While it's not surprising that Kris Kobach, Kansas' secretary of state and vice chairman of President Donald Trump's "election fraud" commission, has a Breitbart column, the source material for his latest op-ed sure is.
As Media Matters notes, one bullet point from his October 24 column trashing undocumented immigrants came from a chain email debunked by the Los Angeles Times in 2009.
That bullet point claimed "75 percent of those on the most wanted criminals lists in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Albuquerque are illegal aliens." As the Times pointed out, that figure, which has been circulating on right-wing message boards and comments for years, cites a 2006 "report" by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) -- a department that closed in 2003 after Homeland Security was created.
Another point asserted that "more than 53 percent of burglaries investigated in the border region states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are committed by illegal aliens," which has also been circulated online for over a decade.
For the second point, Kobach cites ConservativeTruth.org, which cited the "Foreign National Crime Information Center." As Media Matters reported, the FNCI noted on their own website that that figure was several years old and asked readers of the report to disregard it.
