Tipsheet

Beto O'Rourke Says He Would 'Absolutely' Take the Border Wall in El Paso Down

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) told MSNBC Thursday that he would “absolutely” take down the border wall in El Paso, Texas.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes referenced a tweet from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) which showed that illegal crossings had dropped significantly since the border wall was built in El Paso. He asked O’Rourke if he would take down the wall.

“Yes, absolutely,” Rep. O’Rourke replied. “I’d take the wall down.”

“You think if there was a referendum here in this city that would pass?” Hayes followed up.

“I do,” O’Rourke replied.

Crenshaw responded to the exchange on Twitter by pointing to remarks the El Paso mayor and residents have made that the border fence there worked and made them feel safer.

"Here's what we know, after the Secure Fence Act, we have built 600 miles of wall and fencing on a 2,000-mile border. What that has done is not in any demonstrable way made us safer," O'Rourke told Hayes. "It’s cost us tens of billions of dollars to build and to maintain and it has pushed migrants and asylum seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S-Mexico border ensuring their suffering and death."

Rep. O’Rourke went on to characterize the calls for border security as a “perverse” overreaction to 9/11.

"It's perverse, the response that we have to legitimate concerns and problems, international terrorism, which was orchestrated in Afghanistan by al Qaeda, carried out by people from Saudi Arabia, we punish people from Mexico at the U.S.-Mexico border,” he said, “deport in one year alone 400,000 Mexican nationals from this country from a response to 9/11. We wall off 600 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Precisely zero terrorists or terrorist organizations have ever used the border to attack a single American."