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XPost: talk.politics.guns

On 30 Dec 2023, Matt <patriot1@protonmail.com> posted some news:umpqmm$1cfnh$16@dont-email.me:

Biden and Harris should both be executed and nailed to the border
wall.

EL PASO, Texas — Soon the sun would set over West Texas and the Rev.
Rafael Garcia would slip into his white robe and walk to the front of
his cavernous church to say mass. It was the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and he was going to talk about Mary.

But before that, Garcia’s mind was on more terrestrial concerns. On a
couch in a room off the sanctuary, he told me that he worried about what
the freeze in the weather forecast would mean for the asylum seekers
gathered on the sidewalks around his church. He worried about the
violence and political instability in their home countries that prompted
many of them to flee in the first place.

And he worried, on this side of the border, about polls suggesting a
warming to Donald Trump, who had redefined immigration politics here.

Earlier this fall, an explosion of migrant crossings had turned El Paso
into a conservative media sensation and strained the patience even of
Garcia’s heavily Democratic, historically welcoming border region. City officials opened temporary shelters and for those with final
destinations further north — the vast majority of migrants arriving here
— helped run buses to New York, Chicago and Denver. The city’s
Democratic mayor, Oscar Leeser, said at a news conference that the city
had reached a “breaking point.”


Then, for several weeks, there’d been a lull. But by the time I met with
Garcia at Sacred Heart Church, border crossings were ticking back up
again. On the evening news, the local ABC affiliate warned, “ MIGRANT
NUMBERS RISING.” The city was placing some migrants in hotels. It seemed
like only a matter of time before El Paso, once again, became a
flashpoint in the border wars.

“Right now,” Garcia told me, “I’m in a pessimistic moment.”

Donald Trump, the former president and frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary, was ratcheting up his anti-immigration rhetoric,
accusing immigrants of “ poisoning the blood of our country” and
promising to go far beyond the already-rigid measures he pursued while
in office. Earlier this year, he said that, if elected, he will seek to
end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants — a proposal he’d floated during his presidency
but that most legal experts believe would violate the 14th Amendment. He
said he will use his administration’s authority to “ keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America,” suggesting an ideological test would be implemented at the border. And, speaking to a crowd in Iowa in September, Trump promised to “ carry out
the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,”
following the model of immigrant roundups in the Eisenhower era.

Last month, The New York Times reported that Trump plans to hold
immigrants in camps while waiting removal and to redirect military money
to use for the campaign.

That was just part of what was bothering Garcia. What troubled him more
was that none of this posturing seemed to be hurting Trump, who is
clobbering the rest of the Republican primary field and beating
President Joe Biden in some recent polls. Instead, it may be helping
him. In an NBC News poll this fall, voters by an 18-point margin said Republicans handle immigration better than Democrats — the party’s
largest advantage ever on the issue. In a CBS News poll, two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the way Biden was handling immigration.

“The fact that someone like Donald Trump is still the frontrunner,”
Garcia told me, “it’s almost like they want a dictator. It doesn’t
matter if he follows democratic processes. … There’s a certain kind of dictatorship mentality that’s developing, which is happening in other countries, as well.”

The growing appeal of a pro-Trump, hardline immigration mentality was
even evident here, in a city where more than 80 percent of the
population is Hispanic or Latino, and in a county where Biden pummeled
Trump by more than 35 percentage points three years ago.

Leaving the church, I walked up the street and into El Paso’s downtown,
where the city’s WinterFest was in full swing. White lights were strung
from trees, young parents pushed strollers and families lined up at food
trucks for hot chocolate, churros and elotes.


“Get the key and lock the gates,” said Rick Delgado, a Navy veteran who
told me he leans Democratic and who keeps a U.S. Customs and Border
Protection number in his phone.

He said he thinks Biden is “doing whatever he can.” But it was the state
— not the Biden administration — that had strung razor wire on the Texas
side of the Rio Grande and passed legislation that would authorize
police to arrest migrants.

Compared to Biden, Delgado said, Texas’ hardline Republican governor,
Greg Abbott, “is doing a better job.”

Nearby, eating popcorn with hot sauce, Roy Rosales, an executive chef
who was born just across the border, in Juárez, Mexico, told me, “Trump,
he started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up.”


He said, “There are a lot of Mexican people looking forward to Trump.”

On a small stage, a performer began to sing “Feliz Navidad,” and a boy
tugged his mother toward a stall with light-up spin toys for sale. Jaime
Tacuba and his wife, Daniela Simental, walked by in matching Mickey
Mouse Christmas sweaters.

“Everything’s gone to shit,” Tacuba said.

“It’s getting really bad with a lot of the people coming in,” said
Simental, who was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and immigrated
with her family when she was 12. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, she
said. But lately, she’s thinking differently about it.


“Now,” she told me, “I want Trump back.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/19/road-trip-el-paso-2024- 00131703

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