Beto O’Rourke fact-checks Trump's border lies at El Paso rally: ‘Walls do not save lives, walls end lives’

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Beto O’Rourke called out Donald Trump for false claims he made during an immigration speech near the US-Mexico border on Monday night - in the first competing rallies of the 2020 presidential election season.

The former Texas Democratic congressman and potential 2020 candidate rebuked the president’s claims in real-time, fact-checking suggestions that a region of border wall built in Mr O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, Texas, allowed it to become one of the safest cities in the country.

El Paso already had historically low crimes rates by the time a wall was authorised in 2006 and completed in 2009. Those figures have continued to steadily fall since 1993. Local officials and immigration groups repeatedly warned the president he was misrepresenting those facts. In an ironic twist, crime rates in the region actually increased slightly during the wall’s construction and shortly thereafter.

Still, Mr Trump claimed “The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities.”

“Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities,” he continued. “Walls work … walls save lives.”

Mr O’Rourke directly countered those claims, telling an audience of nearly 7,000 cheering people, “Walls don’t save lives — walls end lives.”

The Democrat — who has said he will announce a decision by the end of the month on whether he will run for the White House in 2020 — had previously warned in a Medium post the president would be coming to the state to “repeat his lies about the dangers that immigrants pose”.

“The President, using the same racist, inflammatory rhetoric of years past, seeks to build a wall, to take kids from their parents, to deploy the United States Army on American soil, to continue mass deportations and to end the protection for Dreamers. In other words, he seeks in one administration to repeat all the mistakes of the last half-century,” Mr O’Rourke wrote in the post. “And with past as prologue, we know exactly how that will end.”

Mr O’Rourke went on to assert a border wall “will lead to greater suffering and death for immigrants who are pushed to more dangerous points of crossing” and “will not do a single thing to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming to this country.”

Mr O’Rourke wasn’t the only Texan to call out Mr Trump on his misleading statements.

“I believe [Mr Trump] was given some misinformation,” Dee Margo, the Republican mayor of El Paso, Texas, told CNN, adding the president’s border wall claims in the region were “not factually correct”.

The city’s sheriff Richard Wiles also rebuked Mr Trump’s comments, saying, “The facts are clear. While it is true that El Paso is one of the safest cities in the nation, it has never been '...considered one of our Nation’s most dangerous cities.”

On Monday night, Mr O’Rourke, who was met with chants to run in 2020, laid out a different approach to immigration reform than the president, one led by “compassion” rather than increased deportations and a sprawling border wall.

“With the eyes of the country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand here in one of the safest cities in America,” he said. “Safe not because of walls but in spite of walls.”