ALLEN, Tex. — Patrick Crusius watched the sprawling north suburbs of Dallas where he grew up dramatically change over the course of his short life. The number of Hispanic residents soared, while the non-Hispanic white population plummeted from nearly 80 percent to just more than half. Diversity flourished across Collin County, in its restaurants, shops, neighborhoods and in the public schools, where one high school welcomed both a new black student union and a prayer center for Muslims and others.

Authorities think Crusius, 21, closely noted the shift and spent countless hours on the Internet studying the white supremacist theory known as “the great replacement.” And then, after hanging out with family members late last week, he jumped in his car with his newly purchased assault-style rifle and made the 10-hour drive to El Paso, where, authorities say, he fatally shot 22 people and injured dozens at a shopping center on Saturday near the Mexican border to stop “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” according to a statement police think he posted online shortly before the attack.

On Friday, police said in an affidavit for an arrest warrant that Crusius was clear about his intent. In the affidavit, which was obtained by The Washington Post, he told detectives that he shot multiple innocent victims and that he had been targeting “Mexicans.”

[Read the arrest warrant affidavit]

Crusius surrendered after the shootings when police encountered his car at a nearby intersection. El Paso police Detective Adrian Garcia wrote that Crusius got out of the car with his hands in the air and declared: “I’m the shooter.”

[Will taking down 8chan stop the worst people on the Internet?]

“This all came out of left field,” Ayres said, adding that Crusius would occasionally chat about history and current events but that no one thought his opinions were unusual. “There weren’t hot political opinions flying back and forth or anything.”

Crusius’s parents — Bryan, a therapist, and Lori, a hospice admissions nurse — said in a statement this week that they are devastated, believing their son’s actions “were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs that we do not accept or condone, in any way. He was raised in a family that taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance — rejecting all forms of racism, prejudice, hatred, and violence.”

Lori Crusius called police several weeks ago when she realized her son was in the process of obtaining an assault-style rifle, Ayres said, noting that her call was simply “informational.” She wanted to find out if he could legally have one, which he could.

Ayres said that there was no indication of why he wanted the gun — Crusius occasionally went to a gun range with his father — and that his mother had “absolutely zero concern about any violence or imminent threat.”

Investigators are looking into whether Crusius might have been radicalized online, where they say he has claimed he spent nearly eight hours a day. But friends and former teachers and classmates say he might have been hardened, too, by the tensions in his changing community in real life.

Many people here describe the diversifying community in an overwhelmingly positive way, speaking of a place that has thrived on new arrivals who have flocked here for plentiful jobs and good schools.

But some say the changes have come with a backlash.

Sisilen Simo, 19, a Liberty High School graduate, said she endured racist comments from teachers and students alike and was ultimately inspired to create a Black Student Union at the school in 2017. After President Trump’s victory, students started showing up at school with “Make America Great Again” T-shirts and hats and began making jokes citing the president’s policy positions. Simo said she started hearing chatter about building the wall and banning Muslims that she said made her and other students of color feel uncomfortable.

“So when I hear the kid who shot up Walmart went to my school, part of me was surprised,” Simo said. “The other part was like, ‘This is America.’ ”

When Crusius was in high school, some students bullied him, friends said; one friend said a group of Spanish-speaking students harassed him in the hallways. White-supremacist groups peppered his college campus with pamphlets. And an area public official said he received threats and racist screeds from people who didn’t shy away from giving their real names and addresses.

Michael Phillips, a Collin College professor and historian of race relations in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, said some residents continued to espouse racist sentiments.

Shortly after the 2016 election, a flier in a Collin County town warned “Muslims, Indians, Blacks, and Jews” to leave Texas and “go back to where [they] came from” or face “torture starting now.” While Crusius was a student at Collin College, fliers appeared on campus and in mailboxes around the county that spoke of dangers posed by immigrants, arguing that they are crime-prone and a threat to white women. Other fliers warned of harm from interracial dating, Phillips recalled.

This week, as north Texas baked in the summer sun, Mario Cesar Ramirez sat in the small ice cream shop he owns a few miles from Crusius’s childhood home — with a Spanish menu of Mexican ice pops and traditional desserts — and contemplated the roots of Crusius’s hate.

“He saw the majority started fading, shrinking away,” said Ramirez, who opened his first business, a bakery, when he was 23 and now runs a taqueria chain. “He started seeing more bakeries and taco shops . . . and by the time he went to high school, it was a full melting pot.”

Years ago, when Ramirez used to drop his nephew, who is a few years older than Crusius, off at the nearby Head Start program, he noticed the great diversity of the preschoolers and said he hoped they would grow up to be friends. But his idea of a welcoming, inclusive country “forever changed” in 2016 with Trump’s election, he said.

“The things that Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith used to only think, they can talk about now,” he said. “You go to the movies and you will hear, ‘Here come the f—ing Mexicans.’ I have felt it. I have heard it.”

Crusius, he said, appears to have been in some ways a symptom of that phenomenon, part of the group that now feels it can “tell us openly, ‘We don’t like you; you’re not welcome,’ ” Ramirez said.

BEIJING — After weeks of escalating warnings alleging a covert U.S. role behind the protests in Hong Kong, the tone in Communist Party-backed media outlets is turning darkly acrimonious, with publications attacking a U.S. diplomat in Hong Kong and releasing her personal information.

The pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao on Thursday published a photo of opposition activists meeting in a hotel with Julie Eadeh, a political section chief at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong, along with details of Eadeh’s State Department career and the names of her husband and teenage children.

The report, which was recirculated by Chinese state media, emerged as Beijing doubled down on a familiar strategy of framing the nine-week-long protests as a U.S. intelligence plot to spark a “color revolution” to destabilize China.

[Hong Kong’s protests, explained]

The publication of information about the diplomat drew a furious response from the State Department, which accused China of “thuggish” behavior. U.S. diplomats around the world often meet with opposition figures and groups, occasionally drawing rebukes from governments.

The unusual pinpoint attack on the diplomat in Hong Kong underscores China’s growing frustration over the protests and their anti-Beijing message.

Airport demonstrations

On Friday, hundreds of protesters flooded into Hong Kong’s airport terminal to stage another sit-in and vowed to continue it through the weekend. The territory’s embattled leader, Carrie Lam, made a fresh appeal to the public by citing the economic toll of the disturbances.

Lam said she had met with a broad section of society — entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers — and believed that a “violent minority” of protesters “had no stake in society.”

China’s aviation overseer, meanwhile, ordered Hong Kong’s flagship carrier Cathay Pacific Airways to suspend any personnel who take part in or support the protests.

In Beijing, the propaganda attacks pillorying the United States were not aimed at Washington. But they represented a classic Communist Party influence effort to shore up public opinion in Hong Kong, said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London.

After the first month of protests — when authorities in Beijing censored all mention of record-breaking crowds surging into Hong Kong’s streets to oppose an extradition bill — Chinese state television began to flood the airwaves with scenes of protesters in Hong Kong clashing violently with police and defacing China’s national emblem and flag.

[Is it safe to visit Hong Kong as protests escalate?]

“That is exactly what they would call the United Front approach. We would call it divide and rule,” Tsang said, referring to the Communist Party wing that is responsible for political influence campaigns in China and abroad. “They want to isolate the protesters from the bulk of the Hong Kong population and say, ‘This is all about foreign interference.’ ”

With few good options to swiftly restore order to Hong Kong’s streets, the Communist Party was urgently looking to cement its ties to political allies in the city and “win over the wavering middle,” Tsang said.

Chinese officials this week held a seminar in the border city of Shenzhen with “500 friends from Hong Kong,” including prominent business and political figures.

China’s warnings

In 2014, pro-government media sought to isolate Hong Kong protesters waging a civil disobedience campaign called Occupy Central. At the time, pro-Beijing social media accounts floated theories that protest leaders were receiving military training from the CIA, said Yuen Chan, a lecturer at City University of London.

But the tactic may encounter more resistance this time around, Chan said.

The 2014 movement, which sought broader voting rights, was “a much more polarizing issue compared to this year, when there is so much consensus within Hong Kong society,” Chan said.

Since early June, the protests have drawn millions of people onto the city’s streets, including first-time demonstrators, white-collar professionals, retirees and civil servants. What began as opposition to a proposal for extraditions from Hong Kong to the mainland has bloomed into anger against what many see as an out-of-touch Hong Kong government, a heavy-handed police force and the growing encroachment of the Communist Party leadership in Beijing.

The Chinese government has maintained its support for Lam, dismissed the protests as the work of an extreme minority and escalated its rhetoric against Washington. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Beijing this month criticized U.S. officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and warned that “those who play with fire will be self-immolated.”

[Hong Kong protesters occupy airport amid fears of escalating violence]

After the Ta Kung Pao article, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus described China’s behavior as irresponsible.

“I don’t think leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children — I don’t think that is a formal protest. That is what a thuggish regime would do,” Ortagus told reporters in Washington late Thursday. “American diplomats meet with formal government officials; we meet with opposition protesters, not just in Hong Kong or China. This literally happens in every single country.”

Joshua Wong, one of the pro-democracy activists who were pictured meeting with Eadeh, said on Facebook that he met with the consulate to discuss a bill in the U.S. Congress and to seek a ban on exports of U.S.-made tear gas to Hong Kong police. 

In a lengthy report, Ta Kung Pao dissected Eadeh’s experience in Middle East conflict zones and alleged that she was well-versed in “psychological warfare” and “infiltrating local society in her so-called diplomatic work.” 

The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, published five consecutive front-page editorials on Hong Kong this week — a rare occurrence that demonstrated Beijing’s concerns about the protracted unrest.

Shibani Mahtani in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

Read more

Hong Kong protesters occupy airport amid fears of escalating violence

China’s influence on campus chills free speech in Australia, New Zealand

Will China crush the Hong Kong protests? For Beijing, there are no good options

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

The Trump administration has eagerly pursued arrests of undocumented immigrants over the last two years, culminating in a record-setting raid of Mississippi poultry plants this week. But the administration appears to have been far less aggressive in going after corporations involved in those cases.

Prosecuting corporations, as opposed to individual workers or managers, for immigration-related offenses was also relatively rare during the Obama administration, but it has slowed further under the Trump administration, according to a database maintained by Duke University and the University of Virginia and data reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Corporate Prosecution Registry tracks cases in which companies, rather than individuals, are charged with violating federal law, and it includes cases resolved with plea agreements as well as deferred and non-prosecution agreements.

There were at least 88 such cases against companies for immigration violations between 2009 and 2016 during the Obama administration and at least five companies prosecuted for immigration violations since Trump took office in 2017, according to the data on corporate prosecutions and a review of news releases from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University examined federal data for a one-year period — April 2018 through March 2019 — and found that no companies were prosecuted for knowingly hiring undocumented workers. “Actual prosecution of employers for employing immigrants without proper documentation actually has been relatively rare,” the report states.

“It is striking that with all of the emphasis on prosecution of immigration offenses, prosecutions against the most serious corporate offenders has almost vanished under the new administration,” said Brandon Garrett, a professor at Duke University School of Law.

Cases against companies for employing undocumented immigrants typically originate from ICE, which forwards them to the appropriate U.S. attorney’s office to determine if a prosecution is viable. Such cases generally do not run through DOJ’s Washington office, and Justice Department officials said they were unaware of any directive not to pursue companies for immigration offenses.

The Trump administration says it has made ensuring employers comply with immigration and labor laws a top priority.

There was a more than 300 percent increase in investigations — including federal audits to determine whether companies were hiring undocumented immigrants — between the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, according to ICE. The number of criminal arrests of managers nearly doubled in fiscal 2018 to 100 compared with 59 in fiscal 2017, according to ICE figures. There have been 31 such arrests so far this year, but many cases are still ongoing, and more arrests are possible, the agency said.

The agency has initiated worksite audits and inspections at thousands of business across the country over the last couple of years, a Justice Department spokesman said in a statement.

“Oftentimes, those audits and inspections are the beginning of a lengthy process that could potentially lead to criminal charges, if sufficient evidence of criminal activity is discovered,” the statement said. “Compliance with all immigration laws remains a priority for the Department of Justice.”

The mass immigration raids in Mississippi on Wednesday hit seven plants run by five companies in six cities.

Federal authorities have yet to announce criminal or civil charges against the companies, despite a year-long investigation that ensnared about 680 people the agency said were illegally working at their facilities. ICE said it was the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.

“I strongly suspect that the employers will be charged at some point. Search warrants are used to collect evidence,” said John Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

D. Michael Hurst, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, said in a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon that there was an “open criminal investigation.”

“Law enforcement operations can take time,” a Justice Department spokesman said in a statement.

Besides charging companies or top corporate executives with violating immigration law, the federal government can hold them accountable in other ways.

One of the companies involved in this week’s raids, Illinois-based Koch Foods, agreed last year to pay a $3.75 million settlement to resolve a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit the agency filed on behalf of workers in 2011, according to an EEOC release. The complaint alleged that Hispanic workers at the Morton, Miss., plant were subject to discrimination based on race, sex and national origin.

Koch Foods did not immediately return calls for comment. It is among the country’s largest private companies, with $3.2 billion in revenue in 2017, according to a ranking by Forbes. The company paid a $500,000 fine after authorities raided another one of its plants in Ohio in 2007, leading to the arrest of 160 employees.

Koch Foods is not associated with Charles and David Koch, the conservative Republican donors.

Alabama-based Peco Foods said in a statement that it was cooperating with authorities. “We adhere strongly to all local, state and federal laws,” the statement said.

Of the five immigration cases pursued against corporations under Trump, the largest was in 2017, against Asplundh Tree Experts, according to the Duke-University of Virginia database. The Pennsylvania company pleaded guilty and paid $95 million, the largest fine ever levied by ICE, for employing undocumented workers. The case was the culmination of a six-year investigation.

In its statement announcing that plea deal, ICE said: “Worksite enforcement investigations often involve egregious violations of criminal statutes by employers and widespread abuses. … By uncovering such violations, ICE can send a strong deterrent message to other employers who knowingly employ illegal aliens.”

The data compiled by Duke University and the University of Virginia does not include cases brought against individual corporate executives. For example, last year, a Tennessee man, James Brantley, pleaded guilty to multiple charges including employing undocumented workers at his slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant.

There has been a long-standing debate in legal circles about the effectiveness of prosecuting corporations versus focusing on jailing executives. Prosecuting a company for the bad behavior of a few misbehaving executives is unfair to shareholders who will bear the cost, some legal experts argue. Others say the threat of hefty fines and embarrassment of a corporate guilty plea act as an important deterrent.

“Only by holding the corporation accountable can we ensure that criminal violations do not keep occurring. Only the corporation can usually pay appropriate fines, but more important, only the corporation can fix systematic failures in its compliance,” said Garrett, the Duke professor.

Proving the top executives were aware of the illegal hiring can be difficult in some cases, legal experts say. There may also be no need to prosecute corporations in some cases, said Sandweg. Charging a CEO was “often fatal to the company,” he said. “If we charged the CEO, that often shut the business itself down. These were small, medium-sized businesses.”

Justice Department officials say they are focused on protecting U.S. workers. In 2017, the department unveiled an initiative to prosecute companies that favor foreign workers in the country on visas over U.S. citizens. So far, seven settlements have emerged from the initiative, most recently a $60,000 civil fine against Sam Williamson Farms Inc., a Florida strawberry farm.

The farm told its U.S. workers at the end of the 2016-2017 picking season that it planned to rely on visa workers, and it ultimately made good on the promise, hiring 300 people in the country on visas and no U.S. workers, according to the Justice Department. As part of the settlement, Sam Williamson Farms Inc. will pay U.S. workers up to $85,000 in back pay.

In 2018, the Justice Department sued the state of California, alleging it has violated the Constitution with laws that are friendly to undocumented immigrants. That move, though, was seen in some quarters as being friendly to companies, which could face fines of up to $10,000 for failing to comply with the requirements the state imposed.

Meanwhile, Trump’s businesses have faced questions about their own hiring practices.

This year, The Washington Post found that Trump’s company employed undocumented immigrants for years at its golf clubs — hiring them as maintenance workers, groundskeepers and housekeepers. Latin American employees, including some who entered the United States illegally, built fountains and waterfalls, sidewalks and rock walls at the company’s winery and its golf courses for years, The Post reported Friday.

[‘They’re afraid’: Suburban voters in red states threaten GOP’s grip on power]

The Post has spoken to more than 40 undocumented former Trump workers, some of whom said they were pressed to work extra hours without pay, or urged by Trump supervisors to obtain false documents. The Trump Organization fired at least 18 undocumented workers in January, after an internal audit found their papers — some submitted years earlier — were fraudulent.

The Post has not found any evidence of ICE audits or raids at Trump properties in the recent past, either before or after Trump ran for president. The company has not been publicly accused of or charged with violating immigration law.

A spokesperson for ICE declined to say if the agency had previously had contact with Trump’s company: “To avoid negatively impacting the reputation of law-abiding businesses, ICE does not release information on or discuss such audits unless the reviews result in fines or the filing of criminal charges.”

The drop in corporate immigration cases has coincided with an overall drop in white-collar enforcement. The number of white-collar crime prosecutions hit a historic low in January, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which has tracked prosecutions dating back to 1998.

At the current pace, prosecutions are on track to be down almost 6 percent more this year compared with fiscal 2018 and down nearly 30 percent compared with five years ago, according to the website.

Staff writer David Fahrenthold, Nick Miroff and researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this story.