Texas governor dehumanizes mass shooting victims
Not their names. Not the fact that two of the women used their own bodies as shields between a gunman’s bullets and two toddlers who lost their mother and brother in the carnage.
When Governor Greg Abbott of Texas spoke about the five people, including a 9-year-old boy, shot to death last week, allegedly by their neighbor, he identified them only as “illegal immigrants.”
Nothing about the immigration status of the victims or Francisco Oropesa, the still at-large suspect who Abbott said is “in the country illegally,” is germane to this horrible case. But Abbott never misses an opportunity to toss red meat to his party’s racist dregs at the expense of people’s lives — or deaths.
After considerable and warranted outrage about Abbott’s remarks, his office released another statement: “We’ve since learned that at least one of the victims may have been in the United States legally. We regret if the information was incorrect and detracted from the important goal of finding and arresting the criminal.”
Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21, was a permanent resident of the United States. But Abbott regrets nothing, and saying that information in his initial statement was incorrect willfully misses the real point. Mentioning the victims’ immigration status was unnecessary and cruel. It implied that those killed were somehow complicit in their own deaths. These five people were indicted right along with the man who reportedly killed them.
Abbott actually did exactly what Republicans always falsely accuse Democrats of doing after mass shootings — he politicized the tragedy.
Without mentioning Abbott, Sheriff Greg Capers of San Jacinto County, where the shootings occurred Friday night, pushed back on the governor’s rhetoric.
“My heart is with this [9]-year-old little boy,” he said. “I don’t care if he was here legally, I don’t care if he was here illegally.” Capers was referring to Daniel Enrique Laso, the youngest victim. According to Wilson Garcia, who lost both his son and wife, Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25, the boy was shot while trying to protect his mother. She was the first to die.
The other victims were Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18, and Julisa Molina Rivera, 31.
This time don’t expect to hear a lot of empty talk about mental health, usually the Republican version of an Uno reverse card whenever there’s a mass shooting. This time, it’s going to be about broken borders and President Biden’s immigration policies. It will be about what happens when people refuse to enter this country “the right way.”
Of course, the GOP has no interest in fixing this nation’s immigration policies. Instead, they’ll continue to ramp up the same old racist grievances that represent the moral rot of their party’s platform.
What Abbott and other Republicans won’t talk about is how the suspect often fired his AR-15 assault rifle in his yard. Or, how when his neighbors asked him to move farther away from their house because a baby was trying to sleep, that man allegedly burst into their home and shot five of them “almost execution style,” according to Capers.
They will ignore that the common denominator in every mass shooting is the easy accessibility of guns designed to harm a lot of people in a short amount of time. And that this is a daily atrocity in this nation. But by centering the victims’ immigration status, Abbott created the distraction in a state with some of the nation’s most lax gun laws, if you can even call them that.
That’s who Abbott is. As we approach the one-year remembrance of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, never forget that the governor did not attend a single funeral for any of the 19 children or two teachers who died.
This is what happens when you refuse to see the humanity of Black and brown people. It’s what compels Abbott to continue to put thousands of migrants on buses and send them to Democrat-led cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Abbott is fixated on keeping his base fearful about the nation’s changing demographics. He could have offered compassion to victims and survivors or mourned Daniel as a child who loved soccer and wanted to be a police officer. He could have hailed as heroes the two women who, in their last earthly act, sacrificed their lives to save others.
Instead Abbott used the blood of the victims to score a political point. Being undocumented had nothing to do with these killings in a rural Texas town. But being in a state with too little common sense about guns and too many callous Republican politicians like Abbott certainly did.
Mentioning the victims’ immigration status was unnecessary and cruel. It implied that those killed were somehow complicit in their own deaths. These five people were indicted right along with the man who reportedly killed them.