2 Years After El Paso Massacre Of Latinos, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Festers

Published August 6, 2021 at 1:52 PM EDT

People gather at a makeshift memorial honoring victims outside Walmart on August 15, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Twenty-two people were killed in the Walmart during a mass shooting on August 3. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

Two years ago this week, a gunman in El Paso, Texas, killed 23 people in a Walmart — most of them Latino.

The white man charged with murder allegedly told police he drove 11 hours to the U.S.-Mexico border city with the intention of targeting Mexicans. He reportedly complained about a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas and warned that the U.S. was in the process of a “cultural and ethnic replacement.”

That language echoes the writing of an infamous and influential white nationalist who died at age 85 just weeks before the El Paso massacre. John Tanton was an eye doctor from northern Michigan, but he was better known to some as “the architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”

Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Mark Potok of the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.