Beto O’Rourke was greeted as a hero at the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute's national conference last weekend in Chicago, delivering a stirring oration that recast the border not as a threat to the security of those in the U.S., but to the lives of those seeking to cross it from Mexico.

“We don’t need another wall, we don’t need another fence because, let me tell you this, walls do not as the president has claimed, walls don’t save lives, walls end lives,” O’Rourke said.

From the chants of "build that wall" at his campaign rallies, to his emergency declaration to divert billions of dollars to pay for it, the wall has been the essential, abiding symbol of Donald Trump's presidency. In his response, O'Rourke, whose life and politics in El Paso have been forged by the border, has offered a diametrically opposite vision of the wall and immigration, standing in starkest contrast to the president among a field of Democratic candidates he has yet to decide whether he will join, on what promises to be a fundamental divide in 2020.



“In the last 10 years, after the passage of the Secure Fence Act, the construction of these 600 miles of wall, 4,000 of our fellow human beings have lost their lives trying to cross into the United States to work jobs that no one born in this country would dare work, to be with family — that is a human right that we should honor — to escape the deadliest places on the planet,” O’Rourke said at the conference. “Those are children, those are women and those are men, not in cinder block cells, not locked up in cages, not separated. They are dead.”

O’Rourke, after exhorting his audience that, “when we look back I know that we are going to be grateful for this moment in our lives, never a greater one to be alive, never a more urgent moment in the history of this country,” exited to chants of “Beto, Beto, Beto.”

In the days leading up to and following Trump’s Feb. 11 pro-wall rally in El Paso, and as O’Rourke approaches a self-imposed end-of-the-month deadline to decide whether he is going to run for president in 2020, the former three-term congressman has been unveiling an immigration platform that in its breadth and detail goes beyond anything he articulated in his Senate race against U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

A month after an interview with The Washington Post in which he struggled to offer immigration policy solutions, O’Rourke has staked out a border agenda on the ideological frontier among the developing Democratic field, laying claim to an authenticity and authority on the issue thanks to his identity as a son of El Paso — where these views have long had currency — and providing a sense of right-guy-for-the-right-job mission to a potential presidential candidacy that otherwise might have struggled to answer the questions, why him, why now and why of all things a white male at the top of the ticket with all the choices that now abound.

O’Rourke’s 10-point plan, outlined in a Medium post published on the eve of Trump’s visit to El Paso, calls for extending citizenship to the more than 1 million “Dreamers” now temporarily protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, legalizing and offering a path to citizenship to their parents — what he calls “the original Dreamers” — and, for that matter, to “millions more” living and working in “the shadows.”

He would seek to “significantly reduce drug trafficking and stop human trafficking by investing in infrastructure, technology and personnel at our ports of entry,” better track and notify those who overstay their visas, increase visa caps and provide asylum to “those whose own governments can no longer protect them — including women fleeing abusive relationships.”

O’Rourke would elevate Latin America to a foreign policy priority in hopes of creating the kinds of civil institutions and economies in those nations that would reduce the numbers of people fleeing to the United States in search of safety and opportunity.

O’Rourke — who in 2011, wrote a book “Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the U.S. and Mexico” with Susie Byrd, at the time a fellow member of the El Paso City Council — also calls for ending "the global war on drugs" that he said has had a debilitating impact on Latin America.

The last item on O’Rourke’s agenda: “Speak with respect and dignity when referring to our fellow human beings who happen to be immigrants and asylum-seekers, who in so many cases are doing exactly what we would do if presented with the same threats and opportunities. No more `invasions,’ `animals,’ `rapists and criminals,’ `floods,’ ‘crisis’ — dehumanizing rhetoric leads to dehumanizing policies. We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security — or we risk losing both.”

In the Medium piece, O'Rourke said the United State is reaping what it sowed on the border.

He writes that fear and paranoia led to border crackdowns that made it harder for unauthorized immigrants to go back and forth, staying put in the United States and drawing others to them. Political meddling by the U.S. government, he writes, fomented civil strife in Central America, creating refugees. U.S. demand drove the drug trade.

"And how do we meet this challenge?" O'Rourke wrote. "The President, using the same racist, inflammatory rhetoric of years past, seeks to build a wall, to take kids from their parents, to deploy the United States Army on American soil, to continue mass deportations and to end the protection for Dreamers. In other words, he seeks in one administration to repeat all the mistakes of the last half-century. And with past as prologue, we know exactly how that will end.”

Cristina Tzintzún, the Austin-based director of Jolt, a Texas advocacy organization focused on getting young Latinos to vote, said she appreciates O'Rourke going beyond just bashing Trump.

"One of the most challenging issues for Democrats is to fully express what their vision is on immigration, and I think this is an incredible step by Beto to articulate what that vision is in more concrete terms," Tzintzún said.

'Take the wall down'

Thanks to a rally held there by Trump, the eyes of the nation turned to El Paso, and O'Rourke answered the president on the wall at a contemporaneous counterrally organized by a collection of local organizations.

Three days later, in an interview along the border in El Paso with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, O'Rourke said that if he could, "I'd take the wall down'' separating El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, recounting how barriers raised under the Secure Fence Act, "pushed migrants and asylum-seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, ensuring their suffering and death.”

For John Davidson, the Austin-based senior correspondent for The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, who has reported on the border and was in El Paso as those events unfolded, O’Rourke "played right into Trump’s drama,” fulfilling his stereotype of Democrats as enemies of secure borders outside the political mainstream.

But Davidson said, in the short term, O'Rourke might be on to something.

“Maybe it's more accurate not to say that Beto fell into Trump’s trap, but that he jumped into it willingly,” Davidson said. “He can certainly distinguish himself in a field that otherwise might not be hospitable to a white male. He’s going to force all of them into answering questions about tearing down the wall. That is a bold move.”

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a former top aide to Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry, who lives just outside Austin in Hays County, said he can't fathom O'Rourke's views on border security.

"I've got a big gap between me and those who oppose responsible efforts to secure the border," Roy said. "I just don't get it."

But he agrees that, "it was strategic for Congressman O'Rourke to jump in and lay a marker down. Now you see his potential adversaries in the primary on the Democratic side are having to dance in there and kind of walk along the line of either agreeing with him or trying to dance around it."

And, Roy said, "There is a lot of wiggle room if gets past the primary and into the general election."

Indeed, last week, O'Rourke said his comment to Hayes had been specific to the fence in El Paso, and that physical barriers might make sense in some places.

Nonetheless, Democratic candidates were asked to react to what was perceived as O'Rourke's "tear down this wall" moment.

“I’d have to ask folks in that part of the country to see whether the fencing that exists today is helpful or unhelpful,” said U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. “I could look at it and see which part he means and why, and if it makes sense, I could support it.”

“Would it surprise me if there are places where it would make sense to take some of that down? No.," former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro said.

"I don’t live in El Paso and I take the congressman at this word,” said U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a potential candidate. “I take a back seat to no one in border security, and it’s clear we learned over time that we have the technology, the helicopters, border agents necessary to make our country safe and to keep illegal crossings to a minimum without building a long wall. That’s a decision that should be made in the whole context, not this congressman says take it down here, this congressman says it build it up there. You want to look more broadly than that."

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., shook her head when Trevor Noah asked her on “The Daily Show” Wednesday whether she agreed with what he depicted as O'Rourke's view that "all walls are bad and all existing barriers would be removed" if he were president.

"No, I believe that we need border security, but we need smart border security," Harris said. "We can’t have open borders. We need to have borders. All nations do. All nations define their borders. But we should not have a policy and a perspective that is grounded in keeping people out for the sake of this nationalistic thing that this president it trying to push."

New border paradigm



Davidson said the political virtue of O'Rourke's rhetoric on the wall is that it separates him from the crowded Democratic field who "repeat these not credible platitudes about `Democrats have always supported border security, we just don't want Trump's border security,’” which Davidson doesn't believe most voters take seriously.

"He's going to sweep all of that away and introduce a completely new paradigm for thinking and talking about the border, and it's not at all intended to court or persuade anyone in the center or right of center to come over to his way of thinking," Davidson said.

When Hayes asked O'Rourke whether a referendum on tearing done the fence would pass in El Paso, he said, "I do."

“It resonated as more of a thinkable thought in El Paso,” said Josiah Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. “Some people agree, some people disagree, but people didn’t think, `OK, this person is crazy, that we don’t understand what language he’s speaking.’ It was a very thinkable thought here.”

Heyman said O'Rourke's vision for border policy is essentially one that a lot of activists, academics and political leaders like O'Rourke, Byrd and Veronica Escobar, the former El Paso county judge who succeeded O'Rourke in Congress, developed over the last 15 years.

"He is an expression of a larger network of discussion that has been going on here for some time," said Heyman.

"He is an Anglo from a prosperous family," said Heyman, But, "Beto is somebody who came authentically out of El Paso and has this voice for El Paso. There are people who are critical of him on some local issues, but he is undeniably someone who is deeply grounded in El Paso."

"I don't think there is anything wrong with the attention he’s getting," Heyman said. "We who have been on the ground here for years, we’d like to say, `Hey, we’ve been saying these things for years from the El Paso point of view,' but he’s a very special voice."

And, of course, Heyman said, "Trump is making everyone pay attention to El Paso."

"The conversation on the border has changed in the last few years since Trump’s campaign," said Jeremy Slack, a geographer at UTEP, and editor of the 2018 volume, "The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border."

"There was a pretty agreed-upon security line from both Republicans and Democrats about the border, and I think the way that Trump made it a very overtly racialized and symbol of fear, caused people to take another look at the border," Slack said. "You started to hear a lot of the conversations that people along the border were having for years, which is that you are not creating security, you are creating a humanitarian disaster, and what we’ve been living with is not insecurity and violence along the border, it’s a loss of life, people dying to get across."

"It’s these immense security infrastructures that really hamper people’s day-to-day lives, either crossing the border, waiting hours in line or driving between towns where you have to go through border-control checkpoints all the time, being interrogated, being stopped, being pulled over, things that really anger people in this part of the world," Slack said.

But juxtaposed with that, O'Rourke said in Chicago, "It’s those kids who, if they are lucky are there with their parents, not evading detention or capture but actually turning themselves in, literally arresting themselves in the words of a Border Patrol agent I met in McAllen, Texas. These asylum-seekers who follow our laws and assure that we honor our international commitment, are the very best of us if we allow that because, by allowing them to be here, and ensuring that they are clothed and fed and get the medical care they need, access to an education, not only are their lives going to be better, but it’s the very history of this country to know that our lives will be better as a result, because what we shared with the president is that the very presence of those asylum-seekers in El Paso, Texas, those refugees, those immigrants make us stronger."