I attended a press conference/campaign rally for Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Aug. 3 in Beverly Hills. The two-ish-hour event focused on one topic: The so-called border crisis, which, if he’s elected, Kennedy Jr. promised “will be one of my highest priorities.” Before his speech, the 19-minute film “Midnight at the Border” was screened, chronicling RFK Jr.’s June trip to the Yuma, Arizona-Mexico border for a firsthand look at the migrant issue.
“Midnight” starts late at night as Bobby Jr. meets Jonathan Lines, Arizona Supervisor District 2, former chairman of Arizona’s Republican Party. They drive to a stretch of the border wall, where most migrants appear to be from Africa and Asia – from Senegal, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Bangladesh – not Latin America. The presidential contender notes, “Of all these people only one said he is here for asylum. The rest said they are here for work, for better lives.”
RFK Jr. meets with Chris Clem, retired Chief Border Patrol Agent, who defends Trump’s “wall system” that included steel, sensors, etc., but laments it was sidelined when Biden became president, leaving gaps in the wall. Kennedy Jr. points out millions of dollars-worth of infrastructure, such as steel girders, that have languished since Biden took office and purchased steel fencing (that also seems idle) which unlike the Trump material, we’re told, doesn’t have underground foundations to prevent tunneling. Lines says Trump-provided surveillance cameras are inactive. Onscreen figures claim Yuma border crossings rose from 68,269 in 2019 to 114,000 in 2021 and 310,000 in 2022.
Kennedy Jr. refers to “This dystopian nightmare of this uncontrolled flow of desperate humanity” and after visiting the border, the descendent of Irish immigrants concludes “the open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion-dollar drug and human trafficking operation for Mexican drug cartels. When I’m president I’ll secure the borders … and I’ll build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally so the U.S. can remain a beacon to the world …” (None of the one-sided “Midnight”’s interviewees are migrant advocates.)
After his campaign film ends, Kennedy Jr. appears, and expounds on his immigration policy, assuring voters he’s not trying to “stir up xenophobia” and “comes to the issue with a perspective of compassion, humanitarianism and just common sense.”
The raspy voice 69-year-old asserts: “A country can’t exist if it can’t secure its borders … We need to close them … This assault on the local community. People told us they wouldn’t let their children out during the daytime ... because they were afraid of these strangers running across their yard fleeing from the Border Patrol … The director of the local hospital told me they lost $27 million the previous year in unreimbursed expenses caring for migrants … [A local Yuma expectant mother] couldn’t get in because of 35 immigrant mothers who had filled up the maternity ward … This is now happening in communities across our country.”
Kennedy Jr. goes on to say America has outsourced managing its borders to the Mexican cartels, which he accuses of child sex trafficking and selling fentanyl. Contending there’s up to 16 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, Bobby Jr. stated “there’s no way they can legally work in this country” and “will impact the price of labor and wages for every other working American. They’re being paid $5, $6 per hour by unscrupulous employers.” Stressing how close his father, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, and later he was to the United Farm Workers’ leader, RFK Jr. says, “Cesar Chavez was … probably the lead champion for closed borders because he knew American farmworkers could not make any gains in terms of their wages and benefits … if there was an endless supply of new undocumented workers coming across the border who lacked the bargaining power” vis-à-vis employers, who could always get deported.
Continuing his new stump speech, Kennedy Jr. says, “I was against Trump’s wall. I thought it was a crazy idea … I don’t think we do need a wall for 2,200 miles … but we need something. A lot of that technology was in place. We had towers … cameras, videos, lights, ground sensors, motion detectors. We can protect our borders, we have the technological capacity … We need the political will power and the personnel… We need to restore those [physical] barriers …” in urban areas along the border, and deploy the forementioned technology in rural regions.
“We need to be able to process legal asylum seekers. The one category that comes across the border undocumented [that’s eligible for legal US residency] are people who are fearing, who are fleeing political persecution … We have the methodology for processing those claims… We used to process them at the border. Only 15% of them are adjudicated as legitimate, the rest of them … [were] turned away,” Kennedy Jr. adds.
After speaking for 20 minutes the floor was opened for reporters’ questions. I didn’t notice any MSM present; most covering the event were alternative, independent journalists. I asked:
“It seems … you’re making border issues and migration a cornerstone of your campaign which, in some ways, is similar to what Trump did in 2016. Rumors have been bandied about in media that you may end up running on a ticket with Donald Trump as his vice president. What is your response to those rumors? And do you definitively say you will never run on a ticket for the White House with Donald Trump?”
RFK Jr. responded: “I experience a lot of the stuff repeated in the mainstream news, the corporate news, as what I’d call ‘conspiracy theories.’” At this, the candidate’s supporters burst out laughing and applauded, given that Kennedy Jr. is widely derided by MSM as a fringe figure spouting controversial hypotheses about vaccines and more. He continued: “There’s an entire industry made up of conspiracy theorists and a direct answer to your question: No, I will not be Donald Trump’s vice president.” He did not take the opportunity to comment on the fact that at that precise moment the ex-prez was en route to a Washington courthouse to be federally arraigned of charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
After the next reporter’s inquiry Kennedy Jr. returned to my query saying: “Let me … add an addendum to the previous question, the previous questioner started out with an observation that I – that the border was some sort of Trump issue … It should not be a partisan issue. … I went down to the border feeling that Trump made a mistake on the wall. But people need to be able to recalibrate their worldview when they’re confronted with evidence … When I’m president what I’m going to do is bring in Republicans and Democrats, get the best Republican ideas and the best Democratic ideas and put everything on the table … and avoid the ideological pettiness that has been so damaging to our country. What we’re seeing on the border today is the outcome of that … and not branding Republican issue or Democrat issue, just say let’s deal with this, it’s an existential threat to our country…”
I left “recalibrating,” wondering whether Bobby-the-Lesser was more of a self-described “Kennedy Democrat” or a Trump-lite pretender to the throne?
Ed Rampell is a writer based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of "Progressive Hollywood, A People's Film History of the United States" and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. A longer version of this article appeared at LAProgressive.com. See it at https://www.laprogressive.com/election-reform-campaigns/all-the-way-with-rfk>
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023
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