President Donald Trump is planning his first rally of the year in El Paso, Texas, on Monday, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) will stage a counter-rally across the street, defying the president’s fear-mongering on immigration at the southern border. The former Senate candidate and potential 2020 presidential hopeful slammed the spread of “fear and paranoia,” in a statement obtained Friday by CBS News. He added that during Trump’s planned rally, “El Paso will come together for a march and celebration that highlights the truth.”O’Rourke’s event kicks off at 5 p.m., and he will deliver remarks at 7 p.m., the time at which the president’s “Make America Great Again” rally begins. Trump once again highlighted border security during his State of the Union address last Tuesday, calling El Paso “one of our Nation’s most dangerous cities” and erroneously crediting “a powerful barrier” for making it one of the safest. PolitiFact has since debunked that claim as false, noting that researchers have not evaluated the area as historically among the most dangerous in the U.S.

Source: Huffington Post February 09, 2019 16:52 UTC