Beto O'Rourke In El Paso: Trump 'Is A Racist And He Stokes Racism' | NBC News

I wish I was seeing everybody under different circumstances and conditions. Our sympathies go out to the families of the victims, many of whom we just got to spend time with, some of whom do not know where their loved one is right now. Many fearing and expecting the worst because they have not heard from them and have received no news. We also met incredibly heroic El Pasoans who have survived the most devastating injuries that I can imagine. Many of them shot many times over, who are pulling through right now. We just had a chance to talk to University Medical Center President Jacob Sintron, the nurses and the doctors who are taking care of these patients. Absolute all-time heroes. This community that is bringing more food than anybody can eat right now, inside, that is donating more blood than we could have possibly expected. El Paso is really showing up and standing up for our fellow El Pasoans right now. Lastly, just want to say I'm so grateful to the El Paso Police Department and the first responders and everyone who is on the scene today, including many of you who have to live with something that we thought we would never ever see in El Paso. More murders today than we have in an average year in the city of El Paso. We don't know all the details yet and we await the completion of this investigation, but what I'm hearing from statements from the El Paso Police Department, preliminary indications that this is motivated by hatred, by racism, by an intolerance that is foreign to El Paso and in fact had to be brought somewhere else into this community to do something like what we are seeing right now. And so I would just say that in addition to everything that we're doing for our fellow El Pasoans right now and meeting them in this time of suffering and need and crisis, in addition to making sure that we change our laws so that it's harder for something like this to happen again, I think we also have to ask ourselves about the level of hatred and racism that we're seeing in this country right now that could lead to an event like the one that we saw here today and that is on all of us to both call out and to stop and in our case in El Paso to be the example of how we don't just respect one another, we embrace our differences as a very source of our strength. So could not be more proud of El Paso in the way that we're responding to this tragedy today.