El Paso residents have a message for Donald Trump

EL PASO, Texas – Before Donald Trump's planned visit to the Texas city, with whom he hoped to get support for the construction of a border wall with Mexico, some residents of various political posts in El Paso had a message to the president. American: "Do not speak on our behalf."

"The president is simply wrong about the wall and El Paso," said Jon Barela, a Republican voter and executive director of the Borderplex Alliance, an organization that promotes economic development in a cross-border industrial zone that includes cities and towns. El Paso, City Juarez and Las Cruces, where 2.7 million people live together.

Barela rejected Trump's badertion, already discredited by others, that border barriers in El Paso reduced crime rates. The businessman said the FBI called the city one of the safest and most secure urban areas, that is, it was a long time before the barriers started to to be installed.

"I do not understand why it's a good idea to spend $ 25 million for a wall that will have limited effectiveness," Barela said in an interview. "Mexico is an economic and strategic ally of the US An obsolete effort to create a barrier between us will not work."

Dee Margo, mayor of El Paso's Republican party, also criticized Trump's description of the city in his February 5 government report. He called El Paso "one of the most dangerous cities in the country" before the erection of the barrier. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Veronica Escobar, has asked Trump to apologize and meet with asylum seeker families in the United States during his visit Monday night.

The tension surrounding Trump's planned visit to El Paso revealed several political divides. El Paso is a democratic stronghold in a state where Republicans have long dominated politics. It also houses Beto O 'Rourke, a former congressman who became a Democratic Party star by challenging Senator Ted Cruz and a powerful candidate. against Trump for the 2020 presidential election.

O 'Rourke organized an anti-Trump rally one kilometer from the Coliseum of El Paso County, where the US President will deliver his speech.

El Paso, where Latinos and Hispanics make up 80% of the population, was already a hostile site in Trump. In the 2016 election, he garnered only 26% of the votes in the entire county.

Even in this case, the president will have no problem occupying the Colosseum's 6,000 seats: many of his supporters in the city are still eager to hear him.

"I want a wall to be erected on the other side of the border," said Joshua Ascencio, 21, sentry of the US Army's cavalry wishing to become a police officer borders when he leaves the armed forces.

Although many others in the city of migrants are exasperated only to think that Trump is coming there to promote their restrictive immigration measures.

"The President of the United States, unfortunately, is nothing more than a racist," said Mayra Cabral, a 21-year-old migrant who grew up in Ciudad Juarez and who works at cleaning up tables in a restaurant from the city. texana; She has lived there for nineteen years and is married to an American citizen.

Cabral burst out laughing at the question of what he thinks of Trump's claims that it is Hispanic-born migrants who have carried the crime to the United States. He said that El Paso is so quiet that even "it's sometimes boring". Cabral added that she and her family had not let Trump's visit interrupt her plans. That's why last weekend they organized a quinceañera for his daughter.

"I was able to organize this party for my daughter because I do a job that many people born in the United States do not want to do," Cabral said. "Trump likes to call us criminals, but what about all the Americans in the country who commit violent crimes? Why not, for the first time, talk about it?"

Trump appears to be focused on El Paso as a site to broadcast his billboard and his criminal message after a meeting with Texas Republican officials in January. At that meeting, state Attorney General Ken Paxton told him that it was the construction of the fence that had reduced the rate of violence. El Paso is, among the cities of similar size in the United States, the safest, but the crime rate rose in the city shortly before and during the construction of the barriers when George W. Bush was president.

Paxton said his claim was "a 210-kilometer barrier completed in 2010". PolitiFact, a non-partisan website dedicated to verifying data and information cited by politicians, has questioned Paxton's badertion regarding crime reduction. The site points out in a publication that Texas has 210 km of fences, but that much of the barrier is not even in El Paso.

In Texas, tensions over the treatment of state officials towards Latino voters have also intensified. Republican politicians like Paxton have denounced the fact that there are about 100,000 Hispanics who have the right to vote even though they are not supposed to be US citizens. The Mexican-American Fund for Legal Education and Defense (MALDEF) has sued Paxton, Governor Greg Abbott and Secretary of State David Whitley in early February, accusing them of 39, attempting to purge lists of Latinos voters. after noting his strong participation in the November legislative vote.

Meanwhile, in other border states, the rejection of Trump 's statements on fencing and security has increased. In New Mexico and California, for example, the governors ordered the Trump National Guard agents to retire at the end of 2018, arguing that migrants traveling in caravans posed a danger.

For Trump, it is therefore essential to gain public support for his idea of ​​building the wall with events such as that of El Paso, especially because bipartite negotiations to reach a budget agreement that addresses the issues of border security collapsed on Sunday, 10 February. Trump originally asked for $ 25,000 million and is now seeking $ 5700 million. The democratic legislators who control the Chamber of Deputies propose a figure of between $ 1,300 and $ 2,000 million.

If there is no fiscal pact before February 15, there could be a new closure of the public administration.

Copyright: c.2019 New York Times Press Office