In a CNN town hall Tuesday night, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke peddled several falsehoods and inaccuracies about President Trump’s positions and policies relating to immigration.
In response to a question about how he would restore trust in American leadership, the former Texas congressman said that Trump called asylum-seekers animals, tried to ban all Muslims from entering the country, and is trying to build a 2,000-mile wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Describing those immigrants who come to this country as rapists and criminals, though they commit crimes at a far lower rate than those who are born in this country, describing asylum-seekers as animals or an infestation,” O’Rourke said.
Trump did not describe all asylum-seekers as animals. When MS-13 gang members came up during a roundtable on sanctuary cities in May 2018, Trump said, “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
PolitiFact found in April that a viral tweet that took Trump’s “animals” quote out of context, assigning the description to all asylum-seekers, was false.
“To try to ban all Muslims, all people of one religion from the shores of a country that is comprised of people from the world over, every tradition of faith, every walk of life,” O’Rourke said of Trump.
Trump issued an executive order in 2017 that restricted visas for those from Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen, which have majority Muslim populations. It did not restrict visas for Muslims from all areas of the world, or from other majority-Muslim countries like Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and also Indonesia, which has an estimate 225 million Muslims.
Later, the administration added North Korea and certain officials from Venezuela and removed Iraq and Sudan. Chad, which is about half Christian and half Muslim according to the CIA, was later added to and then removed from the travel ban list.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of travel ban in 2018 following legal challenges that argued the ban violated the Establishment Clause and religious freedom.
During his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump did call for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” His campaign rhetoric, though, did not translate into concrete policy relating to all Muslims.
FactCheck.org noted in a 2018 article that Trump’s travel ban did not affect all Muslims.
“If we invest in solutions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, then fewer people have to flee those countries and come to our border at the United States-Mexico border, where we’re proposing to build a 2,000-mile wall right now,” O’Rourke said during the event.
While Trump’s vision of the border wall has changed and evolved in design and scope, he has consistently said that a wall is not needed on the entirety of the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
“You don’t need a wall for the entire piece because we have wonderful people, border patrol people, that can do the job. But you do need walls in certain sections, without question,” Trump told CNN in June 2015, shortly after he launched his presidential campaign.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said several times that a wall is needed on around 1,000 miles of the border, noting that natural barriers such as mountains effectively deter migrants in some areas.
Following a government shutdown over border barrier funding, Trump issued a national emergency declaration in February to tap funds to build 234 additional miles of steel border barrier. There were about 654 miles of barriers on the border when Trump took office.
O’Rourke’s presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
