Historian and author Michael Phillips, SMU Professor Rick Halperin and Hadi Jawad, co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas, submitted the op-ed below on the history of Texas governors, including Greg Abbott, embracing mob violence.
Christian Castro, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, clearly lied about shooting a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis on January 14. After that incident, he returned to his home state of Texas. Once there, he enjoyed Gov.Greg Abbott’s protection.
Abbott has served for 12 years as Texas’s chief executive. His intervention on behalf of Castro represents only the latest case in which the governor has legitimized political violence and shielded those responsible for such acts from accountability.
Castro had been employed by ICE for only four months when he participated in the agency’s infamous “Operation Metro Surge.” This occupation of Minneapolis from December 2025 to February 2026 resulted in ICE agents fatally shooting two civilians, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
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Castro shot and wounded a third victim, 52-year-old Julio Sosa-Celis. Along with another ICE agent, Castro chased a Venezuelan immigrant, Alfredo Aljorna, who fled during a traffic stop. Aljorna sought refuge in a home he shared with Sosa-Celis. Castro fired his gun through the door even though several people, including two children, were inside.
A bullet struck Castro’s leg. ICE agents then fired tear gas into the home and arrested Sosa-Celis, Aljorna, and their partners.
Castro, however, told a wildly different story when subsequently questioned by the FBI. The ICE agent claimed that he fired his weapon in self-defense after being assaulted by three men who beat him with a broom and a shovel. Surveillance video contradicted these claims.
ICE suspended Castro without pay in February. The agent returned home to the Rio Grande Valley. Minnesota filed state charges against him for assault and falsely reporting a crime. Police arrested Castro in Brownsville and jailed him. While in custody, according to the Texas Tribune, he talked to a woman about marrying her and purchasing a house in Mexico where it would be more difficult for American authorities to bring him to justice.
Because Minnesota considered Castro a likely flight risk, it requested his extradition.
Abbott, however, refused to sign the extradition papers. Instead, he launched a state investigation into whether Castro was legally a “fugitive.” Abbott claimed that ICE had ordered him to move back to the Rio Grande Valley. Completely off-topic, Abbott also brought up allegations of fraud in the administration of federal food assistance programs in Minnesota.
“While they’re making demands, I got a demand of my own, and that is, it’s time for Minnesota to step up and repay the United States of America and Americans for all the fraud that they have committed in their state under federal programs,” Abbott told reporters. “I will not respond to them at all until they step up and do what’s right . . .”
The Cameron County sheriff’s department released Castro from jail on August 27. Castro, however, turned himself in to federal authorities on September 4 after being indicted on six counts of making false statements to the FBI. A federal court in Texas ordered him to wear an ankle monitor.
As The New York Times reported, the indictments “marked a rare instance of the Trump administration seeking to hold an immigration agent accountable for actions taken while on duty.”
It was not, however, a rare instance of Abbott cheering on bloodshed.
In 2021, Abbott gleefully celebrated online the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on murder charges.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, then 17, fatally shot two protestors during anti-police violence protests in Wisconsin. Driven from Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin, by his mother, Rittenhouse joined a group of armed vigilantes. This mob insisted that they were defending property owners during an uprising sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a young Black man. Rittenhouse claimed that he killed in self-defense after his two victims tried to grab his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. Rittenhouse also wounded a third protester he said pointed a pistol at him.
Abbott could barely contain his delight at the jury’s November 19, 2021, decision. “Rittenhouse — NOT GUILTY!” he posted on what was then called Twitter. Since Abbott applauded the verdict, Rittenhouse moved to Texas and has benefited richly from the largesse of some of the state’s pro-gun millionaires.
That social media post doesn’t represent the only time Abbott embraced vigilantism. In 2024, the governor successfully lobbied for the pardon of Daniel Perry, a white supremacist who murdered a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin.
Perry was working as an Uber driver on July 25, 2020, when he drove his car into a group of demonstrators protesting the slaying of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer two months earlier. Garrett Foster, legally carrying an AK-47, approached Perry, asking him to stop endangering the crowd. Perry responded by shooting at Foster five times, striking him four times.
For weeks prior to this lethal encounter, Perry had announced his violent intentions on social media and in texts to friends. In one message, Perry said, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex.” At another point, he declared, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” In May 2023, a jury sentenced Perry to 25 years in prison.
After the trial, the presiding judge in the case unsealed court records that revealed Perry had posted on social media, “Black Lives Matter is racist to white people…It is official I am racist because I do not agree with people acting like monkeys.” Perry also compared Black Lives Matter protestors to “animals at the zoo.”
At another point, he texted a friend, “Too bad we can’t get paid for hunting Muslims in Europe” and engaged in online flirting with a girl who told him she was sixteen. Perry suggested to the teenager that she could send him nude photos of herself when she was older.
Regardless of these repulsive revelations, Perry gained cult hero status in the right wing. Then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other conservative pundits pressured Abbott to arrange for Perry’s pardon. Abbott complied. The governor argued that Perry shot Foster in self-defense. He urged the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend a full pardon. The board agreed. Abbott signed the pardon, which also restored Perry’s full gun ownership rights, on May 16, 2024.
(Abbott couldn’t pardon Perry directly without the board’s recommendation. That power was stripped from Texas governors through a 1936 state constitutional amendment adopted because several governors, including James E. “Pa” and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, had abused their pardon power by selling such reprieves even to violent criminals.)
Abbott at times has expressed frustration about limits on state violence.
During a right-wing podcast hosted by Dana Loesch in 2024, Abbott bragged that under his leadership, Texas had “used all the tools and strategies” available to stop migrants from crossing the border illegally, with one notable exception.
“The only thing we are not doing is we are not shooting people who cross the border because, of course, the Biden administration will charge us with murder,” said the governor with what sounded like a hint of regret.
Sadly, Abbott’s reckless behavior has not been unique in Texas history. Previous Texas political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, have been complicit in mass violence. In 1838, Mirabeau Lamar, the second president of the Texas Republic, launched a genocide against Native Americans, calling for an “exterminating war” against indigenous people that would have no conclusion “except in their total extinction or total expulsion.”
From the 1880s until the 1920s, Texas ranked third in the nation in the number of lynchings, behind only Mississippi and Georgia. As mobs murdered more than 700 primarily African American and Tejano and Mexican men and women across the state in those years, Texas governors mostly looked the other way.
In 1919, when John Shillady, the NAACP secretary, traveled to Texas to investigate the lynching of Bragg Williams in Hillsboro, he was beaten by three men, including Travis County Judge Dave J. Pickle and a constable, who accused him of “inciting Negroes against whites.” The trio forced Shillady onto a train bound for St. Louis. Pickle bragged to the press that “Shillady was beaten until his face bled freely and he asked for mercy.”
Gov. William Hobby, who earlier had called for anti-lynching legislation, not only failed to condemn this assault but blamed the incident on the victim and threatened future violence against civil rights workers in Texas. “Shillady was the only offender,” Hobby insisted, before promising to send any “narrow-brained, double-chinned reformer…back to the North where he came from, with a broken jaw if necessary.”
Another Texas governor, Alan Shivers, sided with an ominous mob of up to 400 whites who encircled Mansfield High School in 1956 to block federally ordered desegregation. Gangs beat up outside observers, physically threatened the sheriff, and hanged three dummy effigies designed to look like Black men on the campus grounds, one with an attached sign that said, “This would be a horrible way to die.” Nevertheless, Shivers refused to order Texas Rangers to enforce the court’s desegregation order. Echoing Hobby almost four decades earlier, Shivers instead defended the actions of the white mob and blamed the violence on “paid agitators” and the NAACP.
Abbott and his predecessors cynically tap into a Texas “culture of violence” in which the state’s mythologized gunslinger past and frontier justice at the hands of mobs has been glamorized as heroic. As Texas author Bryan Burrough suggested, some Texans are still shaped by a “code of the West” in which white men in particular are brainwashed into thinking they are obligated “to avenge all insult and wrong, real or imagined; never to retreat before an aggressor; and to respond with any degree of violence, even death.”
This code has provided cover for vigilantes like Rittenhouse, Perry, and Castro as well as cynical politicians who try to ride their bloody coattails from the safety of the governor’s mansion. We all suffer from this toxic devotion to violence as a solution to political problems. Regardless of whether Abbott succeeds in November in winning an unprecedented fourth term as governor, Texans need to insist that their political leaders stop cosplaying Wild West avengers.