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Why El Paso?
The Accused is From the Dallas Area, Which has Plenty of Potential Victims
Twenty dead and twenty-six injured. (Edited on August 5 to reflect the new reality of 22 dead and 24 injured.)Twenty is more murders than El Paso normally sees in a year. People are standing in long lines to donate blood and I just saw on the tube a fellow bringing slices of pizzas to the people in the line.
People who don’t live in the borderlands need to understand that El Paso is a very safe place. Sister city Ciudad Juárez (formerly known as Paseo del Norte) went through a rough patch with cartel violence starting in 2007. The murder rate peaked in 2010 and has declined every year since. About 20,000 people cross the international border daily on foot to work, to go to school, to shop.
With all the huffing and puffing in Washington, I know it may be hard to believe how utterly ordinary crossing the border is. Certain kinds of shopping happen on the American side and other kinds on the Mexican side. Business deals are cut at restaurants on both sides of the border without regard to where they will be performed.
The narrative of hostility along the border, of Hispanic invasion, reached a crescendo of absurdity when President Trump mobilized military forces to “protect” us from “caravans” of brown people from Central America.
