On Thursday night's All In on MSNBC, host Chris Hayes went to our southern border and interviewed former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who lost a Senate race to Ted Cruz, but is still being painted as a "rising star" in the Democratic sky. In a surprise, Hayes asked a question from the right to O'Rourke -- literally. He borrowed from a tweet from freshman GOP congressman Dan Crenshaw, about the wall. Would Beto take it down?
CHRIS HAYES: Would you, if you could, would you take the wall down now, here?
BETO O'ROURKE: Yes!
HAYES: -- Like you have a wall --
O'ROURKE: Absolutely.
HAYES: Knock it down?
O'ROURKE: I'd take the wall down.
HAYES: And you think the city, if it there was a referendum in this city [El Paso], that would pass?
O'ROURKE: I do.
He continued with his illegal-immigration advocacy:
O'ROURKE: Here's what we know. After the Secure Fence Act [of 2006], we have built 600 miles of wall and fencing on a 2,000-mile border. What that has done is not in any demonstrable way made us safer. It's cost us tens of billions of dollars to build and maintain. And it's pushed migrants and asylum seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, ensuring their suffering and death.
More than 4,000 human beings, little kids, women and children, have died. They're not in cages, they're not locked up, they're not separated -- they're dead. Over the last 10 years, as we have walled off their opportunity to legally petition for asylum, to cross in urban centers like El Paso, to be with family, to work jobs, to do what any human being should have a right to be able to do, what we would do if faced with the same circumstances they were.
While he was on a tear, O'Rourke also claimed his Monday rally in El Paso was "so powerful and so profoundly positive. Nothing negative about it." He must have missed his backers beating a Trump pinata to pieces.
