Trump returns to campaign form with El Paso rally promoting border wall

Standing beneath a giant American flag and flanked by two banners that read “Finish the wall,” Trump proclaimed, “If we didn’t have walls” like the section built in El Paso in 2008, “you would have people pouring in.”

“You know where it made a big difference. Right here in El Paso,” Trump told a capacity crowd of 6,500 supporters at El Paso County Coliseum. (Thousands more listened to the speech outside the coliseum, Trump claimed.)

In a speech that was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, Trump argued that “walls save lives. Walls save tremendous numbers of lives,” and assured his crowd that the one he promised during the 2016 presidential campaign was underway.

“Today we started a big beautiful wall right smack on the Rio Grande,” Trump said, without providing details.

In a speech ostensibly meant to promote the border barrier, Trump took his time getting around to that topic. First, he spent approximately an hour attacking Democrats on a number of issues, including taxes, the Green New Deal and late-term abortion.

Trump’s central argument for the border wall, which he repeated during last week’s State of the Union address, was that the addition of a border wall in 2008 transformed El Paso from a place with “extremely high rates of violent crime” to “one of the safest cities in our country.”

In fact, El Paso, which has a population of 683,577, had one of the lowest violent crime rates for a city of its size before the border barrier was built. That rate edged up slightly after construction of the barrier was complete. Before Trump’s rally, several local officials, including the town’s Republican mayor, sought to correct the president’s assertions.

“It almost seems like the president had to say that we were once dangerous in order to further his narrative that immigrant communities are inherently bad, or that immigrant communities are inherently unsafe,” Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, said at a Monday press conference in her hometown of El Paso.

A mile away from where Trump spoke Monday, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who lives in El Paso, delivered his own speech at a rally that organizers dubbed the “March for Truth.”

O’Rourke, who represented Texas’s 16th Congressional District for three terms but lost his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections, has been one of Trump’s most strident critics on the subject of a border wall.

O’Rourke also celebrated the diversity of El Paso, noting that it was “the largest bi-national community in the Western Hemisphere,” and called his hometown “a city that’s been one of the safest” in the U.S. over the last 20 years,“long before a wall was built here in 2008.”

“Walls do not save lives,” O’Rourke said. “Walls end lives.”

“We stand for America and we stand against walls,” O’Rourke continued. “We know that there is no bargain in which we can sacrifice some of our humanity to gain a little more security. We know that we deserve and will lose both of them if we do. We stand for the best traditions and values of this country, for our fellow humanity and who we are when we are at our best. And that is El Paso, Texas.”

Trump took note of O’Rourke’s participation in the nearby rally.

“We were all challenged by a young man who lost an election to Ted Cruz,” Trump said of O’Rourke, adding, “A young man who’s got very little going for himself.”