On Saturday, August 3, 2019, twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius drove nine hours across Texas from suburban Dallas to the western border city of El Paso. After warning that whites were being replaced by foreigners, a manifesto linked to his name on the far-right web forum 8-chan went on to state: “if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.” Echoing the Trumpian terminology already employed in several thousand reelection ads on Facebook, the manifesto’s author warned that his imminent attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Once in El Paso, the suspected shooter headed for one of the ten busiest Walmarts in the country, a common destination both for the local Hispanic community and Mexican shoppers crossing the border from Ciudad Juárez. Wielding what was likely a WASR-10 semi-automatic rifle — legally, thanks to Texas’s 2016 open-carry law — the shooter reportedly opened fire in the parking lot before continuing his rampage inside. In a few minutes, it was over. As of this writing, twenty-two people have died with twenty-six more wounded, the overwhelming majority either Mexican citizens (eight dead, six injured) or Mexican-Americans.It was the most lethal attack on the Mexican community since the atrocities committed along the Texas-Mexico border in the decade of the 1910s.