EL PASO, Texas — Stephanie Cordero took a day off from her job with an investment firm on Wednesday, just like thousands more Latinos in the border city of El Paso.
But unlike them, she was not part of the protests at President Trump’s visit to a community shattered by a mass shooting; she was trying to nurse her two children, aged six and eight, through the terrifying experience of knowing a family friend who was caught up in the violence.
“I want to collect them early and take them to do something fun,” she said at her home in the dusty suburbs of the city.
Cordero, 32, is also among a minority of Hispanic voters in El Paso who supports Trump and is angry at the way his rhetoric is being blamed for the actions of a gunman who allegedly shot dead 22 people.
“Many people may feel that way, but I don’t blame the president. He did not say go out and target Hispanics at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.”
Even so, the horrifying events of Saturday have left her pondering the way in which racial hate came to El Paso and what it means for life on the border.
She had just driven past the store on Saturday when she got a phone call alerting her to an active shooter. Her son’s baseball coach and a number of local mothers were raising funds for a soccer team just outside.
She soon learned that Guillermo “Memo” Garcia, the coach, another Trump supporter, and his wife were wounded. A long night spent in vigil at the hospital followed.
“I was born and raised here,” she said. “There’s never been anything like this.”
A manifesto published by the alleged gunman suggested he was inspired to act by the recent surge in people crossing the border from Mexico. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” he wrote.
As a result, law enforcement authorities are treating the attack as domestic terrorism.
And many local politicians, from the presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke to the city’s Democratic congresswoman, Veronica Escobar, say they see a direct connection to Trump and his stance on immigration.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington Park, close to one of the hospitals that treated the victims. Some wore T-shirts bearing the slogan: “Racism not welcome. Trump not welcome.”
The headlines and the banners reflect the makeup of an overwhelmingly Democratic city in an otherwise red state. About 80% of the population is Latino, and Trump mustered only about 26% of the vote in 2016.
Yet the city has a Republican mayor and every day welcomes tens of thousands of workers from over the border to keep the economy humming along.
“With that kind of chemistry, it has worked for many years,” said Roger O’Dell, a former GOP official. “With what happened the other day, it has simply dumbfounded people because we do get along, and people are already working hard to heal together.”
The fear is that partisan reactions — such as Democrats blaming Trump for the violence — could leave lasting divisions, a fear expressed by many, whatever their ethnic background.
“We can’t say that Trump is at fault because these mass killings have existed for a long time,” said Carlos Tarin, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in El Paso for three decades, although he added that recent anger over immigration had unleashed violent forces.
Adolpho Telles, the chairman of the El Paso Republican Party, who is also Hispanic, said he hoped Trump’s visit would be part of a healing process.
“He’s meeting with victims, with law enforcement. That’s his job to be comforter in chief and to talk to these people and pick up things on how to go forward,” he said.
For Cordero, it meant reflecting on the gunman’s manifesto and that as a Latina woman, she may well have been a target if she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“But for me, that was the shooter. That was something evil that he built in his mind,” she said. “I don’t blame anybody other than him for that.”
She is a U.S.-born citizen, just like her parents, who trace their lineage back to Mexico, and said it was right that Trump was visiting during El Paso’s hour of need.
“If Trump’s motive for coming is to support this city, to support the victims, then we need to promote unity. All political feelings aside, I think we support our local representatives and they need to respect the president and this country,” she said, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo “El Paso strong,” which is repeated throughout the city on electronic sign boards.
“Presidents have always visited relatives of mass shootings, so had he not come he would have been damned, scrutinized, criticized and called a racist.”
She voted for Trump in 2016 and will do so again, motivated in part by his position on tackling illegal immigration, a stance she said protected those like her family who had arrived in the country with the proper documents.
Tighter security, she said, kept her family safe in El Paso, compared with neighboring Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side of the border, a city long known for its drug cartel-driven violence.
“I do think the wall, the fencing has helped,” she said, talking about construction that began a decade ago. “I know we are just miles away from daily murders, rapes.”
