Dem Rep. U.S. Sen. Candidate Allred on Saying Wall Is Racist in Past: Border’s ‘Personal’, Won’t Take Cruz’s ‘Nonsense’ 

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Ana Cabrera Reports,” Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) responded to a question on his past criticism of the border wall as racist by stating that the issue “is personal for me, and I am not going to put up with any nonsense from Ted Cruz on this.”

Host Ana Cabrera asked, “Your opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) says you have flip-flopped on this, pointing to your past remarks calling the border wall racist, for example. Now, you’re supporting a border bill that has funding, in part, for a border wall. What do you say to those folks, those voters in Texas who don’t really know where you stand, who might think you’ve changed your stance on immigration for political reasons?”

Allred responded, “Well, listen, my family is from Brownsville, the tip of Texas. My grandfather was a Customs officer there. I spent a lot of my childhood in our border communities. So, this is personal for me, and I am not going to put up with any nonsense from Ted Cruz on this. This guy has had twelve years to try and do something about the southern border. And he has not only not done anything, he’s prevented us from doing anything. Because earlier this year, he said, we don’t need a border bill. Well, what was in that? $20 billion for border security for 1,500 new Border Patrol agents, where would they have been? In Texas. For more immigration judges, where would they have been? Helping out to deal with our asylum backlog. For technology to stop fentanyl, that would have helped Texas. So, — and this is not the first time. Back in 2013, he took down a bipartisan effort that President Obama and a group of senators were working on to try and reform our legal immigration system. He’s done this his entire career. He’ll never get the job done. I think Texans are understanding that, and that if we continue to do the same thing and expect a different result, that’s kind of the definition of insanity.”

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