“Trump the Accomplice”: El Paso Residents Blame the President for a Hate-Fuelled Mass Shooting
On Sunday evening in El Paso, Texas, more than a thousand people marched peacefully, carrying signs and flowers, from a city park to the offices of an immigrant-advocacy group. Some identified as progressive activists of one kind or another, but the majority were simply residents—entire families, in many cases—demanding political change a day after a mass shooting near their homes. “Silence is Violence,” one handwritten sign read. “CRUSIUS THE KILLER, TRUMP THE ACCOMPLICE,” another read. Yellow flowers represented the twenty killed on Saturday, in a mass shooting at a shopping center in El Paso patronized largely by Hispanics. Volunteers with the Border Network for Human Rights, wearing T-shirts printed with the phrase “Hugs Not Walls,” handed out bottled water in the heat. The event was billed as a “prayer march and rally against hate,” organized by the Border Network and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, whose offices were its end point. It was a quiet walk. But, when engaged, walkers had plenty to say, particularly about Donald Trump’s relationship to the two hundred and fiftieth mass shooting of 2019. (There have since been five more, including the attack in Dayton, Ohio, where nine were shot to death on Sunday morning.)
“Racism has a name,” Fernando Garcia, the founder and executive director of the Border Network, told me in his offices, hours before the march. “And that name lives in the White House. That name is Donald Trump. His rhetoric brought this violence to El Paso.” Garcia went on. “Today we march in the streets. Tomorrow it will be the elections. We will get this racism out of the White House.”
The Perrillo-Gunn family, residents of El Paso for the past fourteen years, walked along the Montana Avenue sidewalk as the procession passed modest homes, barking dogs, people taking cell-phone videos and offering encouragement in Spanish. “After the shooting,” Jonna Perrillo, who teaches English at the University of Texas at El Paso, said, “it was so quiet here. There was so much shock. We hadn’t felt that kind of quiet since we lived in New York, during 9/11.” Perrillo’s husband, Robert Gunn, added, “We were driving our daughter back from camp yesterday when we heard about it. We were told to avoid the mall, where we shop frequently.” She spoke about the cause of the shooting, as she saw it. “There’s an epidemic of white-male rage in this country, which our hateful President stokes. It’s growing. It’s everywhere. Communities of color are under attack. And it comes from the top.” Her daughter Frances listened, quietly.
A giant Trump piñata was strapped to Raul Amaya’s back. “This is my diabolical Donald piñata,” Amaya, a financial-services entrepreneur, said. “I tricked him out,” he went on, noting the horns, devil’s tongue, and Hitler-style mustache affixed to Trump’s likeness. “It works,” Amaya said. “It’s him.” Amaya handed me a piece of paper listing “solutions” he’d come up with, including a twenty-eighth amendment, calling for a doubling of the size of Congress with citizens drafted by lottery from every congressional district. Amaya went on, about Trump, “He’s been bad news for El Paso. He opened his campaign by lying about Mexico and Mexicans coming here. We know about Mexicans! We’re Mexican-Americans. Most of the people coming here are coming for work. Lucky for them, there are a bunch of greedy capitalist Americans ready to hire them. Trump never demonizes those people.” Amaya continued. “Trump is a cruel, cruel man. He’s a bad man. I don’t believe in the devil, but, if there’s such a thing, it’s him.”
Mary Kay Mahowald, a Franciscan sister who has lived in El Paso since 2012, took it all in. “This tragic event is going to motivate us to get our vote out like never before, and change what’s going on in D.C.,” she said. “I don’t know who is going to be the best President, but we must get Trump out of office. He cannot be there, he and his enablers.” She went on. “The separation of the children was bad—that really got us. But this is enough. No more.”
Beto O’Rourke took the stage in his home town and spoke for about fifteen minutes, in front of the Las Americas offices, on which a mural was being painted by the family of a student killed in the Parkland mass shooting, last year. The mural, and the family’s visit, had been planned long in advance of the shooting, to coincide with the birthday of the slain teen, Joaquin Oliver, who would have turned nineteen within hours of the El Paso massacre.
“We have a President right now,” O’Rourke said, pacing the stage, “who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals,’ who calls asylum seekers ‘animals’ and ‘an infestation.’ ” The Presidential candidate went on. “You may call a cockroach an infestation. You may use that word in the Third Reich to describe those who are undesirable, who must be put down, because they are subhuman. You do not expect to hear that in the United States of America, in this age, in our generation, with this beautiful country that decided two hundred and forty-three years ago that we would not define ourselves by race, or ethnicity, or our differences, but by the fact that we are all created equal.” As O’Rourke finished, a man with a dog parted the crowd, muttering, “Fuck Donald Trump.”
Nearby, Isaac Hernandez carried a sign that read “El Paso Strong.” Hernandez, an eighteen-year-old film student at New Mexico State University, grew up here. He was accompanied by a friend also carrying a sign, which read “El Paso Is Not a Target For Trump’s Fascist Minions.” Hernandez explained, “It’s crazy. You’d never think something like that would happen here. We’re such a good community. Everywhere you go, you feel safe here.” He went on. “I don’t know who to blame except the politicians who don’t make strict enough gun policy. We need more background checks.”
On Monday morning, President Trump tweeted a call for universal background checks on gun purchasers, but pushed his immigration agenda in the same thread. In a subsequent nine-minute speech, about the killings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, he called for mental-health reform and red-flag laws. Trump also condemned white nationalism, saying, “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.” He went on, “Hate has no place in America.”
Shortly afterward, I spoke again to Sister Mahowald, and she dismissed the President’s change in course. “Background checks,” she told me, laughing. “About time!” She went on. “I wish I could believe it. I just can’t. I don’t trust him. We need someone else in the White House saying those words—not him. Not him.”
That sentiment seemed to pervade the city in the wake of the shooting. “He’s part of the problem,” Mario Porras, the director of binational affairs at the El Paso Community Foundation and a former aide to Beto O’Rourke, told me, referring to Trump. “He’s not part of the solution.” Porras went on. “But, even if he’s voted out next year, what’s the lasting effect that he’s had? That’s what I fear, too.”
Robert Márquez had just returned from visiting his mother in Stockton, California, just a couple hours from Gilroy, where a mass shooting took place a week earlier. “Such sadness,” Marquez, a novelist from El Paso who recently retired from a government job, told me during the prayer march. “This town, this kind of violence doesn’t happen here. I never imagined it.” He went on. “The President, his tone. He says he doesn’t mean to, but when you imply something about Mexicans or the border—when you say this is the most violent place—this is on you. I don’t care what you say afterwards.”
DMT.NEWS
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Charles Bethea, BruceDayne
