For Angel Gomez the sunny Saturday morning of 3 August 2019 was hectic in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, the binational community in the west Texas borderland with Mexico. His nonprofit, Operation Hope, was hosting its annual back-to-school event.“We were getting everything ready. Everything was set, we had music, we had food,” Gomez said. More than 800 families were expected to attend. They hailed from El Paso on the Texas side and Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican side of the border that bisects the sister cities, and people arrived at Memorial Park in El Paso well before the 10am kick-off. The event was barely 30 minutes old when phones started going off. “People were getting phone alerts and they were starting to panic,” Gomez said. Scattered pieces of information suggested a shooting. Gomez’s son-in-law was an off-duty police officer at the event and had received a chilling text message.“He goes, ‘Oh my God! There’s an active shooter at Walmart. And they say that he’s on the loose.’ Oh, man. So we started moving the children and the parents [out of the park],” Gomez said. The Operation Hope team packed up, sending families home immediately.“We’re coming home and listening to the radio of course,” Gomez said. “I was thinking, it’s gonna be bad, it’s gonna be bad.”Shoppers at the Walmart at Cielo Vista, a 10-minute drive from the park, had become victims of yet another American mass shooting. This time it appeared that it was an anti-immigration attack targeting Hispanics.