It has now been five years since a Trump-inspired white supremacist from a suburb near Dallas drove to an El Paso Walmart and executed what can only be described as the worst massacre of ethnic Mexicans in modern American history.
When the attack was over, the gunman, Patrick Crusius, had managed to kill 22 people. A twenty-third victim would die from his injuries approximately nine months after the shooting.
By this point, it has been unequivocally established that the gunman was targeting people of Mexican descent. In the online manifesto posted by the gunman prior to the shooting, he unambiguously articulated his desire to kill Mexicans in order to stop the “invasion” of his beloved Texas. He would also openly admit to investigators in the aftermath of the shooting that he had come to El Paso with the express intention of killing as many Mexicans as possible. It apparently didn’t matter to him in the least whether his victims were U.S. citizens or not.
Crusius pleaded guilty in February of 2023 to 90 charges in connection with the shooting and was sentenced in early July of 2023 to 90 consecutive life sentences. Although this sentencing marked the end of the federal criminal proceedings against him, he still faces the very tangible prospect of the death penalty following the state trial likely to occur sometime in 2025. An evidentiary hearing was held on September 12th.
With the completion of the federal sentencing and the state trial on the horizon, it might be easy to succumb to the logic that some form of justice will ultimately be served.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the gunman himself is, of course, accountable at an immediate level for the shooting. But, as I’ve said before and as I will continue to say, there are others who also bear responsibility for what happened in El Paso on that terrible day in August five years ago.
There’s Donald Trump to be specific. On the campaign trail and as president, Trump was fond of invoking the Great Replacement Theory, a staple of white nationalist ideology, routinely warning that America was being “invaded” and “under attack” by immigrants heading for the U.S.-Mexico border.
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And, in case there was ever any doubt, Trump made it crystal clear from the outset of his first presidential campaign who he considered the enemy to be in this scenario. He launched his campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals” and rarely missed an opportunity to denigrate Mexicans. He promised to build a wall that, at least in Trump’s imagination, Mexico would pay for, and, to this day, he continues to propose the creation of a deportation force reminiscent of the Kristallnacht.
Not surprisingly, much of the anti-Mexican sentiment that fueled Trump’s first candidacy and subsequent presidency was directed at Mexican Americans. There’s the time, for example, when Trump unceremoniously kicked Jorge Ramos out of a press conference and another time when he maligned a distinguished Mexican American federal judge named Gonzalo Curiel as “too Mexican” to preside over a civil case involving Trump’s so-called “university.”
And, it was no coincidence, of course, that Trump’s political ascent was accompanied by a series of ugly incidents throughout the country in which Trump supporters invoked the themes and symbols of Trumpism to taunt, harass, and intimidate Mexican Americans. Although it garnered surprisingly limited local media attention, there was even an ugly incident in El Paso at an Applebee’s on the Westside.
But it wasn’t just Trump. There were many Republicans who trafficked in this dangerous rhetoric who also bear responsibility at some level for the attack.
Let’s not forget that during a visit to El Paso as part of a propaganda tour of the Mexican border on behalf of Trump in April of 2017, former U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, that living monument to the Confederacy, described the border near El Paso as “ground zero” and a “sliver of land” where the United States would eventually establish a “beachhead.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also bears responsibility. As reported by the Texas Tribune, one day before the shooting, Abbott circulated a two-page fundraising mailer in which he “spoke in alarmist terms about the need to ‘DEFEND’ Texas at the border.” Abbott would explain in the mailer that the “national Democrat machine, has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to ‘turn Texas blue.’” If the Democrats can do it in California, he warned in an ominous call to action, “they can do it in Texas — if we let them.”
If an attack of this nature had occurred in the context of Islamic terrorism, we would have had conversations about stochastic terrorism and would have cast the net much wider in an effort to ascribe responsibility for this heinous attack. But because it was domestic white supremacist terrorism and because it was Trump, Abbott, and other Republicans who inspired the attack, many local political figures have conveniently chosen to pull their punches and increasingly ignore this element of the attack.
During his speech at the unveiling of the latest set of memorials at Ascarate Park, for example, Judge Ricardo Samaniego, perhaps not surprisingly given some of his political positions in the past, didn’t even bother to mention Trump or any of the other Republicans who had trafficked in anti-Mexican sentiment prior to the attack. In fact, none of the speakers at this particular event did.
Even President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris disappointingly avoided directly calling out Trump and other Republicans in the statements they issued about a month ago on the 5th anniversary of the shooting, choosing instead to frame the shooting as just a gun control issue.
To his credit, however, Fernando Garcia, the Executive Director of the Border Network for Human Rights, speaking at the organization’s annual El Paso Firme event at Edgemere Walk Park on August 3rd, did directly and openly acknowledge Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric as a causal factor in the El Paso Walmart Shooting. But, as far as I have been able to determine, Garcia was perhaps the only local political figure with the integrity and courage to call out Trump and other Republicans.
If Jewish Americans had been the target of a Trump-inspired attack I can assure you that the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish American organizations would have justifiably made sure that this feature of the attack was prominently positioned within the narrative of the event and never forgotten.
But five years later, it’s not exactly certain whether the larger truth about the factors that lead to this terrible attack on ethnic Mexicans will continue to be told at all. Maybe I missed it, but recognition of the catalytic role that the anti-Mexican rhetoric deployed by Trump and other Republicans played in the attack appears to be waning.
And those of us who have insisted that this feature of the attack continue to be acknowledged have been admonished by people in our very own community to stop “politicizing” the shooting and forget the Republican political figures who facilitated this terrible act of hatred.
What has become increasingly clear, however, as another August ended and another anniversary is observed, is that there appear to be less of us with every passing year who are willing to tell the larger truth about the shooting.
I can certainly understand the need for healing and moving past this horrible event at some level, but this healing process should not involve sacrificing or effacing the truth about the factors and context that led to the attack.
El Paso’s Mexican American community, both now and in the future, deserves to know the context of the attack, and it is ultimately incumbent upon members of the Mexican American community to ensure that this larger truth is never forgotten.
About the Author
The Perimeter is a column written by Aldo Mena, an El Paso News opinion columnist and founding writer at Fronterizo.news.
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