“Hispanic invasion of Texas”… “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion”… These are the kinds of racist, anti-immigrant poison that could well have come from the Republi-fascist National Convention just a few weeks ago.
But they were actually part of a rant that a white supremacist gunman posted online five years ago on August 3, 2019 in El Paso, Texas—shortly before he opened fire at a Walmart packed with hundreds of Latino people, taking the lives of 23 people and leaving two dozen others wounded. The massacre sparked outrage and spread terror among immigrants, Latino people and others in El Paso and far beyond.
This Walmart was usually very busy and known as a popular shopping spot for people from the Mexican city of Juárez. Many older people also came here to deposit their benefit checks. The killer had driven over 600 miles from a white Dallas suburb. Reaching El Paso, he parked in the Walmart lot and posted a fascist manifesto. It began with an expression of support for the man who, a few months earlier, massacred 51 people at a mosque in New Zealand. Shortly before that bloody rampage, that New Zealand killer posted an online document promoting the white supremacist “theory” called “the great replacement,” which claims there is a conspiracy in Europe and the U.S. to replace white people with non-white immigrants. The El Paso killer went on in his own manifesto to rant about how Latino immigrants were taking over the economy and the government, and that attacking “low security” targets was the way to “fight to reclaim my country from destruction."
Before he even entered the store, this racist mass murderer shot several people outside, including some at a fundraising event for a girls soccer team. According to one report on the massacre: “Security video showed a skinny young man marching through the front door of the Walmart in a black T-shirt and khaki pants, carrying an AK-47 military-style rifle with an extended capacity magazine. Witnesses say he went aisle by aisle through a store packed with people stocking up on back-to-school supplies. The dead included at least three Mexican citizens and a 25-year-old mother of three who was shot while holding her two-month-old baby.” One survivor recalled how when the shooting started, “I started yelling in Spanish and in English vamonos, vamonos, let's go ..." She may have saved dozens of lives—but the killer murdered and seriously injured others before leaving the scene and later being captured.
Just a week before the El Paso massacre, another white racist fired at a mostly Latino crowd at a festival in Gilroy, California, killing three people. That gunman also posted a white supremacist document shortly before the murders. The previous October, a white supremacist massacred 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after putting up an online post attacking a refugee-related charity linked with the synagogue for “bring[ing] in hostile invaders to dwell among us.”
These and other vicious attacks took place at the height of the fascist regime headed by Trump, who called people from Mexico “drug dealers… rapists… criminals,” slandered non-white immigrants as coming from “shithole countries,” and put tens of thousands of immigrants in concentration camps on the border while forcibly separating families.
And what’s happened since then? Violent attacks on Latinos have increased. Biden came into the White House promising a turn away from Trump on immigrants and the border—but, as Bob Avakian says in his social media message number 26, “Crime and Anti-Immigrant Racism”:
While not using the same blatantly racist language as the fascists, the Democratic Party president, Genocide Joe Biden, has deported and expelled more immigrants than any other president, and has vowed to shut down the border, and essentially eliminate asylum for people coming from countries where they are persecuted.
At the same time, Trump and the MAGA fascist movement he heads are even more aggressive and rabid in their anti-immigrant hysteria, as could be seen in the Republican National Convention in mid-July, with Trump and others blaming “illegal immigrants” for committing rape and murder “every damn day,” and pledging to mount “the largest deportation operation in the history” of the U.S. if elected.
In his social media message number 26, Bob Avakian sharply hits at the anti-immigrant lies (and those among the people who are getting played by those lies), pointing to the reality:
It is the capitalist-imperialist system, and the U.S. most of all, that has ruined the lives of masses of people in Mexico, Central America, and many other places, forcing huge numbers to migrate in already desperate conditions, and then putting up dangerous barriers that can kill them for the “crime” of trying to enter the very country (the “good ole USA”) which has driven them to desperation in the first place!
And:
Looking at the reality of all this, and how it is part of the continuing atrocities that have been committed by the rulers of this country, from the beginning and right down to today: How can any decent person go along with this racist anti-immigrant hysteria? How can any decent person support either the Republicans or the Democrats—when both are instruments of the monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism? How can any decent person defend this system and deny that we need a revolution to overthrow this system?