Many of the asylum seekers have come to El Paso Texas, a city Chris and I have frequently driven past on our way to the easy life of Arizona. We did so again this year. I have frequently thought of the immigrants that come there seeking safety and a better life. I have never done anything to help those people. I have not even stopped to look. That is not something to be proud of.
I remember listening to El Paso Mayor Dee Margo on television a couple of years ago. He was a levelled headed-Republican when Trump was president. The mayor explained how El Paso and Mexico got along well with each other, contrary to Trump’s claims in his inauguration speech. Thousands of people walked across the border peaceably in both directions every day.
When Donald Trump was president in 2016 after being elected on an anti-immigrant platform, he helped to make things worse. He called out the border city of El Paso during his State of the Union Address. In the process he made false claims that the city at the time was overrun by violent crime. Trump falsely claimed that El Paso urgently required his wall to stem the tide. Mayor Margo denied there was an emergency at the border. He said people from El Paso got along fine with the people from Mexico.
This is what Trump said:
“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime, one of the highest in the entire country and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,… Now, immediately upon (the wall’s) building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”
Yet this is what USA Today and the Arizona Republic jointly published about El Paos which:
“as never one of the most dangerous cities, the violent crime rate peaked in 1993, and had declined dramatically over the next decade, the El Paso Times found. The rate was at a low by 2006, when the federal Secure Fence Act was passed. By 2011, two years after the fence was built in El Paso, violent crime rates had actually increased slightly
In general, El Paso has long been considered one of the safest big cities in America. “Our city police’s community-relations efforts and the cooperation between our law enforcement agencies contributed to making our city a safe place to live and work before border fencing was put in place,” El Paso Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican, wrote in an opinion column published Sunday by USA TODAY. “
The truth was that El Paso was very different from what Trump advertised to be the case. His antics were not helping matters
More recently, things got worse in El Paso as a result of a global crisis of immigration. El Paso was always proud about welcoming immigrants, but it has been overwhelmed. Recently, the new mayor declared a state of emergency there.
According to Fareed Zakaria in his CNN special in 2023, in Eagle Pass Texas there were “more migrants in one month than it had total residents.”The turmoil at the border had a dramatic effect on border politics. Zapata County in Texas had not voted Republican since the 1920s! Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama by 43 per centage points. But Donald Trump won in 2020. People there thought, rightly or wrongly, that Trump cared about the border. It didn’t matter that his policies made little sense. As is so often the case, when it comes to politics, reason and immigration keep little company. Republicans made gains all the along the Texans southern border.
And it seems they are doing so again.