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On the other, I’ve seen videos of you in Congress reading State Department warnings describing gun battles, kidnappings, and bombings taking place just across the river. On the one hand, I’ve heard you talk about how safe the border is. And then you start explaining to them that FBI statistics show that the border cities are among the safest in Texas.ĮB: Let me play devil’s advocate. We take them to the international bridges, and they see all this truck traffic, and they start to realize that most of the produce that ends up in East Coast grocery shelves comes from Mexico. But if you live in Minnesota or New Hampshire or Washington State or Indiana-įV: I’ve had six members of Congress and one senator down in the Valley in the last month, and when you bring people down, they see the trade, they enjoy the culture, they see the new university, they go to South Padre Island. A lot of Texans, whether they’re from near the border or not, have visited the border, so they get the interaction between communities. Texans understand it a little bit better.
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Donald Trump never apologized for what he said, and he won’t.ĮB: Do you think Trump’s rhetoric has led Americans to view the border as a dangerous, lawless place?įV: Trump hasn’t helped the matter, but I think if you look at the perception of the border around the country, it’s based on what people have been reading for years. The Hispanic vote is critical in this November election, and I think we need to start talking about that again. Because I think that the Democratic national campaign has let the issues lie. But they’re forgiving, right?ĮB: Four months later, would you have done anything differently?įV: No.
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A Republican buddy of mine, every time I see him, he says, “How’s that wall doing?” A lot of South Texas Republicans felt the same way that I did.ĮB: No one came up to you and said, “Have you no decency, sir?”įV: Along the way I’ve sensed that the language might have been a bit too much for some friends of my mother. I had Republican members come up to me and chuckle about it. I hadn’t met them yet, and they were already getting pretty nasty calls-there were death threats.ĮB: What did your colleagues in Congress think?įV: By and large, the response we got was positive. It was the start of the session, so we had a new set of summer interns waiting for us. FV: The day I published it, the office phones were ringing off the hook.