Texas Hunters Falsely Claiming Attack By Undocumented Immigrants Charged With Deadly Conduct

PRESIDIO COUNTY, TX — A pair of hunters who told police they had been attacked by immigrants entering the country illegally in explaining their having fired their weapons in the direction of other people have been charged with deadly conduct by police, according to a published report.

The hunters' story was a concoction, pure fiction. They initially told police they had been attacked by people who had crossed the country illegally and tried stealing their recreational vehicle.

The problem was, the story was a concoction. The marauding group of undocumented immigrants was a work of pure fiction.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez, there were no attacking immigrants in the Jan. 6 incident. Instead, Michael Bryant ant Walker Daugherty have been charged with using deadly conduct by discharging firearms in the direction of others at the ranch near Candelaria.

The town of Candelaria is located in the Chihuahuan Desert on the north bank of the Rio Grande, just across the small Mexican city of San Antonio Del Bravo.

Police found Daugherty and another man in the hunting party, Edwin Roberts, with gunshot wounds. The subsequent investigation found that Daugherty shot Roberts and Bryant shot Daugherty, Dominguez said.

Yet before the investigation and subsequent arrests, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller took the story on face value and used it as the basis of a Facebook post to use the incident as another reason a well should be built along the southern U.S. border to halt "violent criminals and members of drug cartels coming in."

About 30 officers searched the perimeter of the ranch and found no signs of people approaching the camp and no evidence of “cross-border violence," the sheriff said. By that time, Miller's Facebook post lending credibility to the hunters' tall tale had been shared 6,500 times before being deleted, the Associated Press reported.

It's not the first time Miller has posted his musings cast as factual that turn out to be fake. PolitiFact Texas, a debunking service jointly operated by the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News do a brisk business just checking on the validity of Miller's posts alone.

In a recent a recent interview with KUT News in Austin, he defended his prolific non-factual posts by complaining: "The obvious thing is I’m not a news organization. You know, y’all are holding me to the same standards as you would a news organization."

Todd Smith, a Miller spokesman, echoed that position when contacted by the San Antonio Express-News, expressing surprise that "people think we're a news organization. It's a personal Facebook page."

Asked if he checks the veracity of stories before coming to conclusions, Miller told KUT: "150 posts a week, no, I’m not going to research every one of them. If it’s thought-provoking, I’ll put it up there and let the readers decide. Everybody that reads that is grown-ups. You know, It’s like Fox News, I report and you decide if it’s true or not. We’re not maliciously trying to mislead anybody."

To hear the full interview with KUT, click here.

Miller also has previously garnered criticism for a 2015 posting suggesting using an atomic bomb on the Muslim population and for posting on Twitter a tweet using an obscenity referring to Hillary Clinton that he later deleted.

On Valentine's Day, Miller tweeted out a cartoon depicting Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Native American garb, suggesting that people in glass teepees shouldn't cast stones. Warren is consistently mocked by Donald Trump, who nicknamed the senator as "Pocahontas," for her claims of Native American ancestry.

And despite evidence of Russian interference in the November election benefiting Trump, Miller acknowledged there was interference but of the divine intervention variety:

>>> Official photo of Sid Miller via State of Texas