Leadership Quote by Tom Tancredo

The line is built to sound like a hard fact while smuggling in a political mood: anxiety without specificity. By leading with "In fact", Tancredo claims the authority of evidence, as if the debate is already settled and dissent is naive. The wording is clunky but strategic. "Indicted" is a legal term that borrows credibility from the courtroom, yet it also blurs a crucial distinction: an indictment is not a conviction, and "potential terrorists" is elastic enough to catch almost anyone. That vagueness is the point. It invites the listener to treat suspicion as proof.

The target is also telling. Post-9/11 border rhetoric usually fixates on the Southern border; shifting to "our Northern border" has the thrill of a twist and the utility of contrarian branding. It widens the threat map and implies that the public and the political class have been looking in the wrong place. Subtext: the security state should expand everywhere, not just where cultural stereotypes already concentrate fear.

Context matters. Tancredo made a career on immigration restriction and culture-war framing, and this sentence fits a broader strategy: recast immigration as counterterrorism, and recast policy disagreements as failures to take danger seriously. The phrase "more terrorists or potential terrorists" isn’t a statistic so much as a permission structure. It licenses tougher enforcement, broader surveillance, and harsher screening while insulating the speaker from accountability, because "potential" can never be falsified. The result is a rhetorical ratchet: once you accept the frame, the only "responsible" response is escalation.