El Paso, August 5 (RHC)-- U.S. Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, Texas -- the site of a recent mass shooting that left at least 20 people dead -- said that President Donald Trump was "not welcome" in her city if he came to visit because of his provocative rhetoric about Hispanics and immigrants.
"Words have consequences. T he president has made my community and my people the enemy," Escobar said Monday during an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe." She added: "He has told the country that we are people to be feared, people to be hated."
El Paso police said the 21-year-old suspect published a "manifesto" before his shooting that had anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric. Saturday’s massacre was one of three mass shootings in the United States within a span of 24 hours, unleashing fresh alarm at the national crisis of gun violence.
On Sunday, a 24-year-old gunman killed nine people in a rampage in Dayton, Ohio. That shooting came seven days after a teenager killed three people with an assault rifle at a food festival in California before taking his own life.
"I hope that [Trump] has the self-awareness to understand that we are in pain, and we are mourning, and we are doing the very best in our typical, graceful, El Paso way to be resilient," Escobar said.
"And so I would ask his staff and his team to consider the fact that his words and his actions have played a role in this," she added. The lawmaker said that Hispanic people "have been dehumanized by the president and his enablers" and that this was "one of the lowest points in American history."
Violence committed by white men inspired by an extremist ideology makes up a growing number of domestic terrorism cases, according to a recent report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The shooter in El Paso, located on the U.S.-Mexico border, is described as a Trump supporter who wrote a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto just hours before committing the massacre. The four-page document is entitled “The Inconvenient Truth.”
The manifesto says: "This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion,” begins the screed. The manifesto includes lots of white supremacist language, such as claiming that the writer was “against race mixing.”
One political observer noted that it is interesting that the young man would conveniently forget history, noting that Texas -- only a little more than 170 years ago -- was a part of Mexico. The "invasion" was by U.S. Army troops, led by Sam Houston in 1836, which forced Mexico to abandon the state and Texas was annexed to the United States. The Mexicans in Texas were there before the white 'invaders' arrived.
