El Paso lawmakers have taken issue with a tweet from President Trump’s White House press secretary that attempts to tie the Sun City’s low crime rate to the border fence put in place nearly a decade ago.
Monday evening, Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “Ask El Paso, Texas (now one of America’s safest cities) across the border from Juárez, Mexico (one of the world’s most dangerous) if a wall works.”
Sanders also linked to a weekend opinion piece written about El Paso in the conservative New York Post, titled, “This town is proof that Trump’s wall can work.”
The op-ed—written by conservative author and Fox News contributor Paul Sperry—points out the initial 89 percent drop in undocumented crossings and the drop in illegal drug activity when the 18-foot tall metal barrier went up along the El Paso-Juárez boundary in 2008. Those figures have since crept back up.
The article also makes the argument that El Paso’s low crime rate and ‘safest city’ designation is a result of the fence.
That prompted Democrat El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke to tweet, “Walls have nothing to do with it. We’ve been ranked 1st, 2nd, or 3rd safest city for the last 20 years.”
Texas State Rep. Cesar Blanco, also a Democrat, tweeted, “It’s not a wall that makes us safe. It’s the people in our community that make it safe.”
And El Paso Democrat State Senator Jose Rodriguez chimed in, tweeting that he believed the White House was “cherry picking stats to support lies” in an effort to push President Trump’s larger border wall plan.
Tuesday morning, the White House added a link to the New York Post column on its website.
