CINCINNATI, Ohio – We Build the Wall, Inc., an organization launched by triple-amputee veteran Brian Kolfage, hosted its second town hall Tuesday night in downtown Cincinnati.
Kolfage drew national media attention in December for launching a GoFundMe page to help pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall, and has now received more than $20 million in donations.
The event began with a standing ovation for Kolfage, who said his “team of experts” is prepared to break ground on building sections of the wall by the end of April.
“I was just fed up with the way our politicians were handling it. I’m just a common person like you guys just sitting on my couch pissed off,” Kolfage said of his fundraiser. “It didn’t seem like our politicians were taking it serious, and for as long as I can remember we’ve been promised border security. We’re always promised this and they weren’t followed through, and I’d had enough of it.”
While the town hall was held in Ohio, thousands of miles from the southern border, Tuesday night’s group of panelists repeatedly emphasized that the border crisis affects the whole country.
“I’m in Cincinnati very simply because the border crisis is in Ohio. The border crisis is in Michigan, where we’re going to be on Thursday,” said Steven Bannon, former White House strategist. “You know, it’s not just McAllen, Texas, and the cities of the Rio Grande, or Nogales or Douglas, Arizona, or Tuscon. This border crisis is a national crisis. It’s a crisis of rule of laws, it’s a crisis of our sovereignty.”
Kolfage and Bannon were joined by several other big names, including Sheriff David Clarke, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo. But the guests who stole the show were a group of angel moms and dads in attendance, like the mother who related the heart-wrenching story of her daughter’s opioid over-dose.
“I don’t understand how we can have a 980 percent increase in illegal narcotic deaths in only 8 years, that we could lose 70,000 people a year—that’s just to the illegal drugs, enough to fill a football stadium—and yet Sen. Sherrod Brown in the face of this huge epidemic can go on Twitter and say that he doesn’t support border security in the face of the biggest epidemic in Ohio’s history,” she said to a standing ovation from the crowd.
Tancredo, who spent time with Brown in Congress, had a stern message for his one-time colleague.
“I know him and I’ll tell you right now – and I hope I’m speaking directly to him when I say this – you, Mr. Brown, are complicit in the death of this lady’s daughter,” he said. “Not just you, but every single politician who refuses to deal with this issue because they know that their power base relies upon mass illegal immigration. That’s what’s more important to them.”
Brown, however, wasn’t alone in receiving a public rebuke Tuesday night. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley was booed for his 2017 decision to declare his municipality a “sanctuary city,” something he said he would wear as a “badge of honor.”
Bannon has since joined We Build the Wall, Inc. as chairman, and said that the border wall is “about protecting the African-American and Hispanic working class because the game is: they want to flood the zone with tons of low-skilled, illegal alien labor to compete against Hispanic and black working class.”
“That’s why wages have been down for so long. That’s why wages haven’t increased. That’s what President Trump’s trying to stop,” he said. “The working class in this country, working men and women of every race and gender, cannot take the burden of the economic problems in Central America”
The team from We Build the Wall, Inc. will host its next town hall Thursday night in Detroit, Michigan, which protesters are expected to attend.
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
