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‘It is on all of us’

O’Rourke calls for immigration reform at FD visit

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Beto O’Rourke, Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman, speaks to a crowd at Iowa Central Community College Friday afternoon.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke believes in an easier path to citizenship for immigrants who are working demanding jobs in the United States.

“The ability to free more than one million dreamers from any fear of deportation by making them citizens here in their country,” O’Rourke said during a campaign stop at Iowa Central Community College Friday, where more than 100 people attended.

“Not doing it at the price of their parents, the original dreamers, or at the cost of a $30 billion, 30-foot high, 2,000 mile wall — that by the way, will not be built on the international boundary of the United States and Mexico,” he added.”That’s the centerline of the Rio Grande River.”

Instead, O’Rourke, 46, said the wall will encroach on the property of Americans.

“It will be built well into the interior of this country, on someone’s farm, someone’s ranch, someone’s home, that we will have to seize through our power of eminent domain,” he said. “Taking their livelihood, their way of life at a time of record safety in communities like mine along the border of El Paso, Texas.”

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Beto O’Rourke, Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman, waits to be introduced at Iowa Central Community College Friday afternoon.

O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, touted El Paso as one of the safest cities in America. He said that’s the case, “Not despite the fact we are a city of immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees, but because we are a city of immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees.”

In terms of immigration, O’Rourke used the example of a man in Storm Lake, who told him, “There are so many of us here working jobs that no one born in Storm Lake or in Iowa or in the United States is willing to do.”

O’Rourke launched his bid for president in March.

He said immigrants are adding value to Iowa communities.

“But people who are yet unable to contribute to their full capacity to the success of this country because they live in fear, they live in the shadows, they don’t have citizenship and the ability to do everything they were intended to in their lives and do it here in the United States,” he said.

O’Rourke compared the way refugees are treated at the Mexico-United States border to torture.

“You know full well who it is we are apprehending right now,” he said. “In all honesty, who is turning themselves in, who are arresting themselves? Kids. Kids that they are luckily with their moms. What would compel you to send your 12-year-old daughter on her own, maybe in the hands of a smuggler, for a 2,000 mile journey?

He added, “Some people satisfy themselves by saying those are bad people, bad parents. I’d never do that to my child. Well, you would if it was the only opportunity to keep her alive. To make that journey on foot, on top of a train, to show up here at our border, the border of a country comprised of refugees and asylum seekers from the world over, who at their most vulnerable and desperate moment, we don’t welcome them with open arms.”

He said in some cases when a child is separated from their mother, they may never see each other again.

“We take that child, literally by force, if necessary from the arms of that mother who is willing to risk her very life for that child,” O’Rourke said. “We send the mom back to the very country she fled in the first place — in some cases the deadliest places on the planet. Today we put that child in a cage, send her to a foster care home in Michigan, maybe in Iowa, maybe God only knows where. And that child and that mother, some of them today, no hope or prospect of seeing one another again.”

“This is tantamount to torture. It is cruelty. It is inhumane, but it is up to us to decide if it is un-American. Because in this democracy, where you are the government and government is you, it is on all of us.”

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