When President Donald Trump and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) held dueling rallies in El Paso, Texas, on Monday night, some anti-Trumpers showed up to protest the president’s commitment to building physical barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo was on the ground in El Paso to see the action firsthand.
And on “The Ingraham Angle” on Tuesday night, he shared what he saw from O’Rourke’s rally.
“It was quite a group at this mini-march and protest rally,” said Arroyo. “Near the start time of the [O’Rourke] rally, we found a few hundred people were gathered. It wasn’t thousands [as some news outlets reported]. Most [people were] from California, Colorado, Canada, even Mexico, along with some Texans.”
“The Women’s March helped organize this protest,” he added, “so it was a mixed bag, kind of an anti-Trump crowd with the hard-core remnants of O’Rourke’s failed senatorial run.”
Arroyo spoke with a handful of the anti-Trump protesters prior to the president’s rally to learn more about their objections to the proposed border wall; they mostly gave the same perspective.
One woman said, “I see it as a symbol of hate, the way he communicates it.”
Another said, “The wall [represents] Donald Trump’s ever increasing senility and debilitation of his frontal lobe. I believe he has frontal lobe deterioration.”
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Arroyo pointed out to one protester that there currently are — right now — 188 miles of physical barriers in the El Paso sector of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In response, she said, “To be honest with you, we’ve kind of almost forgotten that there’s a wall.”
When a woman told Arroyo the wall was racist, he told her the number of illegal drug seizures in the area are not half of what they were in 2010 when the fence was completed (as the New York Post also pointed out).
Arroyo then asked the woman if that was a good thing.
She responded, “I believe, yeah. We don’t need to have illegal drugs coming through the system. The Border Patrol, they have the ability to do their job.”
Arroyo then told her the Border Patrol supports a wall and asked if she thought it was a good idea. She still said no.
When sharing his findings with host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night, Arroyo said, “You see the conflict here. Some of these people support the wall — but they hate the idea that Donald Trump is supporting it.”
“I don’t care how many people O’Rourke had [at his rally] — 10 or 10,000. The ideas don’t work.”
Ingraham agreed. “When you really dug into it with them, It was Trump’s connection to the idea with the wall [that they opposed],” she said. “Are they chaining themselves to the wall every day when the cameras aren’t there? No, because the wall works for the community.”
She also noted that she and Arroyo spoke with Border Patrol agents, police officers and ICE employees while in El Paso. She said they were “adamant” about physical barriers being an integral component of stopping illegal immigration.
“The main thing is he [O’Rourke] doesn’t have the right ideas,” Ingraham said. “I don’t care how many people he had [at his rally] — 10 or 10,000. The ideas don’t work.”
Check out the segment from “The Ingraham Angle” below:
Tom Joyce is a freelance writer from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He covers sports, pop culture, and politics and has contributed to The Federalist, Newsday, and other outlets.
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