As his campaign flounders, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Robert O’Rourke did what anyone else would do. He crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico to campaign with asylum seekers.
Oh, wait. That does not make sense since those people cannot vote until they become citizens.
From Fox News:
According to a pool report put out by the O’Rourke campaign, the candidate spoke to a group of asylum seekers in Spanish for about 15 minutes at a restaurant in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso. The candidate then traveled to a shelter for migrants run by the Catholic Church, where he met around a table with migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala who told of being denied entry into the U.S. and returned to the Mexican border city while their asylum claims were being processed.O’Rourke’s campaign livestreamed the discussion on his Facebook page.”We hope, by sharing these stories, that the conscience of our country is awoken right now, and the need to change the policies that we have in place” becomes apparent, O’Rourke said on the stream. The 46-year-old blamed what he called “the Trump administration’s unlawful ‘Remain in Mexico’ program,” meant to reduce the attractiveness of U.S. asylum requests that in the past had allowed claimants to remain in the U.S. for years as their cases wound their way through the courts.
Of course, O’Rourke blamed President Donald Trump’s administration for forcing the asylum seekers to remain in Mexico. Weird how none of the Democratic candidates mention how America’s immigration system has been a mess for years. Oh, yeah. The Democrats had full control of DC in part of President Barack Obama’s administration but did nothing to reform immigration.
But Orange Man Bad or something.
O’Rourke has made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign. While he appears to champion those asylum seekers, O’Rourke has caught flack from others. His rival Julian Castro criticized O’Rourke for not fully supporting decriminalizing illegal crossings from Mexico.
O’Rourke has “released a sweeping immigration plan calling for providing millions of people in the country illegally with a ‘pathway’ to U.S. citizenship, while deploying thousands of lawyers to the border to help process asylum cases and earmarking $5 billion to improve living conditions in Central America.”
However, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele blew a hole into the Democratic narrative as he told the BBC he blames his country and officials on migration after a photo of a dead dad and daughter went viral.
Bukele also blamed Trump, but he stressed to the BBC that the problem begins at ground zero, in the place of origin or the migrants. His words also hold weight because Salvadorans who come into America have skyrocketed compared to other countries:
“They feel it is safer to cross a desert, three frontiers, and all of the things that may happen in the road to the United States because they feel that’s more secure than living here,” he said. “So we want to make our country safer.”He also vowed to address the poverty and lack of employment opportunities that so many migrants cite as their reason for fleeing.“We will make a country that is more prosperous and that can provide decent paying jobs for all of our people,” he said. “So if people have an opportunity for a decent job, a decent education, a decent health care system and security, I know that forceful migration will be reduced to zero.”
O’Rourke and the other Democratic candidates can pander to asylum seekers and protest at detention centers, but the problem runs deeper.
Something tells me the Democratic candidates will not listen to Bukele and keep their eyes on Trump.
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