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On a recent afternoon along Finland’s border with Russia, an attack from Russian military bases a few miles away seemed a distant prospect.

That’s not only because, as NATO’s newest member, Finland now enjoys the guaranteed protection of 30 nations, including the United States — a development that President Biden will celebrate during a visit to Helsinki next week.

It’s also because most of the Russians once stationed in the area went to fight in Ukraine, and many if not most of them, Finnish officials say, are dead. It may be years before Russia poses a conventional military threat from across the verdant forest of pine, spruce and birch.

But there were some Russians to be seen on a sunny June day at the Vaalimaa border crossing, about midway between Helsinki and St. Petersburg. A trickle came and went, many in expensive cars: an Audi Q7, a black BMW with two sleek bikes mounted on a rack. These Russians were likely dual passport holders, possibly headed to other European countries that they can reach only by land because of flight restrictions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

For anyone trying to cross the border illicitly, border guard foot patrols roam the woods. But their trail-sniffing dogs encounter few Russians trying to sneak into Finland.

“We do have some Finns trying to sneak that way,” said Matti Pitkäniitty, an official with the Finnish Border Guard, who guided a visitor around the site, “but normally they are mental cases.” Perhaps the biggest concern on this afternoon was a black bear seen prowling the area.

The peaceful scene belies the fear among many Finns that despite Russia’s weakened state, this transit point, and their country, could one day become a Russian target. That anxiety prompted Finland to seek membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last year, a process completed in April when Finland became its 31st member in what Mr. Biden calls a strategic blow for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

That move infused a long, placid relationship between Moscow and Helsinki with sharp new tensions. In January, Russia’s military announced plans to add a new army corps to the border region of Karelia.

And on Thursday, Russia’s foreign ministry said it was expelling nine Finnish diplomats — payback for Finland’s expulsion last month of nine Russian diplomats accused of being intelligence operatives — and would shutter Finland’s consulate in St. Petersburg this fall. A foreign ministry statement said that Finland’s membership in NATO and its support for Ukraine posed “a threat to the security of the Russian Federation” and amounts to “clearly hostile actions.”

But Finnish officials say the only threat is Russia.

“The Finns think that we could quite easily be in the position that the Ukrainians are in,” Mr. Pitkäniitty said. Gesturing to a road that crosses the border through the forest, he added: “If a Russian division wants to attack Helsinki, they need to go through here. You would be seeing ruins and smoke here.”

Such an attack would have vastly greater consequences, now that Finland’s border — an 830-mile frontier that runs roughly north-south from the Barents Sea to the Gulf of Finland — has become a NATO boundary, more than doubling Russia’s existing borders with NATO countries. Under the alliance’s charter, a Russian attack on Finland would be treated as an attack on all NATO members.

No one expects such an invasion anytime soon. But history leaves Finland understandably wary.

Etched in the country’s national memory is Joseph Stalin’s 1939 invasion and conquest of thousands of square miles of Finnish territory that Russia holds to this day. The Soviet leader believed that St. Petersburg required a larger buffer area to its west for protection, so he created one by force, at the cost of many thousands of lives.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, many Finns revisited that dark chapter of their history.

“It wasn’t hard for Finns to imagine themselves in the Ukrainians’ shoes. They’d walked in them,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said during a visit to Helsinki in early June. “To many Finns, the parallels between 1939 and 2022 were striking.”

For now, the NATO alliance has no plans to install infrastructure or station troops at the border, although its members are eager to learn more about it: U.S. and European officials have been visiting to assess its vulnerabilities and Finnish preparations.

The Finns say not to worry. For one thing, they proudly recall the huge casualties they inflicted on the invading Soviet forces in 1939 — employing insurgent-style ambush tactics against a poorly led and equipped enemy, much as the Ukrainians would nearly a century later. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, later said that while the Soviets had prevailed over the vastly outnumbered Finns, they had in fact suffered defeat, because “it encouraged our enemies’ conviction that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay.”

Partly thanks to bitter memories of that conflict, Finland’s border guard doubles as a branch of its military. Its members receive full military training, and its units are equipped with body armor and semiautomatic rifles, though one team of three that patrolled around Vaalimaa on a recent day had stashed that gear; the only visible enemies were constant swarms of mosquitoes.

In their current numbers, though, the border guards would be of little use against a Russian military assault. It is one for which Finland has almost literally paved the way: A few years ago, Finland upgraded the highway that runs between Helsinki and Vaalimaa to accommodate trade and travel between Finland and Russia, which boomed in the last decade.

But border traffic today is below one-third of its prepandemic levels, and the road is lightly traveled.

The force of the NATO alliance, and its Article 5 treaty mandating collective self-defense, eases fears of attack. “That’s the biggest reason why we joined — to get the Article 5 cover,” Brig. Gen. Sami Nurmi, a Finnish defense policy official, said in an April interview. “And also, of course, that deterrence aspect.”

In the near term, the Finns are more worried about a very different form of warfare — weaponized migration. About 60 miles north of Vaalimaa, Finland has begun to install its first border fence.

In late 2015 and early 2016, Finland experienced a surge of asylum-seeking migrants crossing the Russian border, most of them from third countries. Finnish officials saw the hand of Moscow, which has repeatedly directed migrants into European countries in an apparent effort to destabilize their politics.

“The impression that someone is organizing and regulating things on the Russian side is probably true,” Finland’s foreign minister, Timo Soini, told the country’s state broadcaster at the time. “It is quite obvious that activity like this is a managed effort.”

The Finns were caught off guard. “Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate that we would have, for example, Bangladeshis coming with bicycles to a high north border crossing when the sun doesn’t come up at all and it’s minus 20-25 degrees Celsius,” Mr. Pitkäniitty said, or minus 4 to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite that experience, Mr. Pitkäniitty said that he and his colleagues maintain cordial and professional relations with their Russian counterparts across the border. The two sides communicate regularly, he said.

“When we talk to the Russians we try to avoid politics,” Mr. Pitkäniitty said. “There is no point in arguing. You just end up in a dispute that does not allow for solutions.”

For years, he said, acceptable conversation topics with the Russians included fishing, hunting and sports. “Now we have to exclude sports, because they do not participate in international sports anymore,” Mr. Pitkäniitty said. “So it’s fishing and hunting you can safely talk about with the Russian officers.”

At the same time, “I know that they will not hesitate to shoot me in the back if ordered to do so,” he added. “Just as I would do the same to them.”

John Ismay contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

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It’s back.

A second round of sweatier-than-normal summer heat is forecast to return to the Southern United States starting Saturday and continuing into next week.

A heat dome of high pressure will once again park over New Mexico and West Texas. Although it probably won’t be as bad as late June, areas from California to Texas that typically see temperatures above 100 this time of year could see heat even worse than that, possibly setting daily records. Gulf Coast states will most likely experience above-average temperatures combined with high humidity, creating dangerous conditions. Overnight “low” temperatures could break records for their warmth.

Oh, and a separate system could bring above-average extreme heat to southern Florida, too.

A Chart That Conveys the Forecast: Spot the trend.

It’ll be brutal in Phoenix, according to forecasters. Look up your city or town.

When Will It End?

Not soon. The heat wave across the South, from Florida to California, is expected to last at least two more weeks. That’s not a prediction for an eventual respite; it’s just that forecasts are fuzzy more than 14 days out. So the heat could continue.

One Scary Statistic: Earth’s hottest week on record.

The average global temperature suddenly surged this week, climbing to 62.6 degrees Tuesday, making it the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940.

Greg Carbin, the chief of forecast operations at the Weather Prediction Center, said Friday: “I’ve been watching the global temperature trends like everyone else in our business. This is definitely a concern.”

She was there to woo the conservative moms of Iowa. So Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, wasted no time in talking about her three young children — and how badly she wanted to leave them home.

“It’s funny, somebody outside by the snowball machine was asking, ‘Did you bring your kids with you?’” she said, sitting on a small stage on Thursday in suburban Des Moines for her first solo appearance in her husband’s presidential campaign. Her answer was unequivocal: “No.”

The last time she had the brilliant idea of doing a campaign event with one of her small children, she told the crowd, was at an event for her husband’s re-election campaign in Florida. For most of her remarks, Madison, then 5, squirmed by her side. In the final moments, Madison tugged on her sleeve and whispered that she had to go to the bathroom, Ms. DeSantis recalled.

“What you’re having, moms, is one of those out-of-body experiences. Do I need to get up? Do I need to walk her?” she said, as the audience roared. “Like, what is happening?”

Widely considered to be her husband’s most important adviser, Ms. DeSantis is the “not-so-secret weapon,” the “second in command” and the “primary sounding board” of his political operation. Now, in the early weeks of his presidential campaign, she’s added yet another position to her portfolio: humanizer-in-chief.

Deploying a spouse to try to soften a prickly political image is a tried-and-true tactic of presidential politics. In 2007, Michelle Obama charmed Democratic primary voters with an everywoman pitch devised to ground her husband’s unusual life story. Four years later, Ann Romney toured Iowa and New Hampshire, offering “the other side of Mitt” — a caring, empathic family man who did not fit the caricature of the heartless corporate raider drawn by his rivals. And in the final days of the 2016 campaign, Melania Trump made a rare campaign appearance in the Philadelphia suburbs to counter her husband’s coarse image with female voters.

But rarely does this strategy appear quite so early in the primary campaign, a reflection both of Mr. DeSantis’s struggles to connect with voters and the central role his wife has long played in his political career.

During her husband’s first congressional race, Ms. DeSantis, then a local news reporter, crisscrossed neighborhoods in their northeastern Florida district on an electric scooter, knocking on doors and making his case. Years later, when he ran for governor, she narrated his most attention-grabbing campaign ad, a 2018 spot in which he encouraged their then-toddler to “build the wall” with large cardboard blocks. Her role expanded along with his: After he won, she secured a prime office in the governor’s Capitol suite, participated in personnel interviews as he hired staff for his new administration and shared the podium at hurricane briefings — some of the most high-profile gubernatorial appearances in storm-prone Florida.

In recent weeks, she has joined her husband in embracing the quirky traditions of the early-state primary circuit, praising Iowa’s gas-station pizza and making headlines for sporting a black leather jacket emblazoned with an unofficial campaign slogan “Where Woke Goes to Die” at an annual motorcycle-themed Republican fund-raiser in Des Moines.

Her high-profile role has created a war of conflicting spin, as supporters and detractors offer their assessment of the couple’s professional partnership. She’s his greatest asset. Or, depending on who’s opining, maybe his greatest liability. She’s the antidote to his much-documented struggles to connect. Or a virus infecting his insular campaign, encouraging her husband’s distrust of those outside his tight-knit political orbit.

Yet for Mr. DeSantis, the hope is simply that his wife can offer a way to secure the holy grail of presidential campaigns: relatability.

That message wasn’t subtle on Thursday in Johnston, Iowa, where Ms. DeSantis appeared alongside the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for a question-and-answer session. “How in the world do you do it?” gushed the governor, herself a mother of three daughters and a grandmother to 11 grandchildren.

“It’s a little bit of organized chaos. I’m not going to lie,” said Ms. DeSantis, before launching into a series of stories about her three young children — Madison, Mason and Mamie — and their adventures in the governor’s mansion.

Then, it was down to business. Ms. DeSantis had come to officially roll out “Mamas for DeSantis,” a national version of the statewide group she started during her husband’s re-election bid in 2022. In her remarks, Ms. DeSantis attempted to position him as an avatar for the conservative anger at school administrators and school boards that exploded during the pandemic.

Much of her remarks were focused on a loose social agenda often described as “parents’ rights,” a hodgepodge of a movement that includes efforts to limit how race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues are taught, attacks on transgender rights, support for publicly funded private school vouchers and opposition to vaccine mandates.

“I care about protecting the innocence of my children and your children,” she told the audience on Thursday. “As long as I have breath in my body I will go out and I will fight for Ron DeSantis, not because he’s my husband — that is a part of it — but because I believe in him with every ounce of my being.”

It was a message that resonated with some in the audience, which included many who were affiliated with Moms for Liberty, a group that’s emerged as a conservative powerhouse on social issues. Mr. DeSantis, said Elicha Brancheau, a member of Moms for Liberty, has been a strong champion for parents’ rights, and she said she was impressed by his wife’s commitment to the issue.

“I like her a lot. She’s so smart, well-spoken,” said Ms. Brancheau, who met Ms. DeSantis before the event. “I love the dynamic of their family.”

Not everyone was as convinced.

Malina Cottington, a mother of five who started home-schooling her children after the pandemic, said she was seeking a candidate who would take the strongest position on preserving what she described as parental rights. She was impressed by Mr. DeSantis but liked the bolder plan of one of his Republican rivals, Vivek Ramaswamy, the multimillionaire entrepreneur and author who has pledged to abolish the Department of Education.

“I think we need something that drastic,” said Ms. Cottington, 42, who lives in suburban Des Moines. “We just want to be able to make sure we can raise our kids the way we want to raise them.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $20 million in the first six weeks of his presidential run, his campaign said Thursday, a substantial sum that solidifies his place as the leading rival to former President Donald J. Trump.

While the number falls short of the $35 million that Mr. Trump’s campaign said the former president raised in the three months ending June 30, Mr. DeSantis had only half the time to bring in campaign funds after officially entering the race in mid-May.

In addition to the $20 million the DeSantis campaign said it had raised, a super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down, said Thursday that it had collected $130 million since March. But nearly two-thirds of that sum was transferred to the group from a state committee that had supported Mr. DeSantis’s re-election bid last year.

The totals supplied by the campaigns — more detailed numbers don’t have to be filed with the Federal Election Commission until July 15 — provide the first glimpse into the fund-raising battle between the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, a race that could set records for spending.

The $20 million raised by Mr. DeSantis includes $8.2 million that his campaign said it had taken in on its first full day of fund-raising in late May, suggesting that the pace of its fund-raising tapered off significantly thereafter.

Excluding the transfer from Mr. DeSantis’s state committee, the latest numbers also show that Never Back Down raised more money in its first three weeks than it did over roughly the last three months.

The fund-raising slowdown comes after a bumpy campaign rollout that has brought about questions from donors and supporters about its direction.

But Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, said that the money raised “shows an unparalleled, unprecedented and massively successful fund-raising operation no other candidate in this race has.”

Mr. Trump has raised most of his campaign’s cash through his leadership PAC, Save America. In recent months, The New York Times reported, Mr. Trump has diverted a greater portion of donations he receives to the PAC, which he has used to pay his personal legal fees.

Mr. Trump’s campaign said on Wednesday that it had raised a total of $35 million between April and June — nearly double what the committee had raised in the first quarter of the year, reflecting hefty fund-raising bumps in the wake of his two indictments, in New York City and Florida.

Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.

In a sealed room behind a gantlet of armed guards and three rows of high barbed wire at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, a team of robotic arms was busily disassembling some of the last of the United States’ vast and ghastly stockpile of chemical weapons.

In went artillery shells filled with deadly mustard agent that the Army had been storing for more than 70 years. The bright yellow robots pierced, drained and washed each shell, then baked it at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Out came inert and harmless scrap metal, falling off a conveyor belt into an ordinary brown dumpster with a resounding clank.

“That’s the sound of a chemical weapon dying,” said Kingston Reif, who spent years pushing for disarmament outside government and is now the deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control. He smiled as another shell clanked into the dumpster.

The destruction of the stockpile has taken decades, and the Army says the work is just about finished. The depot near Pueblo destroyed its last weapon in June; the remaining handful at another depot in Kentucky will be destroyed in the next few days. And when they are gone, all of the world’s publicly declared chemical weapons will have been eliminated.

The American stockpile, built up over generations, was shocking in its scale: Cluster bombs and land mines filled with nerve agent. Artillery shells that could blanket whole forests with a blistering mustard fog. Tanks full of poison that could be loaded on jets and sprayed on targets below.

They were a class of weapons deemed so inhumane that their use was condemned after World War I, but even so, the United States and other powers continued to develop and amass them. Some held deadlier versions of the chlorine and mustard agents made infamous in the trenches of the Western Front. Others held nerve agents developed later, like VX and Sarin, that are lethal even in tiny quantities.

American armed forces are not known to have used lethal chemical weapons in battle since 1918, though during the Vietnam War they used herbicides like Agent Orange that were harmful to humans.

The United States once also had a sprawling germ warfare and biological weapons program; those weapons were destroyed in the 1970s.

The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in principle in 1989 to destroy their chemical weapons stockpiles, and when the Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the United States and other signatories committed to getting rid of chemical weapons once and for all.

But destroying them has not been easy: They were built to be fired, not disassembled. The combination of explosives and poison makes them exceptionally dangerous to handle.

Defense Department officials once projected that the job could be done in a few years at a cost of about $1.4 billion. It is now wrapping up decades behind schedule, at a cost close to $42 billion — 2,900 percent over budget.

But it’s done.

“It’s been an ordeal, that’s for sure — I wondered if I would ever see the day,” said Craig Williams, who started pushing for the safe destruction of the stockpile in 1984 when he learned that the Army was storing tons of chemical weapons five miles from his house, at the Blue Grass Army Depot near Richmond, Ky.

“We had to fight, and it took a long time, but I think we should be very proud,” he said. “This is the first time, globally, that an entire class of weapons of mass destruction will be destroyed.”

Other powers have also destroyed their declared stockpiles: Britain in 2007, India in 2009, Russia in 2017. But Pentagon officials caution that chemical weapons have not been eradicated entirely. A few nations never signed the treaty, and some that did, notably Russia, appear to have retained undeclared stocks.

Nor did the treaty end the use of chemical weapons by rogue states and terrorist groups. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used chemical weapons in the country numerous times between 2013 and 2019. According to the IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence collection and analysis service, fighters from the Islamic State used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.

The immense American stockpile and the decades-long effort to dispose of it are both a monument to human folly and a testament to human potential, people involved say. The job took so long in part because citizens and lawmakers insisted that the work be done without endangering surrounding communities.

Late in June at the 15,000-acre Blue Grass depot, workers carefully pulled fiberglass shipping tubes holding Sarin-filled rockets out of earth-covered concrete storage bunkers and drove them to a series of buildings for processing.

Workers inside, wearing protective suits and gloves, X-rayed the tubes to see if the warheads inside were leaking, then sent them down a conveyor to meet their doom.

It was the last time humans would ever handle the weapons. From there, robots did the rest.

Chemical munitions all share essentially the same design: a thin-walled warhead filled with liquid agent and a small explosive charge to burst it open on the battlefield, leaving a spray of small droplets, mist and vapor — the “poison gas” that soldiers have feared from the Somme to the Tigris.

For generations, the American military vowed to use chemical weapons only in response to an enemy chemical attack — and then set out to amass so many that no enemy would dare. By the 1960s the United States had a highly secret network of manufacturing plants and storage complexes around the globe.

The public knew little about how vast and deadly the stockpile had grown until a snowy spring morning in 1968, when 5,600 sheep mysteriously died on land adjacent to an Army test site in Utah.

Under pressure from Congress, military leaders acknowledged that the Army had been testing VX nearby, that it was storing chemical weapons at facilities in eight states and that it was testing them in the open air at a number of locations, including one site 25 miles from Baltimore.

Once the public learned the scope of the program, the long path to destruction began.

At first, the Army wanted to do openly what it had done secretly for years with outdated chemical munitions: load them onto obsolete ships and then scuttle the ships at sea. But the public responded with fury.

Plan B was to burn the stockpiles in huge incinerators — but that plan, too, hit a wall of opposition.

Mr. Williams was a 36-year-old Vietnam War veteran and cabinetmaker in 1984 when Army officials announced that nerve agent would be burned at the Blue Grass depot.

“There were a lot of people asking questions about what would come out of the stack, and we weren’t getting any answers,” he said.

Outraged, he and others organized opposition to the incinerators, lobbied lawmakers and brought in experts who argued that the incinerators would spew toxins.

Incinerators in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah, and one on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, were used to destroy a large part of the stockpile, but activists blocked them in four other states.

Following orders from Congress to find another way, the Defense Department developed new techniques to destroy chemical weapons without burning.

“We had to figure it out as we went,” said Walton Levi, a chemical engineer at the Pueblo depot, who started working in the field after college in 1987 and now plans to retire once the last round is destroyed.

At Pueblo, each shell is pierced by a robot arm, and the mustard agent inside is sucked out. The shell is washed and baked to destroy any remaining traces. The mustard agent is diluted in hot water, then broken down by bacteria in a process not unlike the one used in sewage treatment plants.

It yields a residue that is mostly ordinary table salt, Mr. Levi said, but is laced with heavy metals that require handling as hazardous waste.

“Bacteria are amazing,” Mr. Levi said as he watched shells being destroyed during the last day of operations at Pueblo. “Find the right ones, and they’ll eat just about anything.”

The process is similar at the Blue Grass depot. Liquid nerve agents drained from those warheads are mixed with water and caustic soda and then heated and stirred. The resultant liquid, called hydrolysate, is trucked to a facility outside Port Arthur, Tex., where it is incinerated.

“It’s a good piece of history to have behind us,” said Candace M. Coyle, the Army’s project manager for the Blue Grass depot. “That’s the best part about it, is that it’s not going to harm anyone.”

Irene Kornelly, the chair of the citizens’ advisory commission that has overseen the process at Pueblo for 30 years, has kept track as nearly one million mustard shells were destroyed. Now 77, she stood leaning on a cane and craned her neck to see the last one be scrapped.

“Honestly, I never thought this day would come,” she said. “The military didn’t know if they could trust the people, and the people didn’t know if they could trust the military.”

She looked around at the plant’s beige buildings and the empty concrete storage bunkers on the Colorado prairie beyond. Nearby, a crowd of workers in coveralls with emergency gas masks slung on their hips gathered to celebrate. The plant manager blasted “The Final Countdown” on the P.A. and handed out red, white and blue Bomb Pops.

Ms. Kornelly smiled as she took it all in. The process had been smooth, safe, and so plodding, she said, that many residents of the region had forgotten it was going on.

“Most people today don’t have a clue that this all happened — they never had to worry about it,” she said. She paused, then added, “And I think that’s just as well.”

Emotional testimony from survivors and victims’ families began on Wednesday in the federal sentencing hearing for the gunman who killed 23 people and injured dozens more at a Walmart store in El Paso, one of the deadliest attacks targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history.

The gunman, Patrick Crusius, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes in February after federal prosecutors notified the court that they would not be seeking the death penalty. State authorities have made it clear that they could pursue it in a separate capital murder case that is still pending.

In the federal case, where testimony on a possible sentence was expected to last at least two days, prosecutors agreed with the defense on a proposed sentence of 90 consecutive life terms to reflect the 90 charges, including 45 hate crimes.

Emotions have remained raw in the four years since Mr. Crusius stormed a Walmart in the predominately Latino border city, unleashing a fury of firepower just minutes after publishing a hate-filled manifesto online that deplored the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

El Paso, which regularly attracts shoppers and workers from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez just across the border, has long been seen as a refuge for migrants from Mexico and other countries. Immigrants make up about a quarter of the population.

Family members of the victims packed the courtroom in downtown El Paso on Wednesday and loudly sobbed when Mr. Crusius entered the room in a navy jumpsuit. He swiveled idly in his seat as the magistrate, David Guaderama, read the charges on which he was convicted, and occasionally smiled or rolled his eyes as family members shared stories of grief and anger.

“Why is it us in pain and not you?” said one of the survivors, Genesis Davila, addressing the gunman. She was raising money with her soccer team outside the Walmart when the attack occurred, injuring her father and mother and killing her coach. “No one invited you to our quiet city,” she said.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Crusius, 24, who is white, drove 700 miles from his home in Allen, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, to the Walmart supercenter near a popular mall. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle he had purchased online, the gunman stalked shoppers and workers in the parking lot, down the aisles and behind the cash registers.

In his anti-immigrant manifesto, Mr. Crusius promoted a claim, widely espoused by white supremacists, that elites in the United States and Europe are replacing white Europeans and their descendants with immigrants from nonwhite-majority countries.

Mr. Crusius told investigators that he killed and wounded the people at the store because he believed they were of “Hispanic national origin,” prosecutors said in describing a statement of facts associated with the guilty plea.

They said he told the authorities that he identified himself as a “white nationalist, motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States.” He said he selected El Paso “in order to dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States,” the prosecutors’ statement said.

Prosecutors said the attacker appeared to have drawn direct inspiration from the mass murder of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019, an attack that left 51 people dead.

Witnesses described how a barrage of fire filled the store with smoke as workers and customers, many of them covered in blood, ran for their lives. Mr. Crusius fled in his car, but surrendered moments later after he was pulled over by a state trooper, admitting “I’m the shooter.”

The victims included an Army veteran, a mother shielding her 2-month old son, a German national living on the Mexican side of the border, Mexican nationals and many others.

The defense has said it would make its statements at the conclusion of the victims’ presentations, possibly on Thursday.

In court on Wednesday, relatives of the victims came forward with a series of emotional impact statements, a combination of letters honoring the lives lost and angry statements directed at the gunman. Mr. Crusius at times bobbed his head and swiveled in his seat, appearing as if he were listening to a song only he could hear.

“They were happy people who bothered no one,” said Alfredo Hernandez, a family member of two of the victims, Maribel Loya and Leonardo Campos. “They woke up early that Saturday morning to get their dogs groomed but didn’t know they’d be killed.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation brought in a certified emotional support dog, a hearty black Labrador named Beaumont, to stand at the podium with a young victim, Kaitlyn Melendez, who was 9 in 2019.

She said she and her grandparents had stopped at the Walmart for candy and had planned to go from there to a nearby movie theater.

Her grandfather, David Johnson, 63, died shielding her and her grandmother.

“You and your sick, messed-up brain. Do you know how pathetic you are?” Kaitlyn said, addressing the gunman. “I hope you get what you deserve. I was 9 years old when you took away my childhood; because of you, every person with a backpack that I see is a threat.”

At that point, Mr. Crusius rolled his eyes, smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“You can roll your eyes, smile and smirk all you want,” Kaitlyn said. “I hope you rot in there.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Last year, the story of a 10-year-old girl in Ohio who had traveled to Indiana for an abortion became a flashpoint in the nationwide abortion debate. On Wednesday, the Ohio man who had been charged with raping the girl pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

The man, Gerson Fuentes, 28, appeared in Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, where he entered the plea agreement to two counts of rape, which gives him the possibility of parole after 25 years, according to livestream broadcasts from local media inside the courtroom.

Mr. Fuentes, who was arrested in July of last year, had earlier pleaded not guilty to two charges of felony rape of the girl, who was 9 at the time, court and police records show. The trial had been scheduled to start on Jan. 9, but it was delayed because of plea negotiations, investigations and scheduling, a prosecutor, Dan Meyer, said that month.

Zachary Olah, Mr. Fuentes’s lawyer, was not immediately available for comment.

A Columbus Police Department incident report said that Mr. Fuentes was arrested after the girl went to a doctor, who determined she was pregnant. Mr. Fuentes was charged with the rape of a child under 13 years old, a felony that can carry a life sentence. He was held on $2 million bond.

G. Gary Tyack, the prosecuting attorney for Franklin County, announced in July 2022 that a grand jury had returned an indictment charging Mr. Fuentes with two counts of rape. The indictment said that the assaults took place between Jan. 1 and on or about May 12 of last year.

The girl’s story was first reported by The Indianapolis Star. A video of the court hearing posted by the conservative news site Townhall last year showed the testimony of Detective Jeffrey Huhn of the Columbus police, who said the girl’s mother took her to Indiana for the abortion at the end of June last year when she was just past six weeks pregnant.

He said Mr. Fuentes had confessed to raping the girl twice.

The Columbus Dispatch earlier reported on the arrest and the connection to the girl, who was 10 when she traveled across state lines to receive the abortion, in a case that captured national attention.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade. The decision was followed by a wave of abortion restrictions, including a law in Ohio that bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, with no exception for rape or incest. That law prevented the girl from receiving an abortion in her home state, where sex with a person under the age of 13 is a first-degree felony.

The Ohio case fueled heated public and political disputes over whether the story was true, President Biden and supporters of abortion rights pointed to the girl’s experience as the tragic consequence of abortion bans. Conservatives questioned whether the child even existed, and the Ohio attorney general, David Yost, initially said he found no evidence of such a victim.

After the arrest, Mr. Yost issued a statement saying his “heart aches for the pain suffered by this young child.”