Texas

Texas governor decried for ‘disgusting’ rhetoric in wake

of mass shooting
Republican Greg Abbott condemned for calling Honduran victims
of Friday night shooting in rural Cleveland ‘illegal immigrants’
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Edwin Rios
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manThank you.
accused of fatally
shooting five people after some of them complained about his firing a rifle in his yard,
Single
the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, went Monthly AnnualOropeza
out of his way to describe Francisco
and those he allegedly murdered as “illegal immigrants”.
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The Republican’s words drew ire from immigration advocates, state and federal
lawmakers and other politicians as Abbott’s words hewed closely with his track record
Other
of using anti-immigrant rhetoric in the wake of mass shootings.

TheyContinue
decried Abbott’s rhetoric – which appeared on Twitter but not in his office’s
statement – as dehumanizing and indicative of an attempt to deflect attention from the
role Republican lawmakers played in shaping Texas’s lax gun laws that Democrats say
have created an unsafe environment for residents.

As of Monday, law enforcement authorities had not confirmed the

immigration status of the five people killed. The victims, which included a young boy
and two women who were shielding children from gunfire, were all from Honduras.
Oropeza, who remained at large on Monday morning as federal and local enforcement
frantically searched for him, was a Mexican national who had reportedly been
previously deported from the US.

Political discussions of those facts prompted the local sheriff, Greg Capers of San
Jacinto, to say they were irrelevant to investigators.

“My heart is with this … boy,” Capers told reporters. “He was in my county, five people
died in my county, and that is where my heart is – in my county, protecting my people
to the best of our ability.”

In his statements, Abbott also noted that he would tell state officials to “alert Operation
Lone Star soldiers and troopers to be on the lookout for the criminal and any attempts
to flee the country after taking the lives of five people”. The operation, which started in
2021, enabled Abbott to declare a security crisis at Texas’s border with Mexico – where
crossings have risen in recent years – and deploy the state’s national guard there.

Critics have decried how the operation has cost Texas taxpayers millions of dollars
weekly while its participants make arrests that are physically distant from the border,
not
As related to crimes there,
2023 unfolds, willand involve
you law enforcement
support us? agencies not directly part of
Operation Lone Star, according to reporting from the Texas Tribune, ProPublica and
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the Marshall Project.
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Julián Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio who served as secretary for the
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Department of Housing and Urban Development before he ran for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2020, criticized Abbott for using anti-immigrant rhetoric
when “five human beings lost their lives”.

State senator Roland

$5 perGutierrez
month – a Democratic lawmaker whose
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monthincludes
Uvalde, where 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers were shot to
death by an intruder last year – went on Twitter
Other to call Abbott’s statement a “new low”.

Abbott, Gutierrez maintained, continued to “do nothing to keep #Texas safe from
Continue
#GunViolence”.
Gutierrez, who is likely to run against the Republican Ted Cruz for his US Senate seat,
told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez on Sunday that the state’s GOP members were
responsible for loosening gun laws, noting that there were more than 20 pieces of gun
control legislation that have not moved.

“They don’t get to have an immigration narrative today,” Guiterrez said. “They need to
own the narrative that they have made this state more dangerous … An undocumented
person was able to buy an AR-15 illegally somewhere because of their lax gun laws.”

State Republicans have routinely rejected more gun restrictions, including in the wake
of a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 and at the Uvalde school.
Instead, they have loosened them, despite initially signaling they were open to some
restrictions.

In 2021, two years after the El Paso shooting, Abbott signed a so-called “constitutional
carry” law that allows Texas residents to carry handguns without a license or training.

Texas joins more than half the US in allowing the permitless carrying of firearms. In
April, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law making his state the
latest to allow the carrying of concealed firearms without a license or training, less
than seven years after a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others at the Pulse
nightclub in Orlando.

Despite calls from the families of Uvalde victims for tougher gun laws, Republican
Texas lawmakers have refused to act, and the state’s gun laws have gotten looser. Last
August,
As 2023 a federal judge will
unfolds, struckyou
downsupport
a Texas lawus?
that raised the legal age for people to
carry handguns from 18 to 21.
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Republican, found that American voters favor gun control measures and worry that
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firearms violence will victimize them.

Police recovered an AR-15-style rifle that they say Oropeza used in Friday’s shooting. It
is unclear how he obtained it.
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The Immigration Legal Resource Center tweeted that Abbott’s rhetoric amplified a
“specific narrative” rather than focusing on the people involved.
Other
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus tweeted that Abbott, by centering the victims’
unconfirmed
Continue immigration status, decided to “dehumanize” and “delegitimize” their
lives. Congressperson Chuy García of Illinois, one of the caucus’s members, added that
Abbott would “take every chance he gets to dehumanize migrants. Even if they were
murdered in a mass shooting.”

Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso in Congress, called Abbott’s rhetoric a

“disgusting lack of compassion and humanity”.

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