US Attorney General Jeff Sessions paid us a visit the other day and if you were to believe him, the notorious Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gang has made their home here and is looking for people to swing their machetes at.
He acknowledged El Paso is one of the safest cities in America but then he added “You have gangs.”
So what is it…are we a safe city or are we dangerous Mr. Sessions?
Do El Paso’s children play out in the open or are they hiding in their homes hoping they don’t get hit by a stray bullet?
Sessions had no intention of getting to know El Paso, our people, our businesses and the relationship with our sister city of Juarez.
It was all a photo-op presser designed to feed the prevailing false Trump narrative…you remember…Mexican rapists, criminals, drug dealers.
Riffraff as mayoral hopeful Dee Margo refers to them.
Unsavory Mexican characters wanting to come into El Paso and ruin our reputation for being one of the safest cities in America.
But that squirrely and elfin Sessions turned the dial up on the rhetoric.
He militarized it.
The El Paso/Juárez borderplex is the “beachhead” where Trump’s army of border enforcers will land and engage the enemy at the “front lines” of “ground zero.”
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But we know better in our city. We live, work and play here daily and while Juarez has it’s problems with violence, El Paso remains essentially untouched by any spillover.
Did you know that border apprehensions since 1996 have fallen by as much as 93%? There has been a pattern of apprehensions falling steadily since 2006.
Crime rates along the border from Texas to California are among the LOWEST in the nation.
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Trumps’ Wall has never been about keeping Mexicans out of America…it’s about keeping them in their place.
A visual metaphor to fuel fear and anger towards America’s neighbors to the south.
It’s about taking the 11 million undocumented immigrants living among us and sending them back to the other side of Trump’s Wall.
And that is why Jeff Sessions was here last week.