Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke made his first foreign trip as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination Sunday, traveling over the southwestern border to Mexico to visit with migrants who said they fled violence and turmoil in Central America to seek asylum in the U.S. only to be turned away at the border.
According to a pool report put out by the O’Rourke campaign, the candidate spoke to a group of asylum seekers in Spanish for about 15 minutes at a restaurant in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso. The candidate then traveled to a shelter for migrants run by the Catholic Church, where he met around a table with migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala who told of being denied entry into the U.S. and returned to the Mexican border city while their asylum claims were being processed.
O’Rourke’s campaign livestreamed the discussion on his Facebook page.
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“We hope, by sharing these stories, that the conscience of our country is awoken right now, and the need to change the policies that we have in place” becomes apparent, O’Rourke said on the stream. The 46-year-old blamed what he called “the Trump administration’s unlawful ‘Remain in Mexico’ program,” meant to reduce the attractiveness of U.S. asylum requests that in the past had allowed claimants to remain in the U.S. for years as their cases wound their way through the courts. – READ MORE