Louie Gohmert: Radical Islamists Being Trained To 'Act Like Hispanic' (VIDEO)

GOP Rep: Radical Islamists Being Trained To 'Act Like Hispanic'

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) warned Wednesday that "radical Islamists" are being "trained to act like Hispanic[s]" and cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

"We know Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border," he said Wednesday on C-Span. "We know that people that are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic [sic] when they are radical Islamists. We know these things are happening. It is just insane not to protect ourselves, to make sure that people come in as most people do ... They want the freedoms we have."

He compared the United States to Israel, and said that the nation might need a border fence in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. "Finally the Israeli people said, 'You know what? Enough.' They built 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 might need to do that as well," he said, adding he didn't know whether the attack in Boston was domestic or foreign in origin.

Gohmert has previously asserted that pregnant women were coming to the U.S. to have babies to take advantage of birthright citizenship, where their infants would grow up to be terrorists.

Gohmert's colleague Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Tuesday that immigration reform might need to be delayed because the suspect in the bombings could have been a foreign on a student visa. In fact, there is thus far no suspect for Monday's bombings.

UPDATE: 1:40 p.m. -- The Hispanic Leadership Group, a conservative pro-reform immigration group, condemned Gohmert's remark as "unacceptable, offensive and ignorant."

"Using a national tragedy to further his own anti-immigration reform agenda is not only shameful, but also a blatant attempt to disingenuously twist public sentiment at a vulnerable time," said the group in a statement. "We must take a strong stand and make it clear this kind of intolerance has no place in the conservative movement."

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