This Is What Latinos Think Everyone Got Wrong About El Paso

But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. She had been crying because her husband overheard white men at the community pool remarking that while they didn’t agree with the killings — how magnanimous — they, too, didn’t want white people to be “wiped out” and for Hispanics to “take over.” Story Continued BelowWhere was this said? But what makes El Paso different is that people were targeted, not by someone pledging themselves to ISIS, but to white supremacy.“Now Hispanic Americans have been targeted, some who are immigrants, and all who have limited political power,” I wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. They were from biracial people, but also from white people who explained that their sister had married a Latino man and that means they have two Latina nieces, or a grandson, and they’re scared of the ways their neighbors might try to hurt them — with words they won’t forget or violence that could take them away forever.A Latina in a predominantly Hispanic border city “very much like El Paso” told me she has a new job, overseeing a team of mostly Hispanic staff, with her name on the door — something to really be proud of. It was a new method for separating families, but with the same result.At first I didn’t watch the video of 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio tearfully begging the government to release her father every time it popped up online, because while as a journalist I understand the news value of these images to show the human cost of Trump’s immigration policy, I’ve personally found it hard to continue looking at haunting images like it. CNN’s Nicole Chavez covered how “Walmart united Americans and Mexicans in El Paso for decades” and the network’s Nick Valencia convened a round table of Hispanics from El Paso about “The Impact of Trump’s Rhetoric on Hispanic Americans.” For the “CBS Evening News,” Manuel Bojorquez spoke to a roundtable of El Paso Latinos, one of whom said Trump “has been poisoning so many people with his words and targeting us Latinos when all we do is work.”I believe in and am still awed by the power of journalism, of documenting people’s stories so better-informed citizens can rally around their neighbors and cast out the ignorance that led to this shameful stain on our country’s history.