An “angel mom” bashed Beto O’Rourke for supporting lax immigration policies that she believes contributed to the death of her son.
Mary Ann Mendoza’s son was killed after an illegal immigrant struck his vehicle while driving drunk and high on methamphetamine.
In a weekend op-ed with USA Today, Mendoza pointed to a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, where a woman asked O’Rourke why he was “pandering to illegal aliens.” O’Rourke called the woman’s comments a “slap in the face” to American values and tied her rhetoric to the family separation policies that had been in place at the border.
“What is a slap in the face to my conscience and the best traditions of this country is taking kids from their parents and putting them in cages,” O’Rourke told the woman. “Those immigrants pose no threat to you.”
A woman told me undocumented immigrants are a “slap in the face” to “legal immigrants.”
I told her it’s a slap in the face to lock kids in cages.
Immigrants pose no threat to her. And we need to call people out for saying they do. pic.twitter.com/cpnE9PGBvF
— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 6, 2019
Mendoza picked apart O’Rourke’s claim that illegal immigrants “pose no threat” to other Americans, borrowing his own language to slam his border policies as a “slap in the face to angel moms like me.”
“Angel moms” are mothers whose children have been killed by illegal immigrants in the United States.
“O’Rourke could just as easily have been talking to me,” she wrote. “As the mother of a police officer killed by an illegal immigrant who was able to remain in America because of the same immigration philosophy O’Rourke is pushing, the way he treated this woman makes my blood boil.”
She noted that O’Rourke used the deaths of immigrant children in U.S. custody to justify his support for an overhaul of the immigration system. She claimed that relaxing immigration policy will put more children in danger.
“But he ignored the fact that many, many more migrants die making that crossing than die accidentally in custody — as well as the fact that those children who did die in custody already faced life-threatening conditions when they were apprehended,” she wrote. “Those deaths are actively encouraged by the open borders ideology, yet they aren’t important to O’Rourke.”
She expressed her disgust in O’Rourke’s decision to tie the deaths of migrant children to border law enforcement.
“He wants us to believe that enforcing immigration law is tantamount to killing kids,” Mendoza wrote. “That’s a slap in the face not just to legal immigrants, but to everyone who has suffered from the sort of weak immigration enforcement that O’Rourke desires.”
