Sunday’s New York Times was loaded with hostile anti-administration stories, including “As El Paso Gunman Faces Sentencing, the Hate That Inspired Him Rises Again.”
Reporters Edgar Sandoval and Reyes Mata III tried to hang the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso on President Trump right from the online subhead: “The lawyer of the white supremacist who slaughtered 23 people in 2019 said his client was inspired by President Trump’s words, the same the president is using today.”
Trump’s part in that ghastly crime? Declaring the then-rampaging invasion at the southern border was an “invasion.”
Five and a half years ago, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old with a documented history of mental illness, stopped at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, heard everyone around him speaking in Spanish, and decided “the invasion” that then-President Donald J. Trump often spoke of was underway.
Mr. Crusius’s rampage on Aug. 3, 2019, took the lives of 23 people, both U.S. citizens and Mexican nationals who had crossed the border to do some shopping, becoming the deadliest attack on Hispanic civilians in American history.
His attorney, Joe Spencer, said on Tuesday in an interview ahead of his client’s sentencing hearing scheduled for April 21 for state charges that Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric was to blame. The president’s words, combined with “severe mental illness,” fueled Mr. Crusius’s hate, the lawyer said in his office in El Paso.
At a time when the Trump administration has dramatically secured the border and deported over 100,000 illegal immigrants, the Times is sticking with a narrative from 2019.
The ugly saga, which began in a fusillade of bullets and was then mired by legal setbacks and red tape, concludes this month just as the same anti-immigration rhetoric that may have inspired the Walmart gunman returns with Mr. Trump’s second administration. The president is embarking on an aggressive campaign to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and the word “invasion” is now a legal pretext for deportations and foreign incarceration with little to no due process, critics say.
That has cast a pall over El Paso just when the families of the victims and survivors of the deadly shooting of 2019 must confront the crime again. Christopher Morales, 39, whose aunt was killed that day and whose mother and grandmother suffered severe injures, said Mr. Trump’s influence will be on his mind when he attends the sentencing hearing.
“I do believe that Donald Trump and all of the things that he was spreading had everything to do with him, the shooter, making his decision to come and shoot my family,” Mr. Morales said.
Not mentioned: The wide popularity among not-hateful people of the measures targeting illegal immigrants, especially those affiliated with criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13.
Mental illness and white supremacy proved to be an incendiary mix. The gunman became lost in racist, far-right corners of the internet that espoused the “White Replacement” theory, a conspiracy that maintains people of color are being imported to the country to destroy the power and prosperity of white people, Mr. Spencer said.
Is it really a “conspiracy” that liberals would welcome immigrants, illegal or legal, who will eventually start voting Democrat? It was conventional wisdom not that long ago. Politico took the idea of seriously in a 2013 article: “Immigration reform could be bonanza for Democrats.”
After romanticizing El Paso, "seen as an Ellis Island of the Southwest," Sandoval found yet another liberal to link Trump to the massacre.
Ruby Montana, 43, a lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Chicano Studies Department, told hundreds of people gathered earlier this week to commemorate Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American civil rights leader, that the mass shooting was intertwined with Mr. Trump’s aggressive policies toward illegal immigration.
This badly disguised editorial was not presented as Democrat spin, a choice of murder anecdotes. Texas-based Sandoval didn't report on the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray at the hands of illegal aliens from Venezuela last year, but the Times spit at the topic as a Trump talking point. The subhead of one J. David Goodman story was “The killing of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston has become the latest crime seized on by Republicans to attack President Biden over his immigration policies.”
The story repeated: “Suddenly the killing, which had ripped apart a Houston family, became the latest flashpoint in the debate over immigration, seized on by Republicans and immigration opponents who drew a direct line between the crime and President Biden's policies at the border.” These were “conservative media” anecdotes, he wrote.
