Latta talks about border, AM radio, more

SCOTT TRUXELL/independent editor

Border security and the importance of AM radio were just two of the topics addressed by U.S. Congressman Bob Latta (R-5^th District) during a recent visit to the area.

Latta, from Bowling Green, was in Paulding County last Tuesday to present an overdue Bronze Star to a Vietnam veteran (see story here). He also visited Van Wert’s new TekniPlex factory at Vision Industrial Park, and he made a stop at the studios of WSKD/WERT radio stations and the office of the VW independent.

During a brief interview, he addressed border concerns along the U.S.-Mexico line and noted he’s been there four times.

“I’ve been out there with border patrol at night on the river and I’m telling you – you couldn’t pay me enough money to do that job,” Latta stated. “With this administration (Biden-Harris), probably over 10 million people have come into this country illegally and so what we need to do is listen to border patrol. The first thing they told us on the first trip I was down there was ‘let us erect barriers or a barrier/wall.’ They said they could stop 95 percent of all the traffic.”

“If people are being politically persecuted in their own country, they should go the asylum route – go to the embassy and work their way through that, not just have 10 million people show up here,” he continued. “A lot of people don’t know the second part of the story. We have 300,000 children that came here as unaccompanied minors and we have no idea where they are – we don’t know if they’ve been put in sweatshops by the cartels, they could be into prostitution, we don’t know what happened to these poor kids.”

Latta also said there’s also the issue of drugs coming into the country through the southern border, specfically fentynal.

“What the cartels do is they’ll run 100 illegals into a spot and border patrol all has to go to that one spot, then they bring the drugs in someplace else,” Latta said. “When you think that we had 74,000 people die from fentynal poisoning in this country back in 2022, this is why we have to control the border. We’ve got to have an orderly process and if you want to become an American citizen, you go through the proper steps.”

On a different note, last year, some electric vehicle car manufacturers said they would phase out AM radios in their cars, a decision that didn’t sit well with Latta, who chairs the Congressional Communications and Technology Sub-Committee, and said he knows of five or six locally owned radio stations in his district, including WERT 1220AM in Van Wert. 

“When you think about AM radio, people always think ‘I’ll always have the internet’ – no you won’t,” Latta stated. “We had two massive hurricanes move through Florida and I always told people the first thing you’re going to lose is the internet. In Florida alone, there were 660 cell towers that went down, so they lost internet, but the one thing they didn’t lose was AM radio.”

“It’s important because if you could get in your car and if it was running, you could still get alerts and understand what was going on out there,” he continued. “If we ever have other types of natural diasters or man-made diasters, how are we going to communicate in this country?

He also said some radio stations are equipped with generators with a 30 or 60-day supply of fuel to stay on the air and he said some are built to withstand eletro-magnetic pulses.

“When all else fails, you’ll still be able to get communications from your AM radio dial,” Latta said.

During the interview, Latta also addressed inflation and its effect on families, and money being sent to overseas wars. The full interview will be posted on the VW independent in the near future. 

Latta represents Ohio’s Fifth Congressional District, which stretches from Van Wert, Paulding and Mercer counties all the way into Lorain County in northeastern Ohio. In all, the district is comprised of all or parts of 12 counties.

Latta is seeking his ninth full two-year term in the U.S. House of Representatives. He’s being challenged by Democrat Keith Mundy, a retiree from Parma.