El Paso police and the NAACP on Monday denounced a group of more than half a dozen people seen in a viral video wearing white KKK-style robes and shouting racial slurs as they marched through an Eastside residential neighborhood. Police Chief Peter Pacillas said investigators were reviewing the footage to determine whether the group, described as including young people, violated laws such as disorderly conduct.
Police Chief Peter Pacillas said the group, described as including “young people,” may have violated laws including disorderly conduct, according to the department’s statement Monday. “Symbols and language associated with the Ku Klux Klan represent a history of terror, violence and racial hatred. They have no place in our community,” Pacillas said. “Treating that history as a costume or a joke is unacceptable and contrary to the values of respect and safety that define El Paso.” He added that “free expression has limits when it crosses into conduct that threatens public order or the safety of others,” and the department invited anyone with information to come forward.
The video, first posted by an account identified as FitFam El Paso and amplified by a Twitter/X user (@LongTimeHistory) on Oct. 26, shows more than half a dozen people walking through a residential Eastside neighborhood at night in white KKK-style robes and pointed hoods.
The footage captures the group shouting racial slurs in unison, with a person behind the camera heard saying, “Y’all gotta yell something, güey. As a team, yell something, güey,” prompting the group to yell the N-word together. A second male voice makes a racist remark about Black people, and the person filming refers to the group as “the team,” suggesting possible high school sports participation. Witnesses said the crowd first gathered for a Halloween party at a residential house on the city’s Eastside before marching down residential streets.
The El Paso NAACP branch issued a statement expressing “utter outrage, disgust and righteous indignation” over the imagery, according to KTSM. Branch president Carl B. Dwyer Jr. condemned the display Monday and held a press conference on the steps of the Enrique Moreno County Courthouse. “It hurts. We have people that think it’s okay to don white sheets, white robes, and white hats that are emblematic of the most racist time and period of this country. It is not a joke, and it is not funny,” Dwyer said. He demanded that “every leader in this city step forward immediately and denounce this unacceptable behavior” and warned: “What’s next? When are we going to speak out? When the nooses come out? When the ropes come out? When the lynchings start? Enough is enough!”
Dwyer called on local educators to teach students history and how it affects the present, citing calls the NAACP receives about Black students reporting being called slurs at school. He urged all superintendents and school districts to “please do something about this” to prevent escalation, and pointed to a recent incident in which two Black girls were “attacked and assaulted” at Pebble Hills High School on the Far East side of El Paso earlier in the month. “You cannot tell me that these incidents are not connected,” he said.
NAACP member and pastor Michael E. Grady of Prince of Peace Christian Fellowship compared the racism to rhetoric that drew a mass shooter to an El Paso Walmart on Aug. 3, 2019. Grady, whose daughter was among 45 people shot in the massacre, in which 23 died, told KTSM 9 News: “The shooter drove over 900 miles because of what he heard and what he saw and that he was gonna cleanse up the border with this infestation.”
Mayor Renard Johnson issued a statement expressing “disappointment” that the video took place in a city “built on diversity, respect, and unity.” “Hate is not a costume, racism is not a joke, and our community deserves better. We are better than this, El Paso,” Johnson said. U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, El Paso’s Democratic congresswoman, called the group’s actions “deeply disturbing and unacceptable” in a Sunday Facebook post, writing that “the KKK represents a shameful history of white supremacy, racial terror, and violence against Black Americans and other communities of color.” City Rep. Josh Acevedo (District 2) said El Paso “is a welcoming community to all races, religions, genders, and people and we must say no to hate,” calling for the acts to be confronted “in our homes, in our schools, in local government.”
The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist hate group dating to 1865, is described as the oldest terrorist group in the United States because of its history of racist violence, according to the El Paso Times. The Klan had a documented presence in El Paso more than 100 years ago, when Klan-backed candidates ran for mayor and other city offices in 1923 and lost.
As of reporting, no police, sheriff’s office, or prosecutor statement confirming an investigation, citation, or hate-crime classification tied to the gathering had been made public. The FBI tracks hate-crime data covering bias motivated by race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ethnicity, including incidents involving juveniles, and its El Paso field office has urged residents to report hate crimes to law enforcement. The identities of those shown in the images and the precise circumstances of the gathering had not been independently confirmed by authorities at the time of reporting.
