It has now been six 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 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 prior to the shooting by the gunman on 8chan, now rebranded as 8kun, he unambiguously articulated his desire to kill Mexicans in order to stop the so-called ‘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 federal charges in connection with the shooting and was sentenced in early July of 2023 to 90 consecutive life sentences. On April 21st of this year, Crusius pleaded guilty to all state charges including capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault and was subsequently sentenced to 23 concurrent life sentences.
I am, of course, willing to readily acknowledge that Crusius is accountable at an immediate level for the shooting.
But there are others who also bear responsibility for what happened in El Paso on that terrible day in August six years ago including and perhaps especially Donald Trump. 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 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 enemy in this scenario to be. He would launch his first campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals” and since then has rarely missed an opportunity to denigrate Mexicans including Mexican Americans.
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 reportedly acknowledged that Trump’s rhetoric served to inspire him to commit the attack. Although this point may be subject to legitimate debate, Crusius admitted, at least according to his defense attorney, 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[.]”
But it wasn’t just Trump. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also bears responsibility for the attack. As reported by the Texas Tribune, just 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.”
In the days following the El Paso Walmart Shooting, Abbott even acknowledged that ‘mistakes were made’ in the choice of language used in his fundraising letter.
This acknowledgement hasn’t stopped him or Trump or other Republicans from continuing to recklessly traffic in this aggressive anti-Mexican rhetoric. On June 10th, during a speech at Fort Bragg, for example, Trump claimed that Los Angeles was being “invaded” by rioters “bearing foreign flags.” This was a clear and unmistakable reference to Mexican American protestors brandishing the Mexican flag during anti-ICE protests that had erupted at the time in Los Angeles.
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 the heinous act that occurred in El Paso on August 3rd of 2019. Because it was domestic white supremacist terrorism, however, this larger narrative about the attack is being sanitized and suppressed and scrubbed clean of any references to Trump and Abbott and others.
Many local political figures have conveniently chosen to increasingly ignore this element of the attack. A year ago, during his speech at the unveiling of the latest set of memorials at Ascarate Park, for example, Judge Ricardo Samaniego, 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.
Although I was not in a position to personally attend any of the memorials occurring this year, it is my understanding at this point that not a single local political figure made any explicit reference to Trump or Abbott in this year’s commemorations. And from what I have been able to determine, there also weren’t any explicit references to Trump or Abbott in the context of the El Paso Walmart Shooting on the social media accounts of any member of the Texas Legislature representing El Paso districts.
To her credit, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, has consistently called out Trump and the role that his rhetoric played in inciting the attack, and she did so again on Sunday in a social media post.
She also courageously called out Trump six years ago in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, in an interview featured on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” when 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.
Unfortunately, Escobar appears to be the only local political figure who continues to confront Trump directly on this situation. Recognition of the catalytic role that anti-Mexican rhetoric played in the attack in general appears to be waning to say the least, and it’s not exactly certain whether the larger truth about why this tragic incident occurred will even continue to be told by local political figures or the local media.
What does remain abundantly clear, however, is that El Paso’s Mexican American community, both now and in the future, deserves to know the larger context of the attack including the catalytic role that anti-Mexican rhetoric employed by Trump and Abbott and other Republicans played in inciting the attack. It will ultimately be incumbent upon members of the Mexican American community to ensure that the truth of this larger narrative is never forgotten.
Cover photo credit: The Healing Garden at Ascarate Park, August 3, 2025, Aldo Mena/Fronterizo News.
