Bernie Sanders focuses on Las Vegas homeless vets in video

The presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders released a video Thursday featuring homeless veterans in the Las Vegas area discussing their personal experiences, with the 2020 hopeful telling the group their situations should not be tolerated in the United States.

“We must not step over people on the streets and say ‘well, that’s America, that’s normal.’ It is not normal,” Sanders says to open the video.

The footage was captured during a roundtable discussion with residents of the Veterans Village 2 in downtown Las Vegas on Saturday.

One man told Sanders he lived under a bridge, using “all the survival techniques and stuff that I learned in the service” to live. He said he only received $300 per month for his military pension.

Another women said she was homeless for three years after her husband, who spent 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, as well as her daughter and her dog, passed away.

The group discussed the difficulty in surviving on the streets of Las Vegas during the hot summer months.

“We have a moral responsibility if a country is worth anything, it is how we treat those people who put their lives on the line to defend us,” Sanders says in the video.

Contact Rory Appleton at rappleton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0276. Follow @RoryDoesPhonics on Twitter.