Forget the rust belt, Beto O’Rourke says Texas is the new target for the Democrats in 2020.

“There’s a new battleground state: Texas,” O’Rourke said during the second Democratic debate on Tuesday, bragging that his 2018 run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz helped put it in play.

“We brought everyone in,” he said, referencing the road trip last year that took him to all of the state’s 254 counties, cutting off Sen. Bernie Sanders who was touting his 2016 performance in states like Michigan where President Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton.

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“Now we have a chance to beat Donald Trump in Texas,” he said.

O’Rourke, who desperately needed a good debate night, sailed through most of Tuesday’s event, casting himself as a middle ground candidate on health care, blasting the influence of money in politics and, perhaps most importantly, getting a chance to clear up his stance on immigration, which fellow Texan Julián Castro hammered him with in the first debate.

Castro in that debate called for decriminalizing border crossings and told O’Rourke to do his homework for not supporting the same stance.

For subscribers: Julian Castro, Beto O’Rourke clash as first debate gets feisty

On Tuesday, it seemed O’Rourke had.

He called for:

Waiving citizenship fees for green card holders — “more than 9 million of our fellow Americans.” O’Rourke said he would free so-called Dreamers who were brought into the country illegally as children “from any fear of deportation.” A stop to “criminally prosecuting families and children from seeking asylum and refuge, Ending for-profit detention in this country Assistance for the home countries of asylum-seekers from Central America, “so no family has to make that 2,000-mile journey.”

But O’Rourke said reforms he supports do not include erasing criminal penalties for people who cross the border illegally.

Related: Beto O’Rourke unveils plan for citizenship for Dreamers, ‘millions more’

“I expect that people who come here will follow our laws and we reserve the right to criminally prosecute them if they do not.”

Later, he blasted Trump’s immigration policies as racist and un-American and touted his hometown El Paso as one of the safest cities in the nation “not despite but because it’s a city of immigrants.”

O’Rourke’s response even earned a shout-out from Sanders, who along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was the center of attention as candidates sought to paint them as too extreme in their positions on healthcare, immigration, battling climate change and more.

Like the other candidates on the stage, O’Rourke took his shots at the two frontrunners.

O’Rourke said Americans were being “offered a false choice” between Medicare-for-all supported by Sanders and Warren and those on the stage who want to simply improve the Affordable Care Act “at the margins.”

Sanders and Warren batted away the attacks from the others on the stage.

Said Warren: “I don’t understand why anyone bothers to run for President of the United States just to talk about what we can’t do and what we shouldn’t fight for.”

Sanders voiced the same sentiment: “I get a little tired of Democrats who are afraid of big ideas,” he said.