- The suspect in the Texas mass shooting was a Mexican national unlawfully in the US, officials said.
- He was forced to leave the country four previous times between 2009 and 2016, according to ICE.
The man wanted by authorities in connection to the Texas mass shooting that left five people, including a child, dead is a Mexican national who unlawfully entered the United States and was forced to leave the country four previous times, according to federal immigration officials.
The suspect in Friday night's shooting in rural Cleveland, Texas, was previously identified by police as 38-year-old Francisco Oropesa. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency identified him as Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres to Insider on Monday.
Perez-Torres was initially ordered removed by an immigration judge on March 16, 2009, and was ultimately removed by Houston's ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations and sent back to Mexico the next day, ICE told Insider.
At an unknown time and location, Perez-Torres "unlawfully reentered" the US and again was apprehended and removed several more times by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in September 2009, January 2012, and July 2016, the federal agency said.
Additionally, according to ICE, Perez-Torres was previously convicted of driving while intoxicated in Montgomery County, Texas in January 2012. He was sentenced to serve time in jail, the agency said.
It is not clear when Perez-Torres last entered the country.
The shooting suspect fled in the wake of the massacre, and authorities have launched a massive manhunt to find him. The FBI described him as "armed and dangerous."
In the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott identified the victims as "illegal immigrants" in a statement in which he offered condolences to their loved ones, sparking an onslaught of criticism.
Abbott also said the suspected gunman was in the country illegally. ICE confirmed to Insider that Perez-Torres was in the US without legal permission at the time of the shooting.
Following Abbott's comments, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center said the governor's statement included "dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric."
Reports in recent years, meanwhile, have shown that US-born citizens are more likely to commit crimes than undocumented immigrants.
A 2018 report by the Washington DC-based think tank Cato Institute found that undocumented immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
"The homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants was 16 percent below that of native‐born Americans in Texas in 2015," while the "conviction rates for illegal immigrants were 7.9 percent and 77 percent below that of native‐born Americans for sex crimes and larceny, respectively," the report said.
A survivor of Friday's shooting whose wife and 9-year-old son were slain said that his family called 911 five times in the minutes before their neighbor opened fire.
But by the time authorities arrived at the scene, it was too late. Five people had been fatally shot "almost execution-style" in the rampage, police said.
"I never thought that he would shoot. Then he went room to room, looking for people," survivor Wilson Garcia told local news outlet KTRK-TV.
The shooting unfolded after Garcia asked the gunman to stop firing his AR-15-style rifle near Garcia's family home.
Garcia said that he and two others walked over to his neighbor's house on Friday night to "respectfully" ask that the man shoot his gun farther away from the home because his newborn baby was trying to sleep, according to the Associated Press.
"He told us he was on his property, and he could do what he wanted," Garcia told the AP on Sunday after a vigil.