Robert “Beto” O’Rourke doesn’t support spending money to build physical barriers on the border, but does want to waste taxpayer money to tear down existing barriers.

During an interview Thursday on MSNBC’s “All In” with host Chris Hayes, the failed Senate candidate said he would “absolutely” tear down the existing border barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border if he could.

“If you could, would you take the wall down now? Knock it down?” Hayes asked.

“Yes, absolutely. I would take the wall down,” O’Rourke said.

O’Rourke’s comments come after he held a rally in El Paso, Texas on Monday night, where he claimed that walls are literally killing people.

“With the eyes of the country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand, here in one of the safest cities in the United States of America — safe not because of walls, but in spite of walls,” O’Rourke told the small crowd, which had just a few hundred people.

“We treat each other with dignity and respect. That is the way we make our community and our country safe,” he added.

He continued, “Walls do not save lives. They end lives.”

Mexican flags were also seen waving at the rally while he denounced the effort to build a wall to protect America.

https://twitter.com/victori21921904/status/1095149149815799810?s=11

Those weren’t the only two. Here’s another:

Aside from the lunacy of claiming that a barrier is killing people (it’s not), studies show that existing barriers on the southern border are highly effective.

Here’s a report from The Hill on the facts:

“Of course nothing is impenetrable or foolproof, but the fencing in Yuma, Arizona, is a great example of what works. Since its construction in 2005, it has yielded better than a 90 percent drop in illegal traffic. Similar numbers have been registered at other physical barriers in San Diego, El Paso, Texas, and Tucson, Arizona, since their construction.”

The Republican National Committee also released ad that detailed the following facts about the crisis on the border:

Fact #1: In four Customs and Border Protection sectors where physical barriers have been expanded — El Paso, Yuma, Tucson, and San Diego — illegal traffic has dropped by at least 90%.

Fact #2: In fiscal year 2018, U.S. Border Patrol seized or helped seize 282,000 pounds of cocaine, 248,000 pounds of methamphetamine, 6,500 pounds of heroin, and 2,400 pounds of fentanyl.

You Might Like
Learn more about RevenueStripe...

Fact #3: In 2018, over 17,000 adults arrested at the border had prior criminal records. This included over 6,000 gang members, a major number of those members were from MS-13.

Fact #4: The Democrats would rather risk the safety of hard-working Americans than work with President Trump to secure our nation’s borders. But in 2013, all 54 Senate Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, voted to pass legislation that provided $46 billion to build a physical barrier on the border.

Fact #5: Nancy Pelosi and her hyper-liberal Congressional colleagues just passed a bill to give $54 BILLION to foreign governments, but Democrats won’t allow just $5 billion to secure our borders and protect American citizens.

O’Rourke, who is eyeing a 2020 presidential run, has made countless bizarre comments about the border wall.

In December, he told an audience during a town hall in El Paso that the border wall is killing people.

“The number of people dying at the U.S.-Mexico border in some years has grown,” O’Rourke said.

“In some years has grown because it’s connected to that wall that we have already built that pushes people who are at their most desperate and vulnerable to ever-more inhospitable stretches of the Chihuahua Desert,” he added.

“The wall in this area was built in 2006, 2007, and 2008,” O’Rourke said. “So even though total crossing attempts had decreased, the number of deaths went up.”

He didn’t bother to mention that most of the migrant deaths are attributed to people trying to illegally enter the country.

O’Rourke also argued that border barriers were at fault because it forced migrants to seek more dangerous routes to illegally enter the country.