“Get the key and lock the gates,” said Rick Delgado, a Navy veteran who told me he leans Democratic and who keeps a U.S. Customs and Border Protection number in his phone.
He said he thinks Biden is “doing whatever he can.” But it was the state — not the Biden administration — that had strung razor wire on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and passed legislation that would authorize police to arrest migrants.
Compared to Biden, Delgado said, Texas’ hardline Republican governor, Greg Abbott, “is doing a better job.”
Nearby, eating popcorn with hot sauce, Roy Rosales, an executive chef who was born just across the border, in Juárez, Mexico, told me, “Trump, he started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up.”
He said, “There are a lot of Mexican people looking forward to Trump.”
On a small stage, a performer began to sing “Feliz Navidad,” and a boy tugged his mother toward a stall with light-up spin toys for sale. Jaime Tacuba and his wife, Daniela Simental, walked by in matching Mickey Mouse Christmas sweaters.
“Everything’s gone to shit,” Tacuba said.
“It’s getting really bad with a lot of the people coming in,” said Simental, who was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and immigrated with her family when she was 12. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, she said. But lately, she’s thinking differently about it.
“Now,” she told me, “I want Trump back.”
www.politico.com
He said he thinks Biden is “doing whatever he can.” But it was the state — not the Biden administration — that had strung razor wire on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and passed legislation that would authorize police to arrest migrants.
Compared to Biden, Delgado said, Texas’ hardline Republican governor, Greg Abbott, “is doing a better job.”
Nearby, eating popcorn with hot sauce, Roy Rosales, an executive chef who was born just across the border, in Juárez, Mexico, told me, “Trump, he started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up.”
He said, “There are a lot of Mexican people looking forward to Trump.”
On a small stage, a performer began to sing “Feliz Navidad,” and a boy tugged his mother toward a stall with light-up spin toys for sale. Jaime Tacuba and his wife, Daniela Simental, walked by in matching Mickey Mouse Christmas sweaters.
“Everything’s gone to shit,” Tacuba said.
“It’s getting really bad with a lot of the people coming in,” said Simental, who was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and immigrated with her family when she was 12. She didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, she said. But lately, she’s thinking differently about it.
“Now,” she told me, “I want Trump back.”
‘There Are a Lot of Mexican People Looking Forward to Trump'
A visit to the border city of El Paso shows how the politics of immigration are shifting — and what’s really underneath it.
www.politico.com
