Trump visits border wall days after US Capitol attack

MCALLEN, Texas – Besieged by political crises after inciting a deadly insurgency on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump on Tuesday returned to one of the bread and butter issues that propelled him to power: the border wall .

Visiting the construction near San Juan in South Texas, Trump appeared true to his former campaign self, hailing supporters and calling the project’s progress a political victory at a time when his legacy is enjoying huge success.

“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he told the audience in a brief speech. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the safest southern border in US history.”

In 2015, Trump said he would build the wall on nearly half of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. But that number has continued to decline. In his State of the Union address for 2020, Trump said that by early 2021, “we will have significantly over 500 miles.”

The total currently stands at around 450 miles.

“Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises,” Trump said Tuesday. “And today we celebrate an extraordinary milestone: the completion of the promised 450 miles of border wall.”

Although Trump’s initial promise fell far short of fulfilling, his supporters insisted the president had been vindicated and celebrated his arrival. As her procession passed at full speed, Ilsa Zamora jumped up and down, both arms in the air, tears in her eyes. “He’s my president, he’s my president!” the 45-year-old yelled.

But where Trump sees success, critics see the scar tissue of his four years in power – hundreds of immigrant children are still separated from their parents, the asylum system remains largely closed, and an immigrant community still faces being used as a scapegoat to stoke hatred during the campaign.

“It’s so insulting for him to come to South Texas in particular,” Efren Olivares, assistant legal director of immigrant justice at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a place that has been the epicenter of family separation and where we have an immigrant refugee camp along the Rio Grande, just across the border in Mexico.

“It comes down to what has been tested and what works for him,” Olivares added. “I think that’s why he’s here, and that’s why he’s going to take every opportunity he can to keep talking about immigrants as criminals.”

Trump should focus on the pandemic, which has hit South Texas hard, Olivares said. On Friday, the Rio Grande Valley was renamed a “high hospitalization zone” by public health officials.

“Instead, he’s coming here to do a presumed victory trick over a prize, a foolish project that has squandered millions upon millions of dollars,” Olivares said.

Laura Pena, a former immigration and customs attorney (ICE), said she believed Trump was being encouraged to make the trip in order to prevent him from causing further damage to the GOP following the deadly insurgency in the last week.

She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and said the region has always been a place where you can almost immediately see the impact of immigration policies at the border. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994, Pena began to see children from other parts of Texas in her classrooms, children whose parents worked in Mexican factories. across the border.

Travel to Mexican towns like Matamoros was common because people had family and friends living on both sides of the border, Pena said.

“I remember going to Matamoros to eat, to dance, to go to dentist appointments,” Pena said. “Then I have my most recent memories of trying to counsel a family that was recently kidnapped and tortured in the same neighborhood where I would celebrate New Years Eve two decades ago or near the dentist.

She now works as an immigrant rights advocate with asylum seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration cases are resolved. Along with other lawyers and volunteers, Pena has tried to help the immigrants, some of whom live in a squalid settlement on the border, in fear that the cartels will kidnap or extort them.

She said it would take a long time for the Rio Grande Valley to break down the stigma of a border area in crisis, where families have been torn apart and immigrants tortured in neighboring Mexico after being left stranded by Trump’s policies.

“The valley has been used as a pawn for the past four years and that’s not who we are,” Pena said. “It was fertile ground, a starting point, for much of this cruelty. There was racism and phobias before Trump, but it certainly kindled a lot of those flames here, just like it has in other parts of the country, and Trumpism has really taken hold here.

But as the motorcade carried Trump past a crowd of staunch, flag-waving supporters, the visit in the final days of his presidency left a different impression on Zamora.

“He started his campaign by saying he was going to become the wall, didn’t he?” she said. “Promises made, promises kept.”