Videos that spread over the weekend show a group of about seven people in white pointed hoods and robes walking through El Paso, Texas, at night and shouting a racial slur together on cue. By Monday the city’s NAACP branch was standing outside the El Paso County Courthouse to answer them, and police were still deciding whether anything the group did was against the law.
“It hurts,” Carl B. Dwyer Jr., president of the El Paso NAACP branch, said at the news conference. “It hurts fighting for freedom. Still to this day, in 2026, we have people that think it’s okay to don white sheets, white robes, and white hats that are emblematic of the most racist time and period of this country.”
The group has not been identified. Reports describe them as teenagers or young men, and in at least one clip the person filming tells them to “yell something as a team.” Witnesses told local reporters the crowd had gathered for a Halloween party at a house before walking through the neighborhood.
For Black residents of El Paso, the robe is not a prop. It was the uniform of the organization that terrorized Black families across Texas and the South for generations, and wearing it while chanting a slur at night, through streets where people live, is the part of the history that has never gone away. The NAACP branch said in a statement that “the KKK hood is not a costume.”
El Paso Police Chief Peter Pacillas said the department is looking into whether the group, which he said reportedly includes young people, violated any laws, including disorderly conduct. “Free expression has limits when it crosses into conduct that threatens public order or the safety of others,” he said. Police have asked the public for information about who was involved.
That caution reflects the law as much as the department. Speech, including hateful speech, is broadly protected by the First Amendment, and prosecutors need conduct, such as a threat, harassment or a targeted act, to bring a case. No charges have been announced.
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, called the display “deeply disturbing and unacceptable.” In her statement she said the KKK “represents a shameful history of white supremacy, racial terror, and violence against Black Americans and other communities of color.”
Dwyer was joined at the news conference by community leaders, including Pastor Artie C. Maxwell Jr., who called the costumes deeply offensive to the people the Klan harmed. Dr. Dwonna Goldstone of Texas State University told one outlet that such displays carry a message: “you don’t belong here, and we’re going to intimidate you to get you out of this space.”
One report noted that pointed white hoods also have a separate history in Hispanic Catholic Holy Week processions in Spain and Mexico. Nothing in the videos or the statements from police and the NAACP suggests the group was doing anything but imitating the Klan.
Police have not said when they expect to finish reviewing the videos or whether they will refer anything to prosecutors.
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