That ‘crisis’ isn’t real

President Trump’s White House has become truth’s killing field. El Paso, Texas, Trump’s most recent victim, wasn’t dangerous the 30 years I lived there nor is it dangerous today; it remains among our safest cities.

No malevolent invaders are attacking the U.S., as Trump pretends, not since Pancho Villa raided Columbus, N.M., in 1916, but Juarez has had its deadly times. Mexico’s drug cartels and their bloody drug wars in Juarez, Cancun and throughout the Americas are fed by our ravenous thirst for meth, cocaine and whatever lifeeroding poisons we ingest at a rate and volume to become a national crisis which enriches and arms the likes of El Chapo.

I drove the Border Highway to work for years and frequently slowed to give right-of-way to Mexican workers, some in their work uniforms, some carrying sack lunches, as they sprinted north across four lanes to catch buses to work.

If you stand on the University of Texas at El Paso’s southern-most parking lot you will see past I-10 to the huddled poor living in depressing and meager cardboard shacks lining dirt roads climbing hills. You’ll see women and children launder clothes they slap against stones and wrench dry alongside the Rio Grande, a trickle when dams are closed upstream, or rushing, dangerous waters let loose to irrigate farms on the U.S. and Mexican sides of the muddy river.

During the desert’s monsoons, the cardboard houses are crushed, scattered and swallowed by mudslides that steal lives few deem worthy of a helping hand. These are the destitute families against whom Trump has spread his cruel xenophobic narrative in an attempt to give himself cover to declare his and his cowed Republican Party’s fake national emergency.

BOB REYNOLDS

Conway