Two dogs were strangled to death by a suspected undocumented immigrant during a pursuit Saturday night in the Texas Gulf Coast.

The dogs were on loan to law enforcement agents and were being used to track down a number of people suspected of being in the United States illegally, according to a Facebook post on Sunday by Aransas County, Texas, Sheriff Bill Mills.

In a phone call with the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Mills said an officer tried to pull over a black Ford pickup just north of Holiday Beach on State Highway 35, but it sped away.

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The truck left the roadway and then stopped in an area filled with thick brush. Mills said about 14 to 16 people scattered from the truck on foot. Law enforcement began to round up the fleeing suspects and detained several individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.

Officers from the Aransas County Sheriff's Office were joined by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Refugio County Sheriff's Office, and game wardens from the Texas Department of Wildlife.

One of the men who fled from the truck was hiding in the thick brush and was ordered to come out, but he told the officers in Spanish, "If you want me, come and get me," Mills wrote in his post.

That's when the two dogs were found dead. They appeared to have been strangled with their tracking collars.

Mills wrote that the dogs had been loaned to law enforcement for the search by Joe Braman, a kennel owner and a commissioned deputy with the Refugio County Sheriff's Office.

Braman said Sunday that although he houses dogs from the Refugio County Sheriff's Office at his kennel, the two dogs killed Saturday were his. The two dogs were females — one was 8 years old and named Grunt; the other was 3 and named Nell. He said they were not as aggressive as the dogs trained specifically for law enforcement. Instead, their training focused on tracking.

"They're not real aggressive dogs — they'll just hold someone at bay until you get there," Braman said of Grunt and Nell. "I just wasn't able to get there quick enough."

The dogs were a mix of black and tan coonhound, bluetick coonhound, and redtick coonhound that Braman has been breeding for years.

"I thought this was just going to be a track down and arrest-type scenario," he said. "If it's just a bailout, the majority of the time they just have a backpack full of tuna fish or something and they're running, trying to go find work up north. This escalated past that."

The dogs had been used before to help find individuals with dementia or Alzheimer's disease who had wandered off.

Five men and a woman who fled from the pickup were detained and turned over to CBP agents, Mills said. They were from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, and Mills said at least one of the men had tattoos that led officers to believe he was gang-affiliated.