Yesterday, an 18-year-old Uvalde, Texas, resident named Salvador Ramos gunned down 19 children and two adults before being killed himself. The town is suffering today, but Uvalde was suffering before Ramos.
Uvalde (pop. 15,000) lies about 80 miles west of San Antonio and 54 miles north of the Mexican border. With a population that is nearly 80 percent Latino, like many towns and cities in south Texas, it has been overrun by illegal migrants, many of whom arrive by freight train. An op-ed on The Blaze website in 2019 quoted Uvalde’s mayor Don McLaughlin on the town’s struggle with the resulting problems:
We are in no man’s land. The state is not doing anything; the federal government is not doing anything. We are getting nothing. I’ve lived here all my life and have never seen anything like this. The people in the communities are getting scared. What is coming that we don’t see?
What was coming, among just a gradual worsening of conditions, was the massacre yesterday at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School.
Rumors and counter-rumors were spreading rampantly on social media immediately after the event, with apparently unfounded claims that Ramos was an illegal alien (he is said to have been born in North Dakota) and possibly transgender. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) had to remove a tweet suggesting Ramos was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
On the other side politically, some Twitter users pointed out that ABC News altered Salvador Ramos’s photo to make him appear “more Caucasian”:
More information will no doubt be revealed about Ramos in the coming days, and history teaches us to be wary of snap judgments.
What is not a snap judgment is what we led with: the town of Uvalde was in deep trouble long before yesterday. Mayor McLaughlin again:
With the Border Patrol so busy with the family units, we are seeing an increase in the bad guys. Our DPS and local authorities in surrounding communities are having more car chases. When they crash the cars, all of the smugglers bail out. Border Patrol can’t always respond, so we need to take officers and deputies to track down these people. Three weeks ago, we had a group come right in middle of town, they bailed out and we had to put all our schools on lockdown. We caught all eight individuals, but it took all day.
In a later, March 2021, interview with Fox News, the mayor repeated his complaints and suggested the obvious solution: “We need to go back and shut this border back down,” he said. [Emphasis added.]
Uvalde, along with countless other American towns and cities, both near and far from the border, is suffering. Now, thanks to this senseless act, it suffers more intensely, but the suffering goes on.
For more, see The Blaze.