‘The only threat you face is unarmed children’: Beto O’Rourke mocks Ted Cruz’s claim border smugglers heckled him

Beto O’Rourke has ridiculed Ted Cruz for the much-derided videos that he posted from the border with Mexico, saying that if he was “looking for a crisis to cosplay senator for”, then he could point him in the right direction.

The former Texas Democratic representative then tweeted the many problems that Texans face from day-to-day that the senator could be addressing instead of posting footage from the banks of the Rio Grande.

Mr Cruz and 18 other Republican senators visited the southern border, to “see the crisis that is playing out” – the huge surge in migrants seen in recent weeks.

The Texas senator also tweeted early on Friday morning that human traffickers and cartel members were “yelling” at the group of Republican senators from across the river, the Senate GOP twitter account later saying they were “heckled”.

“That’s Mexico, and you can see there’s three smugglers right there, standing on the Mexico side, looking at us,” Mr Cruz says in the video. Figures can be seen moving about in the distance.

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“They’ve been shining their flashlights at us, they’re yelling at us,” the senator adds.

Mr O’Rourke, who ran against Mr Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018 and made an unsuccessful bid to be the Democratic candidate in the 2020 election, responded to the posts later on Friday.

“You’re in a Border Patrol boat armed with machine guns,” he wrote. “The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler).”

“If you’re looking for a crisis to cosplay senator for, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.”

Mr O’Rourke continued: “The state you ‘represent’ in the Senate is the least insured in the nation.”

“That means your constituents are dying of diabetes, curable cancers, and the flu (as well as 50,000 from Covid in the last year alone) because they can’t afford a doctor or medicine,” he continued.

The list continued with the fact that 110 Texans died in mass shootings in the past two years; that hundred of thousands worked two or three jobs at minimum wage; and that Houston leads the nations in evictions during the pandemic.

With regards to the situation at the border, Mr O’Rourke said that if the senator was interested in actually working on solutions to ease what is happening at the border then he had a number of ideas regarding addressing the underlying factors that cause migrants to travel north.

The Biden administration is under increasing pressure to tackle the surge in migrants at the border – especially because many are unaccompanied children.