El Paso, August 11 (RHC)-- U.S. protesters have marched against racism in the Texas border city of El Paso -- one week after a gunman massacred 22 people while targeting Mexicans. 

At a rally, the crowd was told by a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate that the American president was partly responsible for the hatred that triggered it.  “Not only did El Paso bear the brunt of this hatred and this racism perpetrated not just by white nationalists and terrorists and Klansmen and neo-Nazis but by the very president of the United States of America himself,” said former US congressman Beto O’Rouke.  

The rally on Saturday was made up of more than 100 protesters that marched to El Paso’s courthouse, across the street from the jail holding the shooter of last week’s carnage.  According to a police affidavit released over the weekend, the gunman in the rampage -- identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius -- killed the 22 mostly Hispanic victims and injured scores of others when he opened fire at a Walmart store last Saturday and later confessed after surrendering to police that he was in fact targeting “Mexican.”

U.S. law enforcement agencies further revealed that just prior to the mass shooting, Crusius had posted a manifesto online that was rife with anti-immigrant hatred, explaining his motivation and decrying a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States.

The Saturday’s rally in El Paso – dubbed “March for a United America” -- was organized by Washington-based League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest Hispanic civil rights group.

Also addressing the crowd taking part in the rally was Jessica Coca Garcia, who was shot in the legs last Saturday and whose husband was also injured in the Walmart massacred, as she struggled to rise from a wheelchair to speak.  “Racism is something I always wanted to think didn’t exist,” she said. “Obviously it does.”