Angel dad Chris Odette questioned why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has not presented a bill to tear down the border wall if she really thinks it is “immoral.”
Odette, a military veteran, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Wednesday that he has tweeted Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer numerous times, inviting Pelosi to meet and talk about his daughter’s death, but he has received no response.
Odette’s daughter, Chrishia Odette, was just 13 years old when, on September 12, 2014, unlicensed driver and illegal alien Ramiro Tolentino Guevara careened into the girl’s body. Odette recounted the authorities’ description of the blood that streamed from her face after being struck and the professionals who said she may have lived for minutes with her injuries before dying.
He said he would ask them about this “manufactured crisis, asking is this really a manufactured crisis?” He would inquire, “Why don’t you talk to me about my daughter’s death?”
Odette said he has a card with his daughter’s name, photo, and date of death, along with his contact information, which he wanted to give Pelosi.
I’d absolutely love to sit down with her and have her explain to me how this is manufactured, and I would like to ask her why she never came to my daughter’s funeral,” said Odette. “You know, she’s concerned about so much. Chuck Schumer’s concerned about, you know, border security and not building a wall that would actually control in the direction of people’s movements.”
“Is it immoral that she has a wall around her house?” Odette posited of Pelosi and her residence. “She’s keeping people out as much as she’s trying to keep her family safe.”
During an October Harvard Institute of Politics event, Pelosi called a U.S. southern border wall “immoral, expensive, ineffective, not something that people do between countries.” She pledged then to give “nothing” for the border wall if Democrats won back the House.
“If that wall is immoral now and it wasn’t a few years ago, then why hasn’t she introduced legislation to have it all torn down?” Odette questioned in Wednesday’s interview.
President Donald Trump posed essentially the same question during an executive order signing at the White House Thursday. “If walls are immoral, maybe we should take down all the walls that are built right now. You would see a mess like you’ve never seen before,” Trump said.
Angel families flooded Pelosi’s office on January 15, asking for a meeting and pointing to the fact that walls were what separated Pelosi from them. The speaker refused to meet with them.
Odette described from the perspective of a “combat engineer” his first MOS, the concept of a wall along the southern border. He said the idea is “mobility, countermobility.” He described setting up a minefield to force an enemy to either clear the field or move around it, “force them into a direction you want them to go.” Erecting a wall of either steel slats or concrete barrier forces similar movement.
He challenged Pelosi and Schumer to allow a wall, and if it did not work, they could claim victory.
Odette then turned to Pelosi’s canceling the president’s State of the Union address. The angel dad was in Washington, DC, this week because he was going to be Congressman Michael Burgess’s guest at the event–until Pelosi canceled on short notice. He challenged Pelosi’s claim that there were security issues with holding the event while the government was shut down; the claim was quickly refuted by authorities in charge of that security. Odette then challenged Pelosi’s claim of concern over those government employees not getting paid during the shutdown. “Then why were you about to take a trip and spending money on personal security that you were quoting to get work? So you don’t like people working without getting paid. Well, then why were you about to go on a trip overseas?”
Odette then pointed to Pelosi’s past spending on overseas congressional trips. He questioned if she would be willing to cut out spending on alcohol for the trips and restrict the trips to only members of Congress, not family members or others. He further challenged if Pelosi and others were actually so concerned with those going without pay that they would be willing to pass legislation that imposes a pay cut on Congress during a shutdown. He suggested, “How about instead of denying them a paycheck, [Congress] deny [itself] that paycheck and put the people ahead of us?”
Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook.
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