Unfair Park from p10 A DISD records request turned up Ibar- ra’s personnel file, a letter from the depart- ment’s assistant chief recommending two days of suspension without pay and a resig- nation letter. Nine months after the altercation that led to Ibarra firing his weapon, the assistant chief of the district’s police department was asking for the officer to be suspended with- out pay for two days. The letter is vague, only referencing the policies Ibarra violated and an internal af- fairs investigation report later released to the Observer. It turns out, according to doc- uments from DISD police, that when an as- sistant principal tried to intervene as Ibarra was questioning a student, the officer “or- dered him out of his office, attempted to physically remove the assistant principal from the office and threatened to arrest the assistant principal for interfering with his investigation.” The letter alleged Ibarra violated two DISD police policies. Both had to do with Ibarra’s behavior. The month after this letter was sent, Ibarra filed his resignation. He was hired by the Dallas City Marshal’s Office the follow- ing year, in 2016. On Oct. 12, 2018, Ibarra drove his squad car onto the unpaved roadway in the levees of the Trinity River bottoms. His car got stuck. He tried getting it out by stepping on the gas, but that didn’t help much. A disciplinary letter later given to Ibarra explains, “Your attempts to free the vehicle by excessive acceleration resulted in the ve- hicle’s emissions system overheating and causing a fire in the trunk area.” He left the car there for several days. It rained heavily, flooding the squad car with water and mud. “The incident resulted in a total loss of the vehicle and its contents,” the disciplinary letter said. “You eventually filed a report for this incident, but not until Octo- ber 15, 2018.” It wasn’t until June 2019 that disciplinary action would be handed down to Ibarra over the incident. His punishment? Five days sus- pension without pay. Earlier that year, in Jan- uary 2019, Ibarra would also receive a disciplinary notice for not meeting his goal of clearing DPD Class C warrants. Then, in February 2021, he’d cross paths with Deshode Patton. When DPD was fin- ished investigating Ibarra, they submitted a grand jury referral. “The [Dallas Sheriff’s Office] issued an arrest warrant for both charges on 7/22/22 and Ibarra turned him- self in on 7/29/22,” Kristin Lowman, a DPD spokesperson said in an email. (The charges, official oppression and tampering with a government document, are Class A misde- meanors.) A spokesperson for the city said Ibarra is on administrative leave pending the out- come of a DPD internal affairs investiga- tion. The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges against Patton on May 31. Ibarra didn’t respond to multiple re- 10 10 quests for comment. His lawyer, Kathryn Bishkin, would only say by email, “My client looks forward to setting the record straight when he has his day in court.” ▼ POLITICS SECOND VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST E AT CPAC, MIGRATION IS AN ‘INVASION,’ COMMUNISM LOOMS AND TRUMP’S THE ‘MOST PERSECUTED’ MAN IN U.S. BY PATRICK STRICKLAND ntering the Conservative Political Ac- tion Conference’s event at the Hilton Anatole hotel in Dallas, you’ll walk past one sign after another mentioning the word “freedom.” You’ll pass right-wing booths – “Read Epoch Times, Defeat Commu- nism,” says a poster at the ultra-conservative newspaper’s table. You’ll pass vendors hawk- ing QAnon ball caps and shirts emblazoned with President Joe Biden’s face with a Hitler- like mustache atop his lip. You’ll ask where the press section is, and a volunteer will point to a cordoned area in the back of the main ballroom. That’s “your cage,” she’ll tell you. CPAC first came to town in 2021, not long after another rightwing conference, the QA- non-linked “For God & Country Patriot Roundup.” Like the 2021 gathering, this year’s event included conservative speakers from across the country and beyond. Former President Donald Trump came again. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz made another appearance. Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, even took a break from demonizing refugees and migrants in his country and made the 5,600-mile trip to demonize refu- gees and migrants in Dallas. To hear CPAC organizers tell it, they picked Dallas because it’s in Texas, a state they apparently view as one of the last bastions of freedom in a coun- try beleaguered by progressives. To Cal Jillson, a professor at Southern Methodist University and an expert on Texas politics, CPAC’s decision to hold its conference in Dallas a second year in a row is “unusual.” Still, he said, “They find Texas to be particu- larly comfortable, ideologically and in partisan terms. It’s the largest American red state.” When the day’s events kicked off early last Thursday afternoon, a rabbi who’d traveled from Israel led a bizarre prayer in which he asked God to rid us of “Biblical illiteracy,” “Godlessness” and “moral relativism.” The attendees stood with their hands folded across their paunches, their heads bowed in prayer. He warned of “the haughty forces of darkness who wish to enslave us with their manufactured fears and experimental moral- ity.” Behind the rabbi, a giant video screen read in bright letters, “Awake, Not Woke.” Singer Natasha Owens then took the stage. Wearing a large red, white and blue dress that read “Mobilizing Patriotism,” an ad for a Christian mobile telephone company, she launched into her set. The highlight was a track titled “America First,” words she claimed had led to Trump’s “crucifixion.” When Owens wrapped up, the room dark- ened, and a trailer for a CPAC film titled The Culture Killers: The Woke Wars appeared on the screens. At a dizzying pace, the trailer flashed between clips of protests turned rowdy, American flags aflame, Confederate statues being toppled, Republican politicians lamenting the supposed Marxist threat and at one point, a brief clip of an elderly Fidel Cas- tro. “The land of the free under siege from an enemy within,” an ominous voice narrates over images of Black Lives Matter rallies. After the prayer, the national anthem, the pledge of allegiance, Owens’ performance and the movie trailer, first up on the main- stage was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. He spoke on a panel with CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes. On the screen behind them was this year’s theme: “Fire Pelosi. Save America.” Abbott, who will face off with Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke in November, ticked off a list of campaign talking points: migration con- stitutes an “invasion,” property taxes need to be cut, parents ought to control what their children are taught in schools. That day, Abbott was still neck deep in a public squabble with California Gov. Gavin Newsom and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. Newsom had recently taken out ads blasting Abbott in Texas papers. Bowser had criti- cized him for busing migrants to D.C. “You know, the mayor of Washington has really picked a beef with you over the fact that there’s an invasion going on in Wash- ington, D.C., because you sent 5,000 ille- gals,” the CPAC chairman told Abbott. Abbott said he’d visited South Texas and found that local officials said their communi- ties were “completely overrun” with mi- grants. The officials wanted Border Patrol to bus asylum seekers to San Antonio, he claimed. “I said, ‘Don’t do that. We’re going to bus them all the way to Washington, D.C.’” The Republican governor added, “I’ve got one thing to tell you and to tell them: There are more buses on the way as we gather at this conference today.” He then asked attendees to donate money to help pay for buses to the U.S. capital. (The next morn- ing, Abbott went on Twitter to announce that he’d sent more buses headed northeast, including to New York City.) Human rights organizations, civil rights groups and Democrats have warned that Ab- bott’s xenophobic rhetoric and border stunts could fuel further violence against migrants and asylum seekers. After all, the word “inva- sion,” which Abbott’s used with increasing frequency the closer midterms get, echoes the manifesto published by Patrick Crusius, who shot and killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019. But at CPAC, that kind of rhetoric just earns him applause. A conservative booth at CPAC Matt Angle, director of the Lone Star Proj- ect, a group that backs Democratic candi- dates in Texas, says Abbott’s stunts are “all directed at the most extreme, divisive and mean-spirited elements within his own party. “I think that during this entire campaign, Texas has been in [Abbott’s] rearview mir- ror,” he said. “He shows up at CPAC, within a crowd where he’s never going to be pressed on anything, but refuses to show up at a single town hall meeting during his en- tire governorship.” Angle said Abbott’s rhetoric constituted “barely camouflaged hate speech,” adding: “It’s the same type of rhetoric that, if it was posted on Facebook by an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old, we’d be alarmed about what they would do.” When Abbott’s panel concluded, Hun- gary’s far-right leader took the stage. Fresh from controversy over comments he made last month warning that migration would turn Hungarians into a “mixed race,” Orbán delivered a bizarre string of clichés that you’d be forgiven for mistak- ing as a middle school coach’s pregame pep talk. Conservatives needed to “fight to win” and “play by [their] own rules,” he said, adding that “yesterday’s homeruns don’t win today’s games.” But between the platitudes, he got to the meat of why American Republicans wanted him there. He’d spent more than a decade dismantling Hungarian civil society, tight- ening his government’s grasp on the press, railing against Hungarian American billion- aire and philanthropist George Soros and casting migration as an existential threat to “Western civilization.” Evoking language that might ring un- comfortably familiar to Texans, Orbán boasted, “Ladies and gentlemen, we were the first ones in Europe who said no to ille- gal migration and stopped the invasion of il- legal migrants.” Hungary had built a wall during the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, and now he insisted that’s why the country was waging a war against the supposedly pro- gressive world order. “The globalists can all go to hell,” he said toward the end. “I have come to Texas.” >> p12 Patrick Strickland MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 11–17, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
