Donald Trump and his administration may have already forgotten about the El Paso terror attack, but El Paso hasn’t. Rep. Veronica Escobar on Friday chaired a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship field hearing on anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies and how hateful rhetoric influenced the kind of domestic terrorism that resulted in the killing of 22 people last month in the peaceful border community.
“Anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise today and is inflamed by President Trump,” she said in her opening remarks. “Criminals, rapists, drug dealers. That’s how then-candidate Trump described Mexicans when he launched his campaign.” That rhetoric, she continued, “has only escalated over time.”
The hearing was originally intended to examine the administration’s anti-immigrant policies, the El Paso Times reports, “but following last month’s mass shooting—the largest anti-Latino attack in recent U.S. history—the hearing was expanded to include the relationship between the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and domestic terrorism.”
That relationship is undeniable: The white supremacist who targeted El Paso complained about a supposed “Hispanic invasion” of Texas, mirroring Trump’s rhetoric. In fact, as Escobar noted, a USA Today analysis found that Trump has spewed violent, anti-immigrant rhetoric more than 500 times since 2017, including using the word “invasion” at least 19 times.
“Many of us were absolutely stunned when, at a Florida rally in May, the President rhetorically asked the crowd what he should do with migrants who crossed the border,” she continued. “One of the President’s supporters yelled, ‘shoot them!’ And the President laughed.”
This terrorism targeted Latinos and should be a national security concern, yet not one Republican showed up at Escobar’s field hearing. “Unnamed Republican representatives had planned to attend, Escobar said, but ‘backed out at the last minute’ for unknown reasons,” the El Paso Times continued. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler said, “Either they don’t really care about these issues or they’re intimated by the president and the administration, [or] maybe both.”
According to the El Paso Times, “The other recommendations focused on immigration and included ending Trump's existing policies of separating families at the border and making asylum seekers wait in Mexico, as well as increasing public oversight of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ensuring migrants have access to legal representation.”
Under the inhumane “Remain in Mexico” policy, 38,000 vulnerable asylum-seekers have been forced to wait out their immigration cases in dangerous regions where assaults, murders, and kidnappings are common. In one instance, kidnappers targeted a shelter “looking for Cuban migrants, favored targets because relatives in the United States are known to pay exorbitant ransoms to free abducted loved ones.” They instead stole the Rev. Aarón Méndez, the pastor who runs the shelter. He hasn’t been seen for a month now.
“Those sent back suffer harassment and danger,” Escobar continued. “One father of a young family was kidnapped and beaten while trying to find diapers. Another young woman was raped by Mexican federal police. In my nine months in Congress, it is clearer than ever that this administration governs with cruelty.”
Cruelty that will damage children into their adulthoods. A recent Department of Health and Human Services watchdog report found that children kidnapped from their parents under the administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy suffered “fear, feelings of abandonment, and post-traumatic stress” as a result of their separation, with some kids believing that their parents had abandoned them, while others “expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably.”
“We must understand the human toll of these policies, the inhumanity and the indignities that immigrants suffer as we consider funding for the departments that execute those policies,” Escobar said. “And as for the anti-immigrant rhetoric, for many of us those words have become a matter of life and death.”
