Twins Mark and Michael Sheppard were arrested 90 miles north of El Paso in an alleged connection with a man’s shooting death and an attack on a group of migrants in Hudspeth County.
One of the brothers allegedly opened fire on a group of migrants seeking water near the US-Mexico border, killing one man and injuring another, the New York Times (NYT) reports.
The Sheppard brothers told police they had been hunting and stopped their truck because they thought they had seen a wild pig. Mark Sheppard said his brother got out with a shotgun and fired two times, but did not check if anything had been hit, NYT reports.
The migrants were drinking water from a reservoir when a vehicle passed them and then returned, El Paso Times reports. The driver leaned against the vehicle’s hood and fired two shots, killing a man and injuring a woman.
Law Enforcement tracked down the vehicle and questioned the driver, Michael Sheppard, and later interviewed Mark Sheppard. After initially denying it, he admitted the brothers were together on the evening of September 27 near the shooting site.
On September 29, the brothers were booked into El Paso County Jail on manslaughter charges. Mike Sheppard was the warden at LaSalle Corrections’ West Texas Detention Center, according to El Paso Times.
Michael Sheppard worked as a warden at the West Texas Detention Facility that houses unlawful migrant detainees and contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to records.
Scott Sutterfield, a spokesman for the detention facility operator of LaSalle Corrections, said Thursday that the center’s warden had been fired “due to an off-duty incident unrelated to his employment.”
He declined further comment, NYT reports.
Authorities located the truck by checking cameras and finding a vehicle matching the description given by the migrants, according to court records.
The number of unlawful migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border is approaching an all-time high, The Dallas Express reports.
According to new figures released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Monday, the number of illegal migrant encounters at the southwest border has surpassed 2 million for the first time in a year.
In the first 11 months of the fiscal year 2022, which ends on September 30, more than 2.1 million illegal migrants were encountered at the border. It is also worth noting that over the last 11 months, a record number of unlawful migrants have been removed, with over 1.3 million removals, more than any previous year.
The number of border crossings increased slightly from July to August, with August’s 203,598 crossings representing a 1.7 percent increase over July’s 199,976 figure but still falling short of the 209,840 crossings recorded last August.