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Guns, anti-immigrant bigotry, and fear lead to Uber driver's murder [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-07-01

A Texas Uber driver was shot and killed after his passenger decided—with no evidence whatsoever—that he was attempting to kidnap her to Mexico. Phoebe Copas has been charged with murder after Daniel Piedra Garcia’s family took him off of life support following the June 16 shooting.

Piedra was driving Copas to her destination, the Speaking Rock Casino in El Paso, when according to what she told police, she saw a sign for Juarez, Mexico, and concluded that she was being taken across the border in a kidnapping. Juarez is just miles from El Paso, so it’s natural that there are highway signs for it. According to a court document, Piedra was on “a normal route to drive” to the casino, and the car was not near “a bridge, port of entry or other area with immediate access to travel into Mexico” at the point when Copas shot Piedra multiple times in the head.

Copas did not attempt to call for help before she took out her gun. It doesn’t seem like she even did the very first thing you do when you have a question about where your driver is going: Take out your phone and look at the map to see if you’re on a reasonable route. Presumably if she had taken that basic step, she would have realized that she was not bound for a Mexican cartel.

Piedra was his family’s sole support, a diesel mechanic who had started driving for Uber to make up income he lost when he had knee surgery following a workplace injury. This is the United States of America in 2023: A man had to get a new job soon after knee surgery because health care is expensive and jobs don’t offer adequate (if any) paid sick leave. Piedra’s primary employer had stopped paying him and demoted him while he was recovering. And while he was working the job he picked up to support his family while recovering from surgery, someone got worked up on a combination of anti-immigrant paranoia and gun culture and shot him in the head. Then, by the way, she took a picture of Piedra and texted it to her boyfriend before calling 911. Piedra remained on life support for days until doctors told his family he had no chance of recovery.

“Everyone needs to know who my uncle was,” Piedra’s niece Didi Lopez said at an event commemorating him. “He’s not a criminal. He wasn’t trying to kidnap her. He was a humble man.”

We don’t know much about Phoebe Copas, but we can look at what she did and what she told police about why she did it and see clearly how it fits into strains in the nation’s culture and politics. Republicans are constantly telling us to be afraid and to respond to that fear by being heavily armed. They tell us that the more drugs the government intercepts at the border, the more afraid we should be. That migrant caravans are on their way to overrun the United States. That the way to prevent school massacres is to arm teachers. That major U.S. cities are violent, drug-ridden places of danger.

And it’s spread beyond partisan Republican messaging. This is the culture of viral social media posts insisting that someone followed you in Walmart as part of a human trafficking scheme and that everyone should be on the alert or of the belief that a reasonable response to a stranger (especially a Black one) pulling into your driveway or knocking on your door is to shoot them without asking questions.

Claims about the dangers of the border combined with efforts to dehumanize immigrants and anyone who is imagined to be an immigrant are a regular theme of Republican politics in recent years. Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that human traffickers were taping women’s mouths and driving them into the U.S. in the backs of cars and trucks. Copas claims to have believed she would be driven out of the U.S. and into Mexico. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has echoed Trump with “invasion” rhetoric and calls to kill migrants crossing the border.

“I wish that when people who don’t live here come, (they would) familiarize themselves or do their research before coming so that they would know that we are so close to the border and there are signs all over the freeway, so it doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Piedra’s niece said. But there are politicians with huge platforms sending the message of fear and unthinking violence in response.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/1/2178166/-Guns-anti-immigrant-bigotry-and-fear-lead-to-Uber-driver-s-murder

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