It has now been seven 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 now-convicted gunman, Patrick Crusius, had managed to kill 22 people. A twenty-third victim would die from his injuries approximately nine months later.
Crusius pleaded guilty in February of 2023 to 90 federal charges in connection with the shooting and was sentenced in early July of 2023 to 90 consecutive life sentences. On April 21, 2025, he pleaded guilty to capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault and was subsequently sentenced to 23 concurrent life sentences. He is currently serving his sentence in a general-population state prison near Palestine, Texas.
It wasn’t difficult to establish that Crusius was targeting people of Mexican descent. In fact, in the online manifesto he posted on 8chan prior to the shooting, he unambiguously articulated his desire to kill Mexicans in order to stem the so-called “invasion” of his beloved Texas. He would also openly admit to investigators in the immediate 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.
It is, of course, important to acknowledge that Crusius is accountable at an immediate level for the shooting.
But it’s also important to acknowledge that there are others who also bear responsibility for what happened in El Paso on that terrible day in August seven years ago including and perhaps especially Trump. On both the campaign trail and as president, Trump relentlessly warned that America was being “invaded” and “under attack” by immigrants crossing the Mexican border.
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 “invader” in this scenario to be. He would, after all, launch his first campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals” and repeatedly promised to “build a great, great wall” on the border with Mexico.
There’s really no need to even speculate anymore about the influence that Trump’s heightened anti-Mexican rhetoric had on the shooter. Crusius himself has confirmed, at least according to his defense attorney, that Trump’s rhetoric served to directly inspire him to commit the attack. Although this point is certainly open to legitimate debate, Crusius apparently admitted through the course of extensive attorney-client conversations that he believed that “he was acting at the direction of President Donald Trump when he murdered 23 people and wounded 22 others at an El Paso Walmart in 2019[.]”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also bears some level of responsibility for the attack. As reported by the Texas Tribune, just one day before the shooting occurred, Abbott circulated a two-page fundraising mailer in which he “spoke in alarmist terms about the need to ‘DEFEND’ Texas at the border.” Echoing a version of the Great Replacement Theory, 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.”
While the mailer did not explicitly call for violence, the language in Abbott’s mailer clearly portrayed the Mexican border as the site of an existential battle requiring Texans to “DEFEND” themselves against an impending invasion and political takeover presumably by Mexican immigrants.
In the days following the El Paso Walmart Shooting, even Abbott acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the choice of language used in his fundraising letter.
This acknowledgement certainly didn’t stop him from continuing to recklessly traffic in this aggressive anti-Mexican rhetoric.
In January of 2024, for example, during a radio interview with Dana Loesch, Abbott seemed to lament the fact that Texas law enforcement officials were prevented from shooting migrants crossing the Mexican border because “of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Trump has also continued to traffic in this anti-Mexican rhetoric. On June 10th, 2025, during a speech at Fort Bragg, Trump claimed that Los Angeles was being “invaded” by rioters “bearing foreign flags.” The so-called invaders that Trump was targeting were, in all likelihood, Mexican American demonstrators, and the foreign flag he was referencing was not the flag of some foreign adversary. It was the Mexican flag.
If Jewish Americans had been the target of a Trump-inspired attack like the El Paso Walmart Shooting, the Anti-Defamation League and a multitude of other Jewish American advocacy organizations would have justifiably made sure that this feature of the attack was prominently positioned within the narrative of the event and never forgotten.
If an attack of this nature had occurred in the context of Islamic extremism, there would have been serious conversations about stochastic terrorism, and the net would have undoubtedly been cast much wider in an effort to ascribe ideological responsibility for the attack. Because it was domestic white supremacist terrorism and because it was Trump, Abbott, and other Republicans who inspired the attack, most political figures have conveniently chosen to pull their punches and increasingly ignore this element of the attack.
To her credit, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, has consistently denounced Trump and the role that his rhetoric played in inciting the attack. During an interview featured on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in the aftermath of the shooting, she explained that Trump “has made my community and my people the enemy.” She would accordingly ask Trump not to visit El Paso in the days following the attack. When Trump visited anyways, she rightfully refused to meet with him.
Last year, Escobar clearly referenced the rhetoric that inspired the attack noting in a social media post that in “the days and years before the shooting, Donald Trump so repeatedly demonized Latinos that the man who drove over 10 hours to target our community believed he was fulfilling the president’s wishes.” She also clearly acknowledged that “Trump’s hateful rhetoric created fertile ground for extremists to justify violence against innocent people.”
This year, unfortunately, even she has apparently fallen silent about this feature of the attack.
As a week of commemorations of the shooting come to a close in El Paso, 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. National media outlets stopped covering the shooting years ago, and all that local media outlets had to offer this year was anemic and fleeting coverage of the incident.
But, as the years continue to pass, it’s important to remember that the El Paso Walmart Shooting was not just a random act of violence or just another mass shooting. It was a targeted attack on people of Mexican descent, carried out by a man who had been inspired by the anti-Mexican rhetoric of Trump, Abbott, and other Republicans.
And, ultimately, it will be incumbent upon Mexican Americans to continue to tell this larger truth about that horrible day in August seven years ago.
Cover photograph credit: Grand Candela, Walmart, 7101 Gateway Blvd., August 2, 2025, Aldo Mena/Fronterizo.
