(DALLAS) — Dallas police arrested a suspect in connection with the May 11 shooting of three women in a hair salon in the city’s Koreatown. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime and could be linked to a series of recent shootings at Asian-run businesses in the city, police said.

The salon owner, an employee and a customer are all Korean, according to ABC affiliate station WFAA in Dallas. The women suffered nonfatal injuries and were transported to a local hospital, according to police.

Police said Tuesday morning that a suspect, who was not named, was in custody and that further information on the arrest will be provided by Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia later in the day.

The FBI is investigating the incident as a hate crime.

“The Dallas FBI Field Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District in Texas, and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice have opened a federal hate crime investigation into the incident at Hair World Salon in Dallas,” a spokesperson for the FBI field office in Dallas told ABC News in a statement on Monday. “We are in close communication with Dallas Police and are partnering together to thoroughly investigate this incident. As this is an ongoing investigation, we are not able to comment further at this time.”

Police met with members of the community at a town hall in Koreatown on Monday amid concerns for the public’s safety.

Two of the shooting victims — the owner and an employee — were present at the meeting, according to WFAA. The employee spoke with the help of an interpreter and her was face covered. The women did not reveal their names.

Garcia said at a press conference on Friday that law enforcement “concluded three recent shootings of Asian run businesses may be connected” and the suspect in each incident was driving a similar vehicle.

Police said they learned from a witness report that an unknown Black male parked what appeared to be “a dark color minivan-type vehicle” on Royal Lane and then walked across the parking lot and into the establishment, allegedly opening fire as soon as he entered the salon.

Police also released a security image of a maroon minivan they said the gunmen fled the scene in.

Garcia said the shooting at the salon may be linked to one that happened a day before and one that took place last month.

Police learned from witness reports that on April 2 a driver in a red minivan drove past a strip mall of Asian-run businesses and fired shots at three businesses. No one was injured.

On Tuesday a suspect in a burgundy van or car drove by and shot into Asian-run businesses near 4849 Sunnyvale Street, police said.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have reached out to our partners to make them aware of the possible connection and ask for their assistance,” Garcia said. “This includes the FBI and member agencies of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. We are also working with North Texas police partners to determine if this criminal action has or is taking place in their jurisdictions.”

Garcia said police will be increasing the presence of high visibility patrol officers in areas in the city where there are large Asian American populations.

“We are turning to every resident of the city of Dallas to keep an eye out and safeguard our city,” Garcia said. “Hate has no place here.”

These incidents in Dallas come amid a spate of attacks targeting Asian Americans across the nation, which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Within the pages of the alleged Buffalo shooter’s plan to attack a Buffalo, New York supermarket, he described the radical ideals he said he cultivated on the internet.

It included racist and antisemitic rants reminiscent of the sentiments espoused by shooters who committed similar atrocities in El Paso, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina, in recent years, according to an ABC News review of the document.

Federal security agencies have increasingly sounded the alarm on white supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists as a “significant domestic terrorism threat.”

However, experts on hate in the U.S. said this most recent mass shooting highlights how little the country has done in reckoning with the growing danger of white supremacy in this country.

“We’ve had too many wake-up calls at this point for me to feel confident that we’re going to suddenly change the current path that we are on,” Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News.

White supremacists don’t just look like white-hooded Ku Klux Klan members from the history books, experts said.

Radicalization can occur anywhere and without a particular group or organization to belong to thanks to the internet and the normalization of hateful rhetoric in media, experts said. It’s given right-wing extremism an environment to thrive and grow.

“We better understand this is a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Marc Morial, president of civil rights organization National Urban League, told ABC News.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonprofit policy research organization, found that alleged right-wing attacks and plots have accounted for the majority of all U.S. terrorist incidents since 1994.

“The last two years — 2021 and 2020 — were the highest recorded years of domestic terrorism, plots and attacks, so the trends are pretty concerning,” CSIS Senior Vice President Seth Jones said in an interview with ABC News.

However, Jones said the federal government needs to do a better job collecting and releasing data on domestic terrorist attacks and plots and informing Americans about the severity of right-wing extremism.

There is no public release of such information, he said, which has made it very difficult for Americans to understand the gravity of this problem.

Since 2014, CSIS found that these attacks have been on the rise. Simultaneously, hate crimes have also been on the rise, particularly anti-Black, anti-immigrant and antisemitic attacks, according to FBI data.

“It’s a movement of hatred and violence,” Morial said. “This is not someone just ranting on the internet.”

The normalization of white supremacy and the growing divisive rhetoric of the far-right, Hayden and Morial said, serves to exploit the concerns of vulnerable populations regarding social issues, score political points and win gains for people in power.

“As long as very wealthy people are willing to exploit these feelings of anger in the country, this is going to keep happening,” Hayden said.

“The reality is, they know what they’re doing when they bring up great replacement theory on the air,” Hayden continued. “They know what they’re doing when they dehumanize immigrants. They know what kind of effect it’s going to have on people who are already predisposed to being mistrustful and frightened.”

Experts said there are two routes to combatting white supremacist extremism in America — personally and through policy.

For example, experts say America’s gun violence problem has only made racist violence more deadly. White supremacy has been the motive behind several fatal mass shootings in recent years, past ABC News reporting shows. Experts recommend gun control efforts as a potential solution to deadly extremism.

“This is a deep-seated challenge in the United States, particularly in a culture where individuals have such easy access to guns,” Jones said. “That’s the difference, frankly, between the US and Europe right now, which also has a significant white supremacist challenge in Germany, the U.K., several Nordic countries. What they don’t have, though, is easy access to guns.”

Others stress the importance of getting government funding for improved security in community centers and gathering places, as well as prevention programs and resources that intervene in the radicalization process.

On a personal level, experts recommend calling out racism and white supremacy in your communities as another way to de-normalize and de-platform racist narratives.

Experts also recommend watching out for loved ones who may be encountering extremist ideals online, and avoid leaving them isolated. They say isolation and vulnerability can become a pathway to radicalization.

“Your silence is your acceptance,” Rashawn Ray, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, told ABC News.

“Unfortunately, this is a part of the DNA that created the United States of America and even though there has been progress, these sorts of incidents continue to show that we are not as far as we think we are,” Ray said.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — For people in jails and prisons across the country, where reproductive health care is already abysmal, the potential end of Roe v. Wade is a haunting prospect.

“[People are] going to be forced to carry a pregnancy and be forced to give birth — that literally will be part of their sentence, their punishment,” said Carolyn Sufrin, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It’s hard to predict the depths of trauma and adverse health effects that we might see with this, but I think we can imagine that it’s going to be profound.”

Women are the fastest growing incarcerated demographic, with more than 200,000 women incarcerated right now. Estimates show that at least 58,000 pregnant people enter the carceral system each year, according to The Sentencing Project and the Prison Policy Initiative.

“Overturning Roe is going to force thousands of incarcerated people to give birth and carry pregnancies in health care systems that have been proven to not be capable of providing adequate prenatal care,” said Corene Kendrick, the deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws that could go into effect if federal abortion protections are demolished, according to the Guttmacher Institute. These laws effectively ban all abortions, with some banning abortion after six or eight weeks of pregnancy.

At least seven of these states have some of the nation’s highest rates of female incarceration, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data: Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming, Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi.

Between trigger laws and other set or expected laws, at least 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion if the Supreme Court weakens or overturns Roe v. Wade, per Guttmacher. This means being forced to give birth behind bars could become a reality for tens of thousands of people each year.

Adequate reproductive care — and especially abortion access — is hard to come by in these facilities as it is. There are currently no federal standards for reproductive care and no required system of oversight when it comes to providing health care in these facilities.

Reports have shown that some people are shackled to bedposts while giving birth, and others have been forced to endure labor in solitary confinement. Some people have experienced miscarriages or other pregnancy complications from their jail cell, Sufrin and Kendrick said.

“Incarceration is an inherently traumatizing and right-violating experience,” Sufrin said. “In the most extreme cases, we see pregnant people who are in active labor and are clearly in pain and contracting or their water’s broken and they’re bleeding — they’re ignored or minimized and then they give birth in their jail cells.”

Alejandra Pablos, a formerly incarcerated woman and reproductive justice organizer, told ABC News she believes she had no bodily autonomy while incarcerated.

While she was detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, she said she remembers strict call times for doctors, poor nutrition and hurdles toward accessing basic care like birth control and OB-GYN visits.

“For me, as long as these things exist — prisons, cages, threats to our our self determination, the right to make decisions over my sexuality, my body — we will never have reproductive justice in the U.S.” Pablos told ABC News.

Pregnant incarcerated people are also at higher risk of miscarriage, premature delivery and low birth weight.

“There’s been numerous examples over the years across the country, of people in jails and prisons who did not receive appropriate prenatal care and suffered miscarriages, stillbirths or other negative outcomes,” Kendrick said.

As for abortions, a 2021 Guttmacher study found that many prisons and jails make incarcerated women pay for the treatment — of the 19 state prisons studied that allowed abortions, two-thirds of them required the incarcerated woman to pay for the treatment.

Of the jails that allowed abortions, 25% of those required the incarcerated woman to pay for the procedure. Of the pregnancies that ended during the study, 1.3% of instances in prisons and 15% in jails were abortions.

Several jails and prisons in states that are hostile toward abortion did not allow abortions at all.

“Prisons and jails are not the place where people who are pregnant should be ever, ” Kendrick said.

She instead recommended diversion programs or early release for pregnant people, considering a vast majority of incarcerated women are charged or convicted of nonviolent offenses.

At least a quarter of women in jails have not been convicted of a crime, the Prison Policy Initiative states.

“They’re there because they are too poor to afford to bail out to be back with their families,” Kendrick said.

If Roe is overturned, experts say these cracks in the foundations of abortion and reproductive care in jails, prisons and other detention centers will only make life more dangerous for women behind bars.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.