SIERRA BLANCA (Texas, US), Oct 1 (NNN-TELESUR) — A detention center warden and his brother were arrested on Thursday after opening fire on migrants who stopped to drink water along a farm road in Texas near the US-Mexico border.
One male migrant was killed and a female wounded in the shooting on Tuesday evening near the town of Sierra Blanca. The wounded is recovering at the Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, informed the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).
“The preliminary investigation shows that a truck with two men inside pulled over and shot at a group of illegal immigrants standing alongside the road,” said DPS Lieutenant Elizabeth Carter.
The shooters are facing manslaughter charges. One of them, a warden of a West Texas federal jail for immigrants in Sierra Blanca, has been fired in the wake of the shooting.
“This killing was not vigilante justice,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilbert Hinojosa said, adding that “it was a murder, and it was a hate crime.”
US Customs and Border Protection said earlier this month that it recorded 203,597 migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in August alone and expected the total number of encounters to rise to about 2.3 million by the end of the fiscal year.
Previously, on Wednesday morning, “there was another shooting in Hudspeth County that appeared to also target migrants,” RSN reported, adding that the Texas Democratic Party blamed the shootings on political rhetoric around immigration policy. — NNN-TELESUR
