O'Rourke hits El Paso streets to rebut Trump's immigration address

Source: Politico

Beto O’Rourke, offering a meandering rebuttal to Donald Trump’s appeal for a border wall, walked throughout his El Paso, Texas, neighborhood late Tuesday night, lambasting the president for stoking “anxiety and paranoia” about immigration.

O’Rourke, a former border-district congressman who has catapulted into the top tier of the Democratic presidential primary field, has maintained a conspicuously low profile since leaving Congress.

But as he edges closer to a presidential campaign, O’Rourke filmed himself on Facebook Live for about 75 minutes, visiting friends’ homes and sharing scenic views of the El Paso and Juárez, Mexico, skylines.

“The president using fear and anecdote to try to instill an anxiety and paranoia to build the political will to construct this wall that would cost $30 billion and take private property and cause death and suffering as more asylum seekers are pushed to ever more hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border — that was what we heard from the Oval Office,” O’Rourke said. “And we need to meet that fear with the truth, with our ambition, with the best traditions of this country, a country of immigrants, and with the example of El Paso and Juárez.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/09/beto-orourke-border-wall-trump-1089194