Former Congressman and anti-illegal immigration hawk Tom Tancredo today posted a YouTube ratcheting up his criticism of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, calling on her to resign. Tancredo is fresh from a Tea Party appearance in Southern Arizona this weekend that took a turn when borderland rancher and Tancredo acquaintance Robert Krentz was killed by smugglers. Tancredo called on Napolitano to send troops to the border Sunday. His YouTube today turns up the heat on Napolitano and keeps attention focused on the dangerous conditions on the Arizona border that lead to the death of Krentz.
“Napolitano has misrepresented the true condition of our border security in order to advance a political agenda-amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Our nation can afford this level of incompetence and cavalier attitude toward national security,” he says in the video.
In the last weeks, as lines are being drawn in the coming immigration reform debate, Tancredo has been speaking out against any new proposals that would include amnesty for illegal aliens. In a blog post at his Rocky Mountain Foundation, Tancredo railed against conservatives who he said were preparing to join Democrats in pandering to Latino voters.
They would “betray the American taxpayer to get a new amnesty for fifteen to twenty million illegal aliens,” he said of a Grover Norquist-backed group pushing a “Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.”
In a release put out Sunday, the Rocky Mountain Foundation quotes Tancredo lamenting that Pres. Obama has halted the construction of new border fencing and ended Bush-era increases in the ranks of Border Patrol agents.
In today’s YouTube, Tancredo points to the Department of Homeland Security website border fence maps as inaccurate, a fact that would be obvious, he says, to anyone who has visited the area in general and the so-called Chiricahua Corridor in particular, the crime-ridden section near Douglas, Arizona, where Krentz lived.
“We do not have 600 miles of border fencing as Napolitano claims. We have only 310 miles of actual fencing and then 330 miles of vehicle barriers that do not stop illegal entry into our country.”
The map, he said, is a “brazen lie.”
Krentz appeared briefly in a 2005 profile piece on neighboring Arizona rancher Ruth Cowan written by Tucson Weekly writer Leo W. Banks. The piece documents the chaos faced by the dwindling and aging population that lives in that stretch of the national border.
In the 2008 fiscal year, Tuscon sector border patrol agents apprehended 317,000 undocumented immigrants, a number celebrated for being lower than past years due to increased manpower. Estimates suggest that double the number of immigrants apprehended make it into the country.
A staffer for Southern Arizona Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords said she might join Tancredo in asking the Obama administration to deploy military units to the region.
Tancredo’s Rocky Mountain Foundation reports that the governors in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have called for Napolitano to send National Guard troops to the border.
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