Photograph: Go Nakamura/Reuters
After a barrage of public criticism from immigration advocates, Latino state lawmakers and Congress members, Texas’s Republican governor Greg Abbott has backtracked from controversial remarks he made referring to the victims of a recent mass murder as “illegal immigrants”.
“Any loss of life is a tragedy, and our hearts go out to the families who have lost a loved one,” Renae Eze, a spokesperson for Abbott, told ABC News in a statement about those slain in a shooting in Cleveland, Texas, on Friday night. “Federal officials provided the state of Texas information on the criminal and the victims, including that they were in the country illegally. We’ve since learned that at least one of the victims may have been in the United States legally.”
Eze’s statement also apologized “if the information was incorrect and detracted from the important goal of finding and arresting” the accused killer in the case, who remained at large as of Tuesday.
Francisco Oropeza allegedly killed five neighbors – including a young boy and two women shielding children – in Cleveland after members of the family asked him to move farther away if he was going to fire a rifle in his yard. Oropeza, 38, had previously been the subject of similar complaints by neighbors.
Not long after Wilson Garcia and others asked Oropeza, their neighbor, to shoot elsewhere because Garcia’s infant was crying, Oropeza approached Garcia’s home with an AR-15-style rifle and carried out the 17th mass killing – one with four or more victims – in the US so far this year.
In a tweet announcing a $50,000 reward for capturing Oropeza, Abbott said that the reward was for “a top 10 fugitive who is in the country illegally and killed five illegal immigrants”.
His rhetoric drew ire as it hewed closely with his track record of smearing immigrants in the wake of mass shootings.
Advocates and lawmakers decried Abbott’s language as dehumanizing and part 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.
State senator Roland Gutierrez – a Democratic lawmaker whose district includes Uvalde, where 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers were shot to death by an intruder last year – went on Twitter to call Abbott’s statement a “new low”. Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso in Congress, called Abbott’s rhetoric a “disgusting lack of compassion and humanity”.
Authorities said the victims – Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velázquez Alvarado, 21; Obdulia Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso Guzman, a 9-year-old boy – were all originally from Honduras.
Oropeza, who remained at large as federal and local enforcement frantically searched for him, was a Mexican national who had reportedly been previously deported from the US.
As of Monday, law enforcement authorities had not confirmed the immigration status of the five people killed. Political comments about those facts prompted the local sheriff, Greg Capers of San Jacinto, to say they were irrelevant to his deputies.
“My heart is with this … boy” and his family, 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 response to Abbott’s initial tweet, Carlos Eduardo Espina, who is described as a community organizer and immigrant rights activist, shared an image of a photo identification card from one of the victims, Diana Velázquez Alvarado, indicating she was a permanent US resident and therefore in the country legally.
Jefrinson Josué Rivera, who was Velázquez Alvarado’s partner for the last six years, confirmed that to ABC News, calling Abbott’s descriptions “inhumane”.
He described Velázquez Alvarado as a “happy, humble and caring” person who “gave everything for her children” and “never had issues with anyone”.
“Why do they discriminate against immigrants so much? In what way are we affecting him? What harm have we caused him?” Josué Rivera told ABC News. “He’s making his living and we’re here to make our own? We don’t care if he wants to make his money through politics – we’re here to make an honorable living.”
