09/18/19
A former staffer in the George W. Bush administration wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday urging his "fellow Latinos" to vote President Trump out of office in 2020.
"I am a Republican. I worked in the George W. Bush White House," Abel Guerra wrote in the op-ed. "And I say to my fellow Latinos: I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. But I am asking you to vote President Trump out of office."
"Republicans have lost control of the monster they helped create. Trump hasn’t changed," he continued.
"From day one, Trump spewed his white-supremacist views, promising to halt the invasion of immigrants and spurring a rhetoric of resentment and retaliation against the 'other.' No matter our background, we have been vilified as invaders, marked as illegal and degraded as subhuman. The silence from prominent Republicans is deafening," he wrote.
Guerra highlighted last month's shooting in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people died and dozens more were injured, saying that it "was the inevitable outcome of 30 straight months of hate speech coming from the White House."
Patrick Wood Crusius, the alleged gunman, drove eight hours from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to El Paso, which is directly across the border from Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez and has a high concentration of Hispanic people.
Authorities have investigated Crusius in connection to a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto posted online before the attack that described fears of a Latino "invasion."
Many have pointed to similarities between Trump's immigration rhetoric and the phrases in the alleged manifesto, though the White House has distanced the president from the incident.
"The shooting isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a massacre, a direct hit against our community," Guerra wrote in his op-ed Wednesday.
"As Hispanics, we need to get more voters registered and to the polls. We need to understand that our votes matters, more than ever. A vote against Trump is a stand for human freedom and a future where America is again known for its ideals and not ignorance," he added.
Guerra ended his op-ed by calling on Republicans to "dust off their moral compass and remember what they stand for — and what they stand against."
Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016 presidential election based on exit polls, which compared favorably to 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 27 percent.
Hispanics are expected to make up roughly 13 percent of eligible voters in the 2020, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, making them the largest ethnic or racial minority group in the electorate.