Previous Candidate: Raj Peter Bhakta

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A Pennsylvania congressional candidate and former reality TV star used an elephant and a mariachi band for an elaborate political stunt designed to make a point about border security.

Raj Peter Bhakta, who appeared on "The Apprentice," paraded an elephant and the band through the water near the mouth of the Rio Grande near the Texas-Mexico border Tuesday.

"The elephant never made landfall into Mexico, but I tell you something, he could have made 15 laps back and forth, but no one showed up," Bhakta, a Republican, said in Wednesday editions of The Brownsville Herald.

Bhakta, who favors construction of a fence along the border, said he was in Brownsville to raise money when he saw men swimming under one of the international bridges "with complete immunity" and decided to pull the stunt.

Circus producer James Plunkett said he provided three elephants.

[Vidiette]

Raj Bhakta:

The fired Apprentice 2 candidate, who became as famous for hitting on women as he did for his bow-ties, is now a Pennsylvania congressional candidate. He made headline last month when he pulled a publicity stunt on the river of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which went terribly wrong. Bhakta got a hold of three elephants and hired a six-piece mariachi band and took them to an area near the mouth of the Rio Grande to show how easy it would be to enter the U.S. from Mexico. But the planned backfired when members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture spotted Bhakta and called in officials. Bhakta, who was born in India, is a legal U.S. resident, but didn't have his papers so he was taken in as an undocumented immigrant. Customs and Border Protection officials reportedly detained him for almost five hours before proof he was a legal U.S. resident could be ascertained.