Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) declared San Diego to be “basically a paradise” on Tuesday night — and mocked President Donald Trump for his warning against the border crisis. Yet he later admitted San Diego’s border barriers had something to do with that.
Trump delivered his first Oval Office address on Tuesday evening, which the major TV networks carried during prime time. The address occurred in the midst of a partial government shutdown, which resulted from Democrats’ refusal to give Trump the $5 billion in border wall funding he demanded.
“Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis. And they have refused to provide our brave border agents will the tools they desperately need to protect our families and our nation,” Trump said.
But Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) delivered their joint rebuttals Tuesday night and have refused to budge.
Pelosi claimed that “much of what we have heard from President Trump throughout this senseless shutdown has been full of misinformation and even malice.”
Schumer then said, “The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”
The Democrats’ new talking point is calling the illegal immigration and border crisis a “manufactured crisis” that the GOP designed to force the funding of Trump’s border wall.
Vargas (pictured above right), whose district includes southern San Diego County along the U.S.-Mexico border, told CNN host Don Lemon on “CNN Tonight” on Tuesday that San Diego is “basically a paradise.”
“I live along the border, about a little over 10 miles from the border. It’s San Diego. I mean, it’s basically paradise. It’s one of the safest places in the country,” Vargas said.
“And the notion that we have a crisis there, a security crisis, is absolute nonsense.”
Vargas said the $5 billion Trump is demanding for border wall funding would be better spent helping San Diego with its “crisis of sewage.”
But when Lemon asked Vargas if there were “hoards of people pouring over the border” into San Diego, Vargas admitted there weren’t — because there are border fences and walls there.
“I mean, you go to the border and you see long lines of people waiting to come in … So we do have a problem of having huge wait lines to come in,” Vargas said. “You know, there is fencing already there, to be honest with you. There are places where we already have fencing where it made sense for some security.”
“But now, they want to build out in areas that make no sense at all,” Vargas added. “And that’s why I don’t think it will ever be built. I think it is fantasy.”
In fact, walls and fences span 46 miles out of San Diego’s 60-mile border with Mexico, as the San Diego Union Tribune reported.
These border barriers even played a significant role in stopping a group of migrants trying to rush the border at the San Ysidro port of entry in late November, as ABC News reported. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents deployed tear gas against these migrants.
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