President Donald Trump will visit El Paso over objections.
President Donald Trump intends to visit El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday in the wake of a deadly shooting at a Walmart store that killed 22 people, despite calls from the area’s congresswoman and other Democrats for him to stay away.
Democrats have blamed Trump for stoking anti-immigrant rhetoric that mirrors language in a manifesto believed to have been posted by the gunman before he entered the Walmart in the heavily Hispanic border city Saturday morning.
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and her predecessor in Congress, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, said the president shouldn’t come to El Paso. Escobar said Trump is “not welcome” because of his inflammatory rhetoric about Latinos and immigrants.
But El Paso Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican, confirmed at a Monday news conference that the president will make the visit and said he would be welcome.
“I want to clarify for the political spin that this is the office of the mayor of El Paso in an official capacity of welcoming the office of the president of the United States, which I consider is my formal duty,” Margo said.
Trump condemned white supremacy and offered his condolences to victims at a White House speech on Monday morning. He said the nation would respond with “urgent resolve” to a weekend of mass shootings but offered few specifics. Nine people were also killed in a mass shooting at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, bringing the total fatalities to 31.
Trump is also expected to visit Dayton on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported.
O’Rourke, who has called Trump a “racist,” tweeted Monday that Trump should not come to El Paso despite his remarks earlier in the morning. O’Rourke represented the El Paso area in Congress from 2013 to 2019.
“This president, who helped create the hatred that made Saturday’s tragedy possible, should not come to El Paso. We do not need more division. We need to heal. He has no place here.”
Throughout his presidency, Trump has made the construction of a U.S.Mexico border wall a top priority and used words like “invasion” to describe immigration. Last week he described the majority-black city of Baltimore as “rodent infested,” and last month he told four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries. Three of them were born in America.
Trump on Tuesday pushed back at critics who have called him a racist. “I am the least racist person. Black, Hispanic and Asian Unemployment is the lowest (BEST) in the history of the United States!”
Multiple immigrant advocacy organizations and other left-leaning groups have organized vigils in cities across the U.S. for Wednesday as part of “a call to action against white supremacy.” The rallies are called “ElPasoFirme.”
“The uncontrolled access to weapons of war that has enabled mass atrocities in cities over and over again, has converged with the white supremacist political agenda that we see at every Trump rally, that we hear in every Trump speech,” organizers say on their website.