EL PASO — Hours before President Trump arrived in this desert city on the Mexico border, high school students clad in black released white balloons for every one of the 22 victims killed in one of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history.
Hundreds of people later gathered at a central park to protest the president’s visit, saying he had inflamed the kind of racial and ethnic hostilities that led the shooter to target Latinos at a Walmart in the commercial center of the city. Condemnation of the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been inescapable, too, at a memorial near the site of the shooting where people have stopped by the thousands — after work, between lunch breaks, often in scorching heat — to march and pray and drop off flowers, stuffed animals, and balloons.
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