It was of course a publicity stunt. But in case you hadn't heard about it, I wanted to flag this incident. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) is the chief immigrant-basher in Congress, perhaps in the country. He's also running for president. Yesterday, Sen. Durbin held a press conference on the senate side of Capitol Hill to introduce a bill that grant legal status on illegal immigrants who've graduated high school, choose to serve in the military and meet certain other requirements. As you can imagine, the immigrants they chose to have on hand all had legal status. But Rep. Tancredo suspected there might be illegals somewhere on hand. So he rung up ICE (the successor to the INS), told them he believed illegals would be on hand and asked them to raid the event.

Apparently the ICE officials sensed that even that this would be too craven and outrageous even for the Bush era and wisely demurred.

Tancredo doesn't cut much of a figure in the progressive blogosphere. But in the mainstream media circles he's treated as a respectable if rather outlandish figure. But it's worth pausing play for a moment and recognizing the guy as we would if read about him in the history books: a hate-peddler and huckster, the dark side of our national selves.