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| Photo Credit: AP. |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — One of two Texas brothers who authorities say opened fire on a group of migrants getting water near the U.S.-Mexico border, killing one and injuring another, was warden at a detention facility with a history of abuse allegations.
The shooting
happened Tuesday in rural Hudspeth County about 90 miles (145 kilometers) from
El Paso, according to court documents filed Thursday. One man was killed; a
woman was taken to a hospital in El Paso where she was recovering from a
gunshot wound in her stomach, according to the Texas Department of Public
Safety.
DPS said the
victims were among a group of migrants standing alongside the road drinking
water out of a reservoir when a truck with two men inside pulled over.
According to court documents, the group had taken cover as the truck first
passed to avoid being detected, but the truck then backed up. The driver then
exited the vehicle and fired two shots at the group.
Witnesses
from the group told federal agents that just before hearing the gunshots, they
heard one of the two men in the vehicle yell derogatory terms to them and rev
the engine, according to court documents.
Authorities
located the truck by checking cameras and finding a vehicle matching the
description given by the migrants, according to court records.
Michael
Sheppard and Mark Sheppard, both 60, were charged with manslaughter, according
to court documents. Court records did not list attorneys for either man.
Contact information for them or for their representatives could not be found
and attempts to reach them for comment since their arrest have been
unsuccessful.
Records show
that Michael Sheppard was warden at the West Texas Detention Facility, a
privately owned center that has housed migrant detainees. A spokeswoman for
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Associated Press that no ICE
detainees had been held at that detention facility since October 2019,
following the opening of a larger detention facility nearby.
Scott
Sutterfield, a spokesman for facility operator Lasalle Corrections, responded
to an AP email asking whether Sheppard had been fired as warden. Sutterfield
said the warden had been fired “due to an off-duty incident unrelated to his
employment.” Sutterfield declined further comment, citing the “ongoing criminal
investigation.”
A 2018
report by The University of Texas and Texas A&M immigration law clinics and
immigration advocacy group RAICES cited multiple allegations of physical and
verbal abuse against African migrants at the facility. According to the report,
the warden “was involved in three of the detainees’ reports of verbal threats,
as well as in incidents of physical assault.” The warden cited in the report
was not named.
However,
Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat, said in a press conference
Saturday that Sheppard was in fact the warden at the facility at the time of
the allegations and when the report was published. According to information
provided by Doggett’s office, the webpage for Louisiana-based LaSalle
Corrections listed Sheppard as an employee at West Texas since 2015.
Doggett,
along with other Texas Democratic congressmen, called on Saturday for a federal
investigation into the shooting.
“The
dehumanizing, the demeaning of people who seek refuge in this country, many of
whom are people of color, is what contributed to the violence we see here,”
Doggett said.
In one
account detailed in the report, a migrant told the lawyers that the warden hit
him in the face while at the nurse’s station and when he turned to the medical
officers he was told they “didn’t see anything.”
“I was then
placed in solitary confinement, where I was forced to lie face down on the
floor with my hands handcuffed behind my back while I was kicked repeatedly in
the ribs by the Warden,” a migrant referred to as Dalmar said in the report.
The attorneys
submitted a civil rights complaint over the allegations that year but according
to response letter sent to the lawyers in 2021, the Department of Homeland
Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties conducted an onsite
investigation, made multiple recommendations to ICE, but did not find evidence
of “any excessive use of force incidents” or “incidents of wrongful
segregation” and found some uses of force to have been appropriate.
Fatma
Marouf, a co-author of the report and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic
at Texas A&M, said it was difficult for authorities to follow up on the
allegations because many of the people interviewed for the report were deported
shortly after.
Marouf said
current views on immigration enforcement based in deterring people at all costs
have “spiraled out of control.”
“We don’t
even see people as humans anymore,” Marouf said.
The number
of Venezuelans taken into custody at the U.S.- Mexico soared in August, while
fewer migrants from Mexico and some Central American countries were stopped,
officials said earlier this month. Overall, U.S. authorities stopped migrants
203,598 times in August, up 1.8% from 199,976 times in July but down 4.7% from
213,593 times in August 2021.
Silky Shah,
executive director of advocacy organization Detention Watch Network, said this
is both a problem of the current rhetoric around immigration, including the use
of terms like “invasion” by GOP leaders including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and
inaction from federal officials to move away from the previous administration’s
immigration policies that added to this sentiment.
“I think there is no question that there is a
discourse that is stoking actions like this,” Shah said.
Associated
Press writers Elliot Spagat and Paul Weber contributed to this report.