A man accused of killing nearly two dozen people in a mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart said it was “in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.
Patrick Crusius changed his plea to guilty to federal charges weeks after the US government said it would not seek the death penalty for hate crimes and firearms violations. He still faces a potential death sentence if convicted on a state capital murder charge in the 2019 "racist" shooting that resulted in the deaths of 23 people.
He had pleaded not guilty in the state case, but last months his lawyers said he would be entering a guilty plea to the federal charges. According to court records, Crusius, 24, a Texan, surrendered to the police after the massacre, saying, “I’m the shooter”, and that he had been targeting Mexicans.
The prosecution told the court that Crusius had driven for more than 10 hours from his hometown near Dallas to the largely Latino border city of El Paso having allegedly just published on the internet a document stating that his actions would be “in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” — echoing anti-immigration rhetoric of American politics at the time and racist screeds put out by other mass killers in the US and elsewhere.
In 2019, a lawyer for the Crusius family said that they had never heard the killer use the kind of racist and anti-immigrant language that was posted in the online screed.
But more than three years after the shooting, the description of an “invasion” on the US-Mexico border by Republicans has continued in American politics, angering Democrats and migrants' rights groups. Republicans had been increasingly describing high numbers of migrant crossings into the US as an "invasion", threatening public safety and overwhelming border communities.
Critics have since condemned the rhetoric as anti-immigrant and dangerous in the aftermath of El Paso and other racially motivated attacks. The shooting on August 3 2019 happened on a busy weekend at a Walmart popular with shoppers from Mexico and the US. In addition to those killed, more than two dozen were injured and hundreds more were scarred by being present or having a loved one wounded.
Many of the dead and wounded were Mexican citizens.
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