U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert is once again contributing to the public discourse, drawing connections between the attack during the Boston Marathon and immigration reform. On CSPAN's Washington Journal today, Gohmert, a Republican from East Texas, expressed concern over ethnicity-shifting terrorists aiming to abuse the U.S. immigration system:
"We know that Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border. We know that people are being trained to come in and act like they're Hispanic when they're radical Islamist."
Gohmert also compared the Boston bombing with attacks in Israel, saying: "Finally the Israeli people said this is enough. They built, over 70 percent of it is a fence and the rest is a wall to prevent snipers from knocking off their kids. They finally stopped the domestic violence from people that wanted to destroy them. I am concerned we need to do that as well."
Gohmert joins Iowa congressman Steve King, who said Tuesday that the attack in Boston is reason to put immigration reform on hold since security, not legalization, should be the national focus.
"If we can't background-check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where?" he told the National Review. King was apparently referring to a Saudi national injured in the attack, now confirmed to be a witness and not a suspect.
The Texas Department of Public Safety in February released its latest Threat Overview. It does detail instances of terrorist travel across the border, but says nothing of known Al Qaeda-drug cartel camps.
Gohmert has a history of seeing terrorist threats where others are slow to find them. In 2010 he tried to sound the alarm about "terror babies," infants born on U.S. soil who would one day return to destroy the country.
