Beto O’Rourke was holding a rally in El Paso at the same time as U.S. President Donald Trump was carrying out his own event in the Texas border city on Monday night.

O’Rourke, a former El Paso city councilman who lost to Ted Cruz in the race for a Senate seat for Texas in November, was set to speak at Chalio Acosta Park at 6 p.m. MT.

The rally comes as federal negotiations continue around the construction of a wall to shore up security on America’s southwest border with Mexico.

In his State of the Union address last week, Trump said that El Paso “used to have extremely high rates of violent crime,” which went down “immediately” upon the building of a powerful barrier.

The El Paso Times reported that this was not the case.

Beto O’Rourke says Trump offered ‘lies’ during SOTU ‘about El Paso being dangerous’

Some kind of barrier has always divided El Paso from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which is located directly to its south.

New fencing was erected starting in 2008 and it was completed in 2009.

Violent crime in the city peaked in 1993 but subsequently plummeted, reaching a 20-year low in 2006.

Speaking at the rally at Chalio Acosta Park, O’Rourke called El Paso “one of the safest cities in the United States of America.”

He said it’s safe, “not because of walls, but in spite of walls.”

O’Rourke said that building a wall at a time of historically low northbound apprehensions would require the government to “take someone’s property, their house, their farm, their ranch.”

He said cities along the U.S.-Mexico border “are far safer than the cities in the interior of the United States of America.”

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