![]() ![]() “You could go on and on with the existence of white nationalism here, and the threat that it poses to us domestically here,” Hawkins said.Ī photo uploaded to Mauricio Garcia’s social media account in April shows the vest with a “Right Wing Death Squad” patch that authorities say he was wearing when he shot 15 people on May 6, 2023, at the Allen Premium Outlets mall. In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, the FBI Dallas Field Office warned North Texas law enforcement that the boogaloos, a far-right militia group, could expand in the Dallas-Fort Worth area due to the “presence of existing anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists.” In June 2022, of the 31 white nationalists arrested at a gay pride event in Idaho, seven were from North Texas. 6 Capitol riot, at least 28 are from North Texas, according to an analysis of FBI data. Of the more than 1,000 people charged in connection with the Jan. The memo specifically mentioned the El Paso shooting. In a January 2020 Texas Department of Public Safety memo, the agency warned that “White Racially Motivated” terrorism attacks were the “most violently active domestic terrorism type” in the country. Patriot Front, a far-right group led by a Coppell native, was responsible for nearly 80% of all white supremacist propaganda in 2020, according to the ADL. Dallas-Fort Worth has increasingly become a hotbed for such extremism, according to data from the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League. He said in a social media post prior to the attack that it was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”īoth Crusius’ and Mauricio Garcia’s social media posts centered around white nationalist views. More recently, in August 2019, Patrick Crusius, who coincidentally lived in Allen, drove to El Paso, where he shot and killed 23 people at a Walmart. “It creates the ability for people to create new narratives of being replaced by people of color.” ![]() ![]() “And that is a dangerous, dangerous sentiment,” Hawkins said. Ignoring the context “creates an environment where these things are erased from our memory,” he said. While dark, the racism in Texas’ history must be acknowledged, said Jerry Hawkins, the executive director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. The large Asian-American population in Allen is in itself a result of racism in DFW, Drenka said, as many Asian-American communities and other people of color were pushed out of Dallas over the decades and found homes in the suburbs. In the 1920s, Dallas may have had the largest KKK chapter in the world. In 1921, a Fort Worth mob lynched Fred Rouse in the only documented lynching of a Black person in the city’s history. North Texas itself is no stranger to racial violence. ![]() “When you layer on the neo-Nazism, it’s a perfect storm for racial violence.”Ī social media post shows Mauricio Garcia scouted the Allen, Texas, mall to see when it was busiest while planning his mass shooting. “Because we are outsiders and easy to target for that scapegoating,” Drenka said. As the pandemic hit the U.S., people of Asian descent became a scapegoat for COVID-19, and some national leaders pushed anti-Asian rhetoric. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders especially have increasingly been the target of discrimination and hate crimes, according to the FBI. “And that is continually being compounded by further acts of violence.” “We’ve been living in fear, I would say for several years now,” she said. To Drenka, who is the co-founder and executive director of the Dallas Asian American Historical Society, the shooting was an example of increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “Out of the eight people who were killed, four were of Asian descent, and it was not by accident.” “It is especially alarming to find that the gunman had posted pictures of handwritten diary pages targeting Asian men and women,” the Ka:ll Community Dinner Church, an AAPI community group in Dallas, said in a statement about the shooting. ![]()
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