Pouring

Eventually, thousands of people were pouring into El Paso every day, sometimes paying as little as a quarter for rides on makeshift rafts over the Rio Grande.

“People could cross whenever they wanted,” said Silvestre Reyes, who was chief of Border Patrol’s El Paso sector in 1993 and won a congressional seat in 1996. “The city was tired of it.”

Reyes ordered around-the-clock patrols and authorities repaired 100-plus holes in nine miles of fences downtown. But when O’Rourke, then an upstart exCity Council member, ran against Reyes in the 2012 Democratic primary, he didn’t make Reyes’ border crackdown an issue. Instead, O’Rourke more frequently complained of long wait times for cars crossing into El Paso from Juarez.

Meanwhile, Democrat Elizabeth Warren used her first visit to Nevada as a presidential candidate to describe a squeeze on working families and a political system that she says fails to protect homeowners, including the residents of Las Vegas who were pummeled by the mortgage crisis a decade ago.

The Massachusetts senator spoke about her work as a consumer activist and her role overseeing the bailout of banks and insurers a decade ago, a job that brought her to the city to hear from residents struggling to keep their homes.

Warren said her own family almost lost their home when she was growing up and recalled one man she met in her Las Vegas visit a decade earlier who was one of millions around the country losing his home.

“You better believe one reason that I am in this fight is we can never let this happen again. Never,” Warren told about 500 people at a botanical garden and event center northeast of the Las Vegas Strip.