El Pasoans react to President Trump’s National Address asking for border wall funding

A group of about 30 people gathered at the Border Network for Human Rights’s office to watch President Donald Trump’s nine-minute address to the American people, calling for a border wall.

The Border Network is a group that focuses on migrants’ rights, and executive director Fernando Garcia is staunchly against President Trump’s wall proposal.

“He keeps portraying immigrants and immigrant families as criminals, and that is quite racist and xenophobic,” Garcia said.

President Trump’s speech focused on what he called a crisis at the border. Trump cited different examples of undocumented immigrants committing crimes here in the United States. But Garcia disagrees with this portrayal, and uses El Paso as an example.

“El Paso is the safest city in the nation, safer than Washington, D.C. so we don’t what he’s talking about,” Garcia said.

But Adolpho Telles, Chairman for the Republican Party of El Paso, is quick to use the city’s safety record as a reason to build the wall.

“We need to spread our story of how it’s positively impacted us — why we’re one of the safest cities in the United States. We do have stronger border security here.”

The federal government has been partially shutdown for 19 days and counting. President Trump is asking for $5.7 Billion to fund more than 200 miles of a border wall. Congressional democrats are not budging. Tuesday night Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said democrats would be willing to address border security at a later date, once the government shutdown ends.

If the stalemate continues through Saturday, it would be the longest shutdown in our nation’s history.