 2030 and triple production of nuclear energy by 2050. Against the backdrop of current global energy production by fuel type, and as quantified in Part One, against a goal of increasing total energy production from 600 exajoules in 2022 to at least 1,000 exajoules by 2050, where does COP 28’s goals put the world’s energy economy? How much will production of renewable energy have to increase?
To answer this question, it is necessary to recognize and account for the fact that most renewable energy takes the form of electricity, generated through wind, solar, or geothermal sources. And when measuring how much the base of renewables installed so far will contribute to the target of 1,000 exajoules of energy production per year in order to realize—best-case scenario—800 exajoules of energy services, the data reported in the Statistical Review of Global Energy is profoundly misleading.
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House Republicans on Wednesday announced the date on which James Biden, one of President Biden’s brothers, will will give a transcribed interview to the chamber’s Oversight Committee, as part of their investigation into the Biden family’s overseas business dealings and impeachment inquiry.
The committee posted to X that James Biden will testify Feb. 21.
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Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah signed a bill on Tuesday that bans men from using women’s restrooms and locker rooms and creates a legal definition for male and female.
The bill, introduced by Republican state Rep. Kera Birkeland, would designate restrooms in schools and public spaces as only “designated for the exclusive use” of females and males, according to the text. The bill was passed by the state House of Representatives on Friday before being signed by Cox this week, according to the press release.
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