Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses supporters during a political rally at the Phoenix Convention Center on Saturday in Arizona. (Photo by Charlie Leight/Getty Images)
These are heady days for former Congressman Tom Tancredo, who is watching presidential hopeful Donald Trump take up his obsession with illegal immigrants at the same time a national discussion is underway about sanctuary cities after a fatal shooting in San Francisco by a five-time deportee.
So is Tancredo, who once ran for president himself, a supporter of The Donald?
“God, yes,” Tancredo said, and then clarified his position. “At least of what’s he said.”
The problem, Tancredo said, is that Trump “needs to be a little bit more artful” when talking about the problems of illegal immigration.
“He should take lessons from me on how to talk to the press. For a small fee — no, actually for a very large fee — I will help him out. You’ve got to learn how to talk about it, which takes years of practice, which God knows I’ve had,” Tancredo said, cracking himself up.
Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (The Denver Post)
Tancredo of course is joking about getting a “You’re hired!” salute from Trump. And of course he is not. Illegal immigration dominated Tancredo’s run for president in 2008 and both of his attempts to become governor of Colorado after serving a decade in Congress representing metro Denver’s southern borders.
And it has dominated the Republican presidential race since Trump’s entry on June 16 when he said Mexico doesn’t send it’s best people to the United States. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said.
gave Trump’s statement four Pinocchios and said, “Trump’s repeated statements about immigrants and crime underscore a common public perception that crime is correlated with immigration, especially illegal immigration. But that is a misperception; no solid data support it, and the data that do exist negate it. Trump can defend himself all he wants, but the facts just are not there.”
But the backlash and the counter backlash are ongoing.
NBC, Univision, Macy’s and NASCAR severed corporate partnerships with the real estate mogul. on Saturday to talk about illegal immigration sold out so quickly a larger venue was needed. that Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush are virtually tie for the 2016 Republican nomination, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll.
In Tancredo’s first run for governor, in 2010, he accused the Democratic nominee, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, by offering safe harbor to illegal immigrants. “I don’t care how many times people say it’s a ‘sanctuary city’; it doesn’t make it true,” Hickenlooper said in a debate.
More recently, Tancredo’s been embroiled in a controversy involving an effort to get the .
Tancredo has taken time out from that scandal to appear on CNN alongside Paul Begala to talk about the death of Kathryn Steinle, 32, on Pier 14 in San Francisco. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant and convicted felon, has admitted shooting her. Sanchez has been deported to his native Mexico five times.
“It would have been six, but the San Francisco sheriff’s department, which had been holding him on a drug charge, let him go after charges were dropped. Why? San Francisco is what’s called a sanctuary city,”
Tancredo told CNN that Sanchez is the “real face of immigration,” although the media likes to talk about the immigrant high school valedictorians.
He later said he was stunned that CNN host Erin Burnett in her intro mentioned San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city, and that California’s U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein also has been critical of the sheriff’s department for not notifying the feds about the Sanchez’s release.
“You have Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats talking about sanctuary cities, critical of them,” Tancredo said. “I thought, ‘What’s this world coming to?’ Well, it turns out they’re coming to Tancredoland.”
