AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – One migrant is dead, another is injured and at least seven others languish in detention three weeks after twin brothers reportedly opened fire on them in the Texas desert, claiming they thought they were on the run boar shots.
Still, the accused gunmen, 60-year-old brothers Michael and Mark Sheppard, who both worked for local law enforcement, were initially released on half a million dollar bail after serving a short time in prison on charges of manslaughter.
The case has sparked outrage among lawyers for the victims and survivors, who say their detention violates a U.S. immigration and customs directive calling for strong consideration that they were crime victims who cooperated with authorities. to determine whether they should be released.
“This is a hate crime that happened immediately after they crossed the United States,” said Zoe Bowman, the oversight attorney for the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which represents the seven incarcerated survivors.
Michael Sheppard, who was a security guard at the troubled West Texas detention center where he was charged with abuse, and his brother, Mark, who worked for the Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Office, were recently re-arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a fatal outcome. weapon in connection with the shooting on September 27.
The sheriff’s office did not say where they were being held or why they were initially released on bail. The case is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Migrants crossing the US-Mexico border are often victims of crime, including human trafficking, but most take place south of the border. A clear case like this, in which migrants are victims of a widely publicized crime on US soil in which charges have been filed against identified suspects, could provide a rare paper trail to protection under a visa for migrants who are victims of crime in the US. said Bowman.
But despite the August 2021 ICE directive strongly encouraging the release of crime victims while the lengthy visa process is underway, these migrants remain in detention, Bowman said.
Six of the surviving migrants are being held at the El Paso Processing Center — an ICE detention center — while a seventh is in the custody of the US Marshals Service and is expected to be transferred to the West Texas Detention Facility, the controversial incarceration where Michael Sheppard was. a guard.
“It certainly looks like they’re not putting the needs of these people first by choosing to hold onto them,” Bowman said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs officials did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment on the migrants’ detention.
The migrants told authorities they were drinking water from a reservoir on county land in Sierra Blanca, south of El Paso in the hot, arid Chihuahuan Desert, when two men — identified in court documents as the Sheppard brothers — were arrested. a truck stopped. The migrants said they were running to hide.
Mark Sheppard told investigators that he and his brother were out hunting and thought they had seen a javalina, a type of wild boar, when they opened fire. “Mark Sheppard told us he used binoculars and saw a ‘black ass’ who thought it was a javalina,” court documents said.
But the migrants told authorities the men in the truck were yelling and cursing at them in Spanish, mocking them to come out, and revving their engines as they reversed. When the group emerged from the hiding place, the driver exited the vehicle and fired two shots at them.
Jesús Iván Sepúlveda was shot dead. Brenda Berenice Casias Carrillo was struck in the stomach and seriously injured.
Silvia Carrillo, the injured woman’s aunt, told The Associated Press that on Sept. 25, she learned from her niece via WhatsApp that the group was embarking on the precarious desert journey from Mexico to Texas and turned off their phones. When she reconnected with Casias two days later, her niece told her that the group had been shot at and that she was wounded, fearing she would die.
Carrillo encouraged her niece to call 911 for help. The group of 13 migrants also included Carrillo’s two sons, another niece and a son-in-law. Casias told her they were all fine, but another man who was with them—22-year-old Sepulveda from Durango, Mexico—was dead.
“I felt like I was going to die, I was desperate and imagining the worst,” Carrillo said.
When authorities arrived in response to her 911 call, Casias was taken to a hospital and the other survivors were questioned by federal and immigration officials. Their testimonies led to the arrest of the Sheppard brothers, after which the witnesses were placed in ICE custody.
On October 7, Carrillo said she spoke to Casias again, this time from the hospital. Casias sounded weak, but said she was slowly getting better and had another operation.
Casias remains stable and improving and has some legal protection, her attorney, Marysol Castro, chief attorney for Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, said Tuesday. She declined to give details because she said her client has feared for her safety since learning of the Sheppard brothers’ first release.
Bowman said she is seeking visas for crime-victim migrants for her clients, but while the case has been widely publicized, it could take months to produce the necessary court documents.
In the meantime, so far unsuccessfully, she has filed a request to release them to sponsors in the US – a decision that is at the sole discretion of ICE authorities.
John Sandweg, a lawyer who served as ICE director during the Obama administration, said other factors, such as the survivors’ role as witnesses, could lead authorities to choose to keep them in custody so they can be close by. to testify in the case.
Still, on the face of it, he said “there is no good reason” why these migrants remain detained.
“Basically, study after study after study and ICE’s own data have demonstrated the effectiveness of alternatives to detention,” Sandweg said, adding that the system “needs to be reformed.”
Meanwhile, Carrillo said she and relatives of the other survivors are awaiting answers about the fate of their loved ones in the country they have traveled to for a better life, and are calling for the gunmen to be brought to justice.
“I just want them to do justice to my niece and to Jesus, the man who died,” Carrillo said.
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Associated Press reporters Jake Bleiberg in Dallas, Texas, and Paul Weber in Austin, Texas contributed to this report.
