LOS ANGELES, California — Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched a short documentary film on Thursday about his trip to the southern U.S. border last month, highlighting an issue few other Democrats have dared to touch.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, Kennedy visited the border near Yuma, Arizona, at the dead of night, arriving without fanfare so that the scene would not be sanitized in preparation for his visit. A guide informed him that he and Sen. Mark Kelley (D-AZ) were the only two Democrats who had visited the border to see firsthand what is going on under the Biden administration.
The documentary, a 19-minute film, was released at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills before an audience of several hundred local supporters of the Kennedy campaign, along with members of the media.
The film shows Kennedy meeting, and speaking with, migrants from all over the world, including Africa and Asia — only one of whom was seeking asylum. The rest, he said, were economic migrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
Kennedy, who is fluent in Spanish, is shown speaking to migrants from Spanish-speaking countries — though there are many migrants from other parts of the world as well. He hears, firsthand, their stories of distress and dislocation along their journey.
He also tours gaps in the border wall (or fence) that were left behind when President Joe Biden dropped former President Donald Trump’s program to build a physical barrier, along with patrol roads and electronic sensors, to stop the flow of illegal migrants.
Kennedy is also shown learning about sexual assaults committed against women and children on the journey to the border, including both girls and boys.
He says at the conclusion of the documentary that he has learned that the current U.S. border policy is just a way of funding “a multibillion-dollar drug and human trafficking operation” to benefit the Mexican cartels. He promises, if elected, to seal the border, while allowing pathways to legal immigration.
Former TV news anchor Bob Jimenez, who accompanied Kennedy to the border, introduced the documentary. He said that it exposed “the lie that has been told to us” about the border, and about what happens to the immigrants “who are in harm’s way, all the way,” while the cartels get “richer and fatter every year” because “our southern border in open.”
The documentary was produced internally by the Kennedy campaign.
In remarks following the film, Kennedy declared, to applause, that “a country cannot exist if it can’t secure its borders.” He said that unlike other candidates who had approached the issue with “xenophobia,” he would do so through “compassion.”
He framed the issue not as one of immigrants’ rights — which he respected — but as the self-enrichment of the cartels.
Kennedy confessed to having had a change of heart on the issue, after learning more about the border.
“I was against Trump’s wall. I thought it was a crazy idea,” Kennedy admitted.
He said he still believed that the U.S. did not need a wall along the entire border — “the 2000 miles from Brownsville to San Diego” — partly because of natural barriers.
“But we do need something.”
He said that he would use a physical barrier for part of the border, and restore electronic surveillance of the boundary where it had been abandoned. He added that the U.S. had to work more effectively with Latin American countries to stop the migration.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.