In a new ad set to run Monday morning on Fox News in Bedminister, N.J. Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro accuses President Trump of inciting white supremacist violence through his anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Castro spent just $2,775 on the targeted ad buy so that Trump would be confronted with his message while watching Fox and Friends at his Bedminster golf club, according to the Washington Post.
“As we saw in El Paso, Americans were killed because you stoked the fire of racists. Innocent people were shot down because they look different from you. Because they look like me. They look like my family,” the former Obama Secretary of Housing and Urban Development says during the ad.
A message for @realdonaldtrump: pic.twitter.com/WFYRxm69hA
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) August 13, 2019
A lone gunman, who is now is federal custody, killed 22 people at an El Paso, Texas Walmart on Saturday. He posted a manifesto to the website 8Chan minutes before the attack in which he rails against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and casts his attack as a legitimate response to the hostile take over of his state.
Advocates of more permissive immigration policy have seized on the shooter’s use of the word “invasion” to argue that immigration restrictionists have recklessly inserted violent rhetoric into the debate.
Castro’s ad buy comes days after his brother, Democratic Texas congressman Joaquin Castro, posted a list of El Paso-area Trump supporters on Twitter in an effort to shame them. A number of those individuals, some of whom also donated to Castro himself, have been subjected to violent threats in the wake of the posting.