Wall could be tricky issue, for O’Rourke
Warren highlights her work
EL PASO, Texas, Feb 18, (AP): When Donald Trump visited Beto O’Rourke’s hometown to argue that walling off the southern border makes the US safer, the former Democratic congressman and possible 2020 presidential hopeful was ready.
As the president filled an El Paso arena with supporters, O’Rourke helped lead thousands of his own on a protest march past the barrier of barbedwire topped fencing and towering metal slats that separates El Paso from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
O’Rourke clearly hopes to make his personal experience with the border a strength if he runs for president – and the battle over billions of dollars in new fortifications may well shape the 2020 campaign. But O’Rourke’s history with the barriers that have lined the Rio Grande since he was a child actually could be a bit of vulnerability, too.
As the 2020 campaign is joined, other top Democrats can oppose Trump’s call for more and larger walls as a straightforward wedge issue – something they say shows anti-immigrant feeling, intolerance and even racism.
But O’Rourke’s record on border walls is complicated. Last March, he supported a spending package that other leading Democratic contenders opposed and included $1.6 billion for border wall construction in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Buried in that was $44.5 million for repairs of existing fencing elsewhere – including El Paso.
O’Rourke later explained the vote as a compromise to win approval of another proposal he backed, expanding access to mental health care for military veterans who had received other-than-honorable discharges. But his action attracted criticism from people who know the border best. Scott Nicol, co-chairman of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands team, called it “very disappointing.”
“The things that he has said have been dead on,” Nicol said. “The next step becomes what do you do.” O’Rourke’s nuanced position on border barriers, sometimes willing to use them as a bargaining chip, could be politically awkward in a national campaign but it’s shared in El Paso. Here, many people accept dozens of miles of existing walls as a fact of life, objecting mostly to structures so intrusive they suggest a war zone.
“People in El Paso live with the border and the ambiguities and contradictions of the border,” said Josiah Heyman, director of the University of Texas at El Paso’s Center for Interamerican and Border Studies.