Monday on MSNBC, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) said weeping family members of the victims of the El Paso, TX mass shooting told her they do not want President Donald Trump to visit because they believe the president’s use of words like “invasion,” played a role in the shooting.

Escobar said, “I’ll tell you, Rachel, I only speak for myself. I know that there are people in the community who want him to come here. They want him. They want to welcome him, and they have every right to feeling that way and to wanting to see him come into this community. But the words that I mentioned that are hanging over us have power, and they clearly and obviously have fueled the violence. They have fueled it. The screed, as you all described, was a litany of what the president has said at his rallies.”

She added, “As I was walking earlier among the families that gathered at the memorial and was talking with them, embracing them, trying to give them as best comfort as I could, there were several women, especially, who came up to me and clung to me and were weeping, and they said, ‘don’t let him come here.’ There is so much resilience and beauty in this community, but we’ve got to deal with our pain, and there are people who are still afraid. And as much as I want to tell them don’t be afraid, and we are still a safe community, we are, and we always will be, and we’re going to take good care of one another, we need the president to accept responsibility, apologize and take back those words so that his followers, the people who cling to his every word, who follow his rallies, who get riled up and excited about the bigotry that comes from his speeches at those rallies. They need to hear that the president acknowledges that he was wrong and that his words were wrong, and that every human being has value because those words have dehumanized whole groups of people. You can’t be a person with a gun and shoot innocent victims unless you think they are subhuman. That language dehumanizes people.”

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