By Mario Carrillo
In politics, words are not just words — they are tools, weapons and blueprints. When President Trump and other elected leaders refer to immigration at the southern border as an “invasion,” they are not merely using metaphor, but creating an ideological battleground in which violence becomes not only justifiable to some, but necessary.
Such dehumanizing and violent language extends well beyond immigration to all facets of American society. It encourages violence as the answer to all of our challenges.
I’ve long criticized President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, even telling the Washington Post days after the El Paso shooting in 2019 that then-President Trump could have easily pushed back against one of his supporters, who at a Florida rally in May of that year, yelled out that migrants crossing the border should be shot, while the President smirked and made a snide comment.
Now, years later, the El Paso gunman’s defense attorney has explicitly stated that his client believed he was “doing Trump’s work” by stopping the so-called “Hispanic invasion,” and points to that exact rally in Florida as his breaking point and when he decided to purchase his firearms.
Of course, the White House and other Republicans haven’t said a word about this, but it’s important that we let that sink in: a mass murderer believed he was acting on behalf of the president of the United States.
This is not a fringe interpretation of Trump’s language — it is a logical endpoint. When a political leader repeatedly uses dehumanized and militarized language like “invasion” or “infestation,” going as far as saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, framing immigrants not as fellow human beings, but as enemy combatants, it encourages people to believe they are under siege and must respond with force.
The El Paso shooter made that leap.
The murderer cited the “great replacement” conspiracy theory in his manifesto — an ideology that claims white Americans are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants. This theory has been echoed in far-right media and alluded to by Trump himself during rallies and speeches.
And now, in 2025, the dangerous dehumanization of migrants continues unabated.
Trump continues to see immigration as a zero-sum threat to American identity, his rhetoric is as inflammatory as ever, and his immigration policies during his second administration bear that out.
We’re fewer than 100 days into his second administration, and his campaign promises of mass deportations are becoming a reality. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going into communities and ensnaring parents and their children, students with visas, people with permission to be in the United States, including green card holders, into this wide enforcement net and it’s become a real threat to due process and the rule of law.
He’s also sending people, the vast majority without criminal record, to CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing. But despite a clear order from the Supreme Court that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of a Maryland father, it continues to delay and obfuscate.
This disregard for due process is unprecedented and has to be understood in Trump’s worldview of the U.S. being under invasion and this being his response. Not to mention that most of the migrants who have been sent to El Salvador without due process have been summarily deported using an archaic wartime act that was last used primarily on Americans of Japanese descent who were sent to U.S. internment camps during World War II.
And recently, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said at a Border Expo panel in Phoenix that deportations should be treated like a business, “like (Amazon) Prime, but for humans.”
Clearly, the nearly six years since the violence in El Paso have not made Republicans, and especially those in Trump’s orbit, rethink how they talk about immigrants, and the dehumanization is simply a tactic to make their cruelty seem more palatable. It’s disgusting.
White House advisor Stephen Miller recently tweeted, “If every foreign trespasser gets to have their own federal trial prior to removal then there is no liberation. There is no restoration. The invasion will be made complete.”
These comments should send a chill down any American’s spine. A restoration toward what exactly?
The admission from a convicted murderer that he felt he was doing the president’s work in carrying out the El Paso massacre should be a reminder about the dangerous consequences of immigration rhetoric that dehumanizes, inflames, and misinforms. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like President Trump or his allies care or are prepared to learn the lessons we in El Paso know all too well.
Mario Carrillo of El Paso is campaigns director at America’s Voice.
The post Opinion: El Paso’s mass shooting is proof of the impact of words. Trump and Republicans don’t care appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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