LAS VEGAS — U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle defended a series of campaign advertisements that use images of sullen, dark-skinned men and a map of Mexico to blast rival Sen. Harry Reid's immigration record. 
 
 Angle, a tea party favorite who has rallied for stricter border enforcement, played down her usual conservative rhetoric in a brief discussion with a Hispanic high school group Friday in Las Vegas. The students asked her to explain her repeated use of TV spots denounced by national pro-immigrant and Hispanic organizations as race-baiting attacks. 
 
 "I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials," Angle is seen telling the students in a video of the private meeting obtained by The Associated Press. 
 
 "I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence. What we know is that our northern border is where the terrorists came through. That's the most porous border that we have. We cannot allow terrorists, we cannot allow anyone to come across our border if we don't know why they're coming. So, we have to secure all of our borders and that's what that was about, is border security." 
 
 Rancho High School teacher Isaac Barron said his students organized the meeting with Angle Friday because they felt the ads stereotyped young Hispanics. Barron, a Democrat, said Angle's explanation was met with incredulous stares. 
 
 "Some of the kids, they couldn't help but chuckle at that," he said. "To deny they are anti-Hispanic when those are the only people shown in her ads, it doesn't add up." 
 
 Hispanics are an increasingly important voting bloc in Nevada, where they make up roughly 25 percent of the population. More than 80 percent of the Silver State's Hispanics hail from Mexico. 
 
 Reid has tried to brand Angle as "too extreme" in the tight race. 
 
 The Democrat is counting on the Hispanic vote to secure his fifth term and has also tailored his message on immigration to the crowd he is addressing. To mainstream audiences, he has touted his votes to beef up border security. To Hispanic crowds, he has vowed to make the road to citizenship more inclusive. 
 
 Angle's campaign has released more than five TV spots that accuse Reid, the Senate majority leader, of offering special breaks to illegal immigrants. The ads have drawn criticism from some immigration advocates worried that such messages encourage discrimination against Hispanics. 
 
 "Basically she is using the politics of fear and trying to tell Americans that, 'we are being invaded by Mexicans, so vote for me,'" said Lynn Tramonte, director deputy of America's Voice. 
 
 Angle campaign spokesman Jarrod Agen, who said Reid was "pro-amnesty," would not say why the images were chosen for the ads. 
 
 "Sharron has said several times before that illegal immigration is not about race, it is about the rule of law in this country," he said in an e-mail. ||||| Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections.
– Rachel Maddow has deemed an ad by Sharron Angle the most "overtly racist" spot of this down and dirty political season. Maddow blasted Angle on Meet the Press yesterday, criticizing the candidate for a television commercial that shows "a group of white college students being menaced by some tough-looking Latinos." The spot has since been removed from YouTube, notes the Huffington Post. Angle tried to head off criticism related to her ads last week by indicating the spots don't necessary feature Latinos. Maddow also poked at Angle for "saying conservatives should be expected to use guns to try to get what they want if they don't get what they want from the election."