Many El Pasoans blame Trump for ‘target’ on their backs
Slaughter has majority Latino border city in anguish, anger, disbelief
EL PASO — Steps away from the international pedestrian bridge connecting El Paso with Juárez, Maria Vidal sold cheap clothes to weekend shoppers as she always has, but this Sunday afternoon she shrunk deeper into the shadows, eyeing strangers warily from her post hidden partly behind a rack of outfits.
The 31-year-old moved here from Juárez two years ago, escaping rising killings in that border city for El Paso’s safe streets. But since 21-year-old Patrick Crusius allegedly drove more than the 650 miles from Dallas to El Paso to target Hispanics, railing in a hate-filled online manifesto against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and killing at least 20 people and injuring 27 more Saturday in a Walmart, Vidal has been afraid.
“You feel like you have a target on your back,” she said. “You’re afraid to go outside.”
Across this bicultural border city, residents reeled from grief, anger and disbelief Sunday that such a rampage had unfolded, killing almost as many people in a matter of minutes than had been slain here in all of 2018. They placed the blame largely on what they said has been a steady stream of anti-immigrant rhetoric from President Donald Trump that started before he even took office, when he likened Mexicans to criminals and rapists during his campaign.
“The people who died yesterday died because of the color of
their skin and because of the messages from our president,” said Alexsandra Annello, an El Paso City Council representative, in an emotional news conference with state and county leaders, in which they urged for such hateful rhetoric to end.
Some Republicans pushed back on that characterization, calling it unfair “finger-pointing.”
“Some people don’t approve of the verbiage that the president uses,” Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told NBC. “People are going to hear what they want to hear. My guess is this guy’s in that parking lot out in El Paso, Texas, in that Walmart, doing this even if Hillary Clinton is president.”
After hours of near silence, tweeting out a few condolences, Trump late Sunday addressed reporters as he boarded Air Force One.
“Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” Trump declared. He declined to elaborate but promised to speak more on Monday morning.
Tied to migrant crisis
That the gunman of the massacre — which federal prosecutors said Sunday they were treating as a domestic terrorism case — picked El Paso over heavily Hispanic enclaves in the Dallas area, where the shooter lived, or San Antonio, which is 60 percent Latino, for instance, felt to many here not only calculated, but linked to the ongoing debate about migrants at the border that has thrust this city into national headlines.
For months, federal officials have called El Paso the ground zero of the immigration crisis as more than 117,600 Central American families seeking asylum have turned themselves in to authorities here, putting the system at what Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan termed a “breaking point.” Last month, a Border Patrol processing facility in Clint, just outside of El Paso, became the latest face of the crisis as lawyers reported hundreds of migrant children in filthy, overcrowded conditions.
The surge of migrant families prompted the president this spring to threaten to close the border, and wait times to pass through international bridges have skyrocketed, slowing trade and complicating intertwined cross-border life. In El Paso, about 20,000 pedestrians a day join about 36,300 cars and 2,600 cargo trucks in their commute to and from Juárez and many families live between both cities as if they were one.
Trump earlier this year held a rally just blocks from the international bridge here, chanting “murders, murders, killings, murders,” to point out crimes he said immigrants commit. During his State of the Union, he wrongly claimed El Paso was one of the nation’s most dangerous cities before a border wall was constructed. It is actually one of the safest cities in the nation, with only 23 homicides recorded last year, and is about 80 percent Hispanic, with many residents switching between English and Spanish as if they were not two languages at all.
“You could not target a community that is more symbolic of the heart and soul and identity of the United States, a country built by immigrants,” said Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House, an El Paso nonprofit that has sheltered migrants for 40 years. “This person came in here, reflecting the rhetoric that has become part of our political sphere.”
In a statement, El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz wrote that the city had seen “the face of evil.”
“We see the effects of the sinful and insipid conviction that some of us are better than others of us because of race, religion, language or nationality,” he said.
By contrast, he said El Pasoans for months have reflected to the world how to handle people with God’s grace by accepting tens of thousands of asylum seekers and helping them with shelter, food and transportation to their ultimate destinations in the U.S.
“The borderlands have shown the world that generosity, compassion and human dignity are more powerful than the forces of division,” he said.
Beto O’ Rourke, a former El Paso congressman now running for president, told CNN that Trump’s rhetoric encourages white nationalists, ideologies which the gunman referenced in his manifesto. Critics said his use of “invasion” in particular borrows from Trump, who has used it multiple times to describe immigrants coming here illegally.
“He doesn’t just tolerate it; he encourages it, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, warning of an invasion at our border,” O’ Rourke said. “Folks are responding to this.”
During a rally in Florida in May, Trump said there were not enough border agents to stop the thousands of migrants coming across.
“How do you stop these people?” Trump asked.
“Shoot them,” someone shouted, to which the president responded, “that’s only in the Panhandle, can you get away with that statement.”
The crowd cheered and laughed.
In an emotional Facebook post, El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said that his city would never be the same.
“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” he wrote. “I’m outraged and you should be too.”
Seeking word of loved ones
At McArthur Middle School near the deadly Walmart attack, dozens of families were still waiting late Sunday, hope sinking that they would find their missing loved ones alive.
“To know that someone came here to target people with the color of my skin is very frightening,” said Daisy Guzman, a 20-year-old student who works at the Cielo Vista Mall near the Walmart that was locked down Saturday during the shooting. She wasn’t there, but said many of her coworkers hid for hours before they could come out. Guzman said she came to the family reunification site Sunday to see if there was anything she could do to help.
“It could only have been someone from the outside that did something like this, because this is not El Paso at all,” she said. “We are an inclusive city.”
At Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic church near El Paso’s historic district, Susan Velasquez said the pastor nearly wept during his sermon. Her family came here from Mexico more than a century ago and she said the two countries are “like brothers.”
She wondered how the shooter thought he could pick out immigrants from the nearly entirely Latino crowd doing back-toschool Saturday shopping during tax-free weekend, or whether that even mattered to him.
“Those families there were not only Mexican-American, but American too,” she said. “Nothing like this has ever happened in El Paso until he came in.”
Hundreds gathered late Sunday night at a rally outside Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in an event that originally was supposed to honor the father of a Stoneman Douglas High School student who was killed in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., last year.
Manuel Oliver had decided months ago to paint a mural in honor of his son, Joaquin, who would have turned 19 Sunday. He chose El Paso for the artwork because of the city’s key role in the immigration debate and to pay tribute to his son’s rebuke of what he saw as Trump’s anti-immigrant speech. The family came here from Venezuela 16 years ago.
Instead America’s scourge of gun violence once again struck close to Oliver’s family, just a few miles from where he and his wife were staying last week.
“The coincidence of being here has some reason,” Oliver said. “I want to think that Joaquin needed us to be here for this.”
He wondered if now, after two mass shootings in less than 24 hours, lawmakers finally would act.
“This is the way we live now,” Oliver said. “Every day we are at risk.”
“It could only have been someone from the outside that did something like this, because this is not El Paso at all.”
Daisy Guzman, 20, who works at the mall near the shooting