DPS

Congressional Dems ask Paxton to release Uvalde info

He won’t, because he sucks, but you gotta ask.

Best mugshot ever

Nine Democratic members of the U.S. House from Texas on Tuesday called on Attorney General Ken Paxton to order the release of government records related to the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde that local officials are attempting to withhold.

In a letter, the group said that authorizing the release of records would help the families of victims heal by revealing the full truth about what happened at Robb Elementary School that day. They also said disclosure was important because officials have repeatedly changed their story about law enforcement’s response to the shooting.

“A first step in restoring trust in law enforcement and healing requires transparency from state and local officials,” the letter states. “You have a choice: shine a light on what went wrong to help Uvalde heal or be part of the cover up.”

It is signed by U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio; Colin Allred and Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas; Lloyd Doggett of Austin; Veronica Escobar of El Paso; Sylvia Garcia, Lizzie Fletcher and Al Green of Houston; and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth. Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents Uvalde County, declined to join, Castro’s office said.

The city of Uvalde has declined to fulfill any records request from The Texas Tribune since the shooting, even those unrelated to the incident. In Texas, public agencies seeking to block the release of records must forward requests to the attorney general, citing specific exemptions under the Texas Public Information Act.

[…]

The members of Congress who signed the letter also said public officials should not hide behind what is known as the “dead suspect loophole,” an exemption to releasing public records meant to protect individuals who are never convicted of a crime. However, this exemption can also be applied to suspects who have died and thus won’t face prosecution, as is the case with the shooter in Uvalde.

Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, said last month it would be “absolutely unconscionable” for officials to use the loophole to withhold records related to the shooting.

See here, here, and here for some background. That sure was a show of courage from Rep. Gonzales, wasn’t it? As for Paxton, he does six unconscionable things before breakfast, so I would not hold out much hope for him to do something non-hideous here. But as I said, you have to at least put him on the spot about it.

Uvalde versus DPS

Jun 23rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

No comments yet

Someone’s not happy.

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin on Tuesday accused state authorities of selectively releasing information about last month’s school shooting to scapegoat local law enforcement and intentionally leaving out details about the state’s response to the massacre.

New details emerged this week about the timeline of the shooting based on surveillance video from the school’s hallways and a transcript of officers’ body cameras. The records show that officers might not have attempted to open the doors of the classrooms where the gunman had holed up with victims. During a state Senate committee held earlier Tuesday, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told lawmakers that law enforcement’s response to the Uvalde school shooting was an “abject failure.”

McLaughlin lambasted McCraw for what he described as a selective release of information about the investigation, focusing on blaming local law enforcement and leaving out the role of McCraw’s agency during the shooting.

“McCraw has continued to, whether you want to call it, lie, leak … mislead or misstate information in order to distance his own troopers and rangers from the response,” McLaughlin said Tuesday evening.

McLaughlin said none of the entities with information about the investigation into the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School — DPS, the Texas Legislature, the Uvalde County District Attorney’s office and the FBI — have briefed Uvalde city officials about their findings.

McLaughlin said he had been asked to refrain from sharing details about the investigation while it was ongoing but said Tuesday he would now start releasing that information as it became available to city officials.

“The gloves are off. If we know it, we will share it,” he said.

McLaughlin’s comments at a special City Council meeting seemed to contradict a press release issued just hours before, in which the mayor had said city officials would refrain from commenting on the investigation “or reacting to every story attributed to unnamed sources or sources close to the investigation.”

I mean, Steve McCraw put all the blame on Pete Arredondo, so it’s not a big surprise that Uvalde’s mayor didn’t care for that. As a reminder, McLaughlin is the guy who got all mad at Beto O’Rourke when O’Rourke interrupted Greg Abbott’s press conference – you know, the one he held just before he headed out for a big fundraiser – to demand that Abbott do something in response to the massacre. This was back when Abbott and DPS were praising Arredondo and Uvalde police for their response, which is to say, back before any of the truth started coming out. McCraw, meanwhile, is a longtime hatchet man for Abbott and Rick Perry before him, and deserves exactly zero benefit of the doubt. This is a fight where you can root for both sides to lose with a clear conscience.

The real issue here is the coordinated resistance to releasing data about the police response to the mass shooting. This is the appropriate response to that.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, is suing the Texas Department of Public Safety over records related to the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary last month.

“In the wake of the senseless tragedy, the people of Uvalde and Texas have demanded answers from their government. To date, they have been met with lies, misstatements, and shifts of blame,” Gutierrez said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

State and local Uvalde officials have fought the release of records that could provide clarity around the botched emergency response to the shooting that killed 19 children and two educators. Law enforcement responding to the shooting waited more than an hour on the scene before breaking into the classroom to kill the shooter.

Gutierrez said he filed an open records request on May 31 for documentation about police presence and ballistics at the shooting, and he still has not received a response. Per state law, DPS had 10 business days to either respond or make a case to the attorney general.

[…

Abbott’s office on Tuesday said all information related to the shooting has been shared with the public or is in the expedited process of being released. Full results of the ongoing investigation by the Texas Rangers and the FBI will also be made public, according to the governor’s office.

That same day, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said city officials have been left out of briefings related to the investigation from entities, such as DPS, the Texas Legislature, the Uvalde County District Attorney’s office and the FBI.

Sen. Gutierrez’s press release is here and a copy of the lawsuit is here. I cannot wait to see what response the defendants make to this. The Chron has more.

UPDATE: Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police Chief Pete Arredondo has been placed on administrative leave by the district.

DPS pins the blame on Arredondo

Jun 22nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Look out for that bus!

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told a state Senate committee Tuesday that the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting was an “abject failure” and police could have stopped the shooter at Robb Elementary School three minutes after arriving were it not for the indecisiveness of the on-scene commander, who placed the lives of officers before those of children.

McCraw said the inexplicable conduct by Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo was antithetical to two decades of police training since the Columbine High School massacre, which dictates that officers confront active shooters as quickly as possible.

“The officers had weapons; the children had none,” McCraw said. “The officers had body armor; the children had none. The officers had training; the subject had none. One hour, 14 minutes and 8 seconds. That’s how long children waited, and the teachers waited, in Room 111 to be rescued.”

The revelations detailed by McCraw completed a remarkable shift in the police response narrative state officials have given since the May 24 shooting. Twenty-seven days after Gov. Greg Abbott said the shooting “could have been worse” but for officers who showed “amazing courage by running toward gunfire,” his state police director described stunning police incompetence that bordered on cowardice.

[…]

McCraw said though the state police are a far larger agency than the six-person Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District department, Arredondo was the rightful incident commander because he was the most senior first responder who had immediate jurisdiction over the district’s campuses. He said Arredondo could have transferred command to another agency, such as state troopers who arrived, but never did so.

Acting against the orders of an incident commander during an emergency can be dangerous and chaotic, McCraw said, responding to a question about why his troopers did not take charge. But he said the failure of one police agency means all law enforcement performed unacceptably that day.

The story notes the comparison of what Arredondo had said to more recent reporting; you can also see a list of places where the two accounts differ in this subsequent Trib story. One almost feels a little sorry for Arredondo. The main question I have at this point is what if anything are we going to do about this? Forget about adopting any kind of gun safety measures, which Greg Abbott will not do, are we interested in any laws that might prevent, or at least disincentivize, police behavior like what we got in Uvalde when the next mass shooting (whether at a school or not) occurs? One possibility I can think of that also will never pass through a Republican legislative chamber is to dial back qualified immunity for law enforcement officers, at least in this kind of circumstance. If the next Pete Arredondo has to worry about getting his ass sued for taking no action at the next gun massacre, maybe he’ll be more inclined towards action. Whether that might end up as a net positive or not, I can’t say. But it’s at least something we could talk about doing, rather than just talk. And someone else, maybe even someone with actual expertise in the matter, may have better ideas. Reform Austin and the Chron have more.

What were Uvalde police actually doing at Robb Elementary?

Jun 21st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

I’ll say it again: The more we learn about the law enforcement response to the Uvalde massacre, the worse it looks.

Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally breached the door and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.

Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.

All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they close and can only be locked or unlocked from the outside with a key, the source said. Police might have assumed the door was locked. Yet the surveillance footage suggests gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 and enter with assault-style rifle — perhaps because the door malfunctioned, the source said.

Another door led to classroom 112.

Ramos entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. that day through an exterior door that a teacher had pulled shut but that didn’t lock automatically as it was supposed to, indicating another malfunction in door locks at the school.

Police finally breached the door to classroom 111 and killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. Whether the door was unlocked the entire time remains under investigation.

Regardless, officers had access the entire time to a “halligan” — a crowbar-like tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms even if it was locked, the source said.

[…]

Days after the massacre, Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference that “each door can lock from the inside” and that when Ramos went in, “he locked the door.” That information was preliminary, the source said, and further investigation has yielded new revelations about the door.

That’s the last paragraph of the story, which was published on Saturday with a note at the end that it’s developing and will be updated. Late yesterday, the Trib published this:

For this article, the Tribune reviewed a timeline of events compiled by law enforcement, plus surveillance footage and transcripts of radio traffic and phone calls from the day of the shooting. The details were confirmed by a senior official at the Department of Public Safety. The investigation is still in the early stages, and the understanding of what happened could still change as video records are synched and enhanced. But current records and footage show a well-equipped group of local officers entered the school almost immediately that day and then pulled back once the shooter began firing from inside the classroom. Then they waited for more than an hour to reengage.

“They had the tools,” said Terry Nichols, a former Seguin police chief and active-shooter expert. “Tactically, there’s lots of different ways you could tackle this. … But it takes someone in charge, in front, making and executing decisions, and that simply did not happen.”

Here are some key findings from these records and materials:

No security footage from inside the school showed police officers attempting to open the doors to classrooms 111 and 112, which were connected by an adjoining door. Arredondo told the Tribune that he tried to open one door and another group of officers tried to open another, but that the door was reinforced and impenetrable. Those attempts were not caught in the footage reviewed by the Tribune. Some law enforcement officials are skeptical that the doors were ever locked.

Within the first minutes of the law enforcement response, an officer said the Halligan (a firefighting tool that is also sometimes spelled hooligan) was on site. It wasn’t brought into the school until an hour after the first officers entered the building. Authorities didn’t use it and instead waited for keys.

Officers had access to four ballistic shields inside the school during the standoff with the gunman, according to a law enforcement transcript. The first arrived 58 minutes before officers stormed the classrooms. The last arrived 30 minutes before.

Multiple Department of Public Safety officers — up to eight, at one point — entered the building at various times while the shooter was holed up. Many quickly left to pursue other duties, including evacuating children, after seeing the number of officers already there. At least one of the officers expressed confusion and frustration about why the officers weren’t breaching the classroom, but was told that no order to do so had been given.

At least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school, and at times Arredondo seemed to be issuing orders such as directing officers to evacuate students from other classrooms. That contradicts Arredondo’s assertion that he did not believe he was running the law enforcement response. Arredondo’s lawyer, George E. Hyde, did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

You can read the rest and get mad all over again. It seems clear why there’s such a wave of resistance to releasing official information about what happened in Uvalde. We can at least be glad that there are plenty of people who will leak info to the press, because otherwise we’d still be talking about what a bunch of damn heroes these guys were supposed to have been.

There’s a lot of resistance to releasing information about Uvalde

Jun 18th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Wow.

The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained by Motherboard in response to a series of public information requests we made. The public records Uvalde is trying to suppress include body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.

“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton’s office will eventually rule which of the city’s arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.

The letter makes clear, however, that the city and its police department want to be exempted from releasing a wide variety of records in part because it is being sued, in part because some of the records could include “highly embarrassing information,” in part because some of the information is “not of legitimate concern to the public,” in part because the information could reveal “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” in part because some of the information may cause or may “regard … emotional/mental distress,” and in part because its response to the shooting is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Uvalde County District Attorney.

The letter explains that Uvalde has at least one in-house attorney (whose communications it is trying to prevent from public release), and yet, it is using outside private counsel to deal with a matter of extreme importance and public interest. Uvalde’s city government and its police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Motherboard.

The city says that it has received 148 separate public records requests (including several from Motherboard), and has lumped all of them together, making a broad legal argument as to why it should not be required to respond to many of them. Earlier this week, Motherboard reported on a similar letter sent to Paxton by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which wanted to suppress body-camera footage because it could expose “weaknesses” in police response to crimes that criminals could exploit. (The main seeming weakness in the Uvalde response was that police, in violation of standard policy and protocol, refused to risk their lives to protect children.)

For example, the city and its police department argue that it should be exempted from releasing “police officer training guides, policy and procedure manuals, shift change schedules, security details, and blueprints of secured facilities,” because these could be used to decipher “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime.”

That argument sound familiar, doesn’t it? Gosh, I wonder what Ken Paxton will say. Also, it would be good to know how much the city of Uvalde is paying for those outside attorneys.

Here’s more on the same topic:

In the past week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has joined the growing list of state and local officials fighting the release of records that could help bring clarity to how the emergency response unfolded during last month’s deadly shooting in Uvalde.

The governor’s office strayed from that broader opposition Monday, granting a request under the Texas Public Information Act from a Houston television station that sought the handwritten notes he used when he first spoke publicly about the shooting. The notes appear to support Abbott’s claim that he was misled when he initially praised law enforcement efforts during the mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two educators and left many more injured.

The recent release by Abbott underscores both the tremendous power government officials have to decide what is in the public interest and the unwillingness to release records that could call their agencies’ actions into question.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have submitted about 70 public information requests that could help answer larger questions as state and local leaders continue to offer conflicting accounts about why law enforcement did not confront the gunman sooner during the May 24 massacre. Those requests include 911 audio recordings, body and police car camera footage, and communications among local, state and federal agencies. The newsrooms also requested use-of-force documents, death records and ballistic reports.

Three weeks after the shooting, government officials have not provided the news organizations a single record related to the emergency response.

[…]

Abbott’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the U.S. Marshals Service and the city of Uvalde are asking the state’s attorney general for permission to withhold records that may offer tangible answers to the contradictory accounts. (Under Texas law, agencies seeking to avoid disclosure of public records typically must make their case to the attorney general.) Other government entities have asked the state for extensions as they decide whether to fight such disclosures. News organizations across the country are reporting similar responses.

Among the arguments provided by government entities for withholding such documents is one from DPS stating that releasing records like footage from body cameras would provide criminals with “invaluable information” about its investigative techniques, information sharing and criminal analysis.

In most cases, however, the agencies argue that releasing such information could interfere with ongoing law enforcement investigations by the federal government and the Texas Rangers, an arm of DPS now tasked with investigating its own department. In a statement, Abbott’s office said that, upon completion of the investigations, “we look forward to the full results being shared with the victims’ families and the public, who deserve the full truth of what happened that tragic day.”

But timely disclosure of the records is paramount given the lack of transparency and contradictory accounts from state and local officials, three Texas Public Information Act experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Laura Prather, a First Amendment attorney in Texas, said the reason the state allows agencies to withhold information when it is part of an ongoing investigation is to protect someone who was accused of a crime but didn’t ultimately get convicted, “not to protect law enforcement for their actions in circumstances like this, where the shooter is dead.”

“The public has the right to know what happened that day, and right now they can only act on rumors and conflicting information,” said Prather, who is representing ProPublica in an unrelated defamation lawsuit. She said law enforcement must be transparent in order to earn the public’s trust, but agencies are instead using their discretionary powers “to thwart the public from getting information that they are rightly entitled to.”

Because state law allows government officials to withhold information in cases that don’t result in a conviction, it creates a loophole that lets governments deny records in cases where the offender was killed and will not be tried.

That results in a challenge for members of the public seeking records related to Uvalde because “either way, there is a statutory basis for these governmental bodies to seek to withhold information,” said Jim Hemphill, an attorney who serves on the board of the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation.

We’ve heard about the “dead suspect” loophole before. I have a modicum of sympathy for withholding some information during an active criminal investigation, but here we already know who did it and there won’t ever be a criminal trial, at least not for him. Especially given the sheer amount of contradictory information that has been out there, we really deserve a lot of timely disclosure.

House Speaker Dade Phelan has talked about addressing that loophole in the next legislative session. Maybe there are some other items for them to address as well.

Members of the Uvalde Police Department are refusing to cooperate with a Texas House committee probing the law enforcement response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, the Express-News reports.

In comments Thursday, Committee Chairman Dustin Burrows — a Republican state rep from Lubbock — said Uvalde school district police department personnel were providing testimony to the three-member panel, according to the daily.

“There is a question mark, however, about the Uvalde Police Department itself, about whether or not they will visit with us voluntarily,” the lawmaker added. “We’ll see if they do that.”

The committee is in Uvalde for two days to hear closed-door testimony about the May 24 mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Even if Uvalde police officers don’t voluntarily testify, the committee has the power to issue subpoenas, the Express-News reports.

You have the power to compel their cooperation, or at least to make it a lot more painful to not cooperate. I’m just saying.

What was DPS doing during the Uvalde massacre?

Jun 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Not much, it would seem.

As many as 13 troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety waited in a hallway at one point during a gunman’s rampage that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde last month, state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat whose district encompasses Uvalde, said DPS Director Steven McCraw revealed the number of responding state troopers to him in a recent exchange.

“He told me there was enough people and equipment to breach the door,” Gutierrez said, even as officers continued to wait for more than an hour and some of the children inside the two locked classrooms called 911 for help.

In previous statements, McCraw has said that as many as 19 officers from various law enforcement agencies waited outside the classrooms. DPS has not publicly clarified the extent to which it was involved in the widely criticized police response to the May 24 mass shooting.

[…]

At a news conference last month, McCraw described Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde school district, as the on-scene commander. He said that after Arredondo arrived at the school, he instructed other officers not to force entry into the locked classrooms until they could acquire more equipment, such as ballistic shields.

Gutierrez said he spoke May 28 with McCraw, who was in tears. McCraw told Gutierrez that day that DPS would never again “stand down,” the lawmaker told the San Antonio Express-News.

In another exchange June 2, McCraw told Gutierrez that as many as 13 DPS troopers had massed in the hallway outside the classrooms at one point — waiting to make entry even as the massacre unfolded.

[…]

The district attorney for Uvalde, Christina Mitchell Busbee, is leading a criminal investigation into the shooting. The Texas Rangers, with assistance from the FBI, are investigating the police response.

Separately, the Justice Department is conducting a “critical incident review” of the police response. And a three-member legislative committee appointed by House Speaker Dade Phelan is investigating the massacre.

Gutierrez wants more answers now.

“We’re supposed to be the big bad-ass cops in the region,” Gutierrez said of the DPS troopers. “What happened here? Where were they situated in that building, and what time did they get there? When it came to protecting our children, we failed.”

Yeah, lots of investigations of this massive tragedy – perhaps this explains why the local cops quit cooperating the DPS’ own investigation, or why Uvalde schools top cop Pete Arredondo sounds so defensive. Maybe we need all these investigations now because clearly no one wants to have ownership of any of this. Which, given what a massive clusterfuck it appears to have been, I can understand. But man, everything about this just keeps getting worse and more infuriating. I’m with Scott Braddock:

.
Decades of covering Texas and I have NEVER seen this level of incompetence and misplaced priorities.
Few travel this entire incredible state talking to everyone from all walks of life like I do.
We ARE better than what we are getting from leadership right now.

— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:25 PM – 13 June 2022

.
Gov @GregAbbott_TX has drained almost every other state agency’s budgets to fund DPS operations in South Texas. When DPS was on the scene of the #UvaldeMassacre in South Texas what did they do?
Fucking nothing.
Your tax dollars at work, Texans.

— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:13 PM – 13 June 2022

.
The Abbott Administration’s officers stood down while those kids were slaughtered in that classroom. This isn’t hard to understand.
What will you do about it?

— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:01 PM – 13 June 2022

To put this another way:

Gutierrez questioned why state troopers on the scene would automatically defer to a school district officer with no radios.

“Why weren’t the decisions made by the most superior police force on-site?” he asked. “How then did everybody just jump on and make (Arredondo) the incident commander? If he never had a radio, then how did he make himself the incident commander? It just doesn’t follow.”

At the news conference last month, McCraw told reporters that police in Texas are trained not to wait for orders to neutralize an active shooter.

“When there’s an active shooter, the rules change,” McCraw said. “You don’t have time. You don’t have to have a leader on the scene. Every officer lines up, stacks up, goes and finds where those rounds are being fired at and keeps shooting until the subject is dead. Period.”

Law enforcement sources told the Express-News that four Border Patrol agents and two sheriff’s deputies made entry into the classrooms and killed Ramos.

Gutierrez said officers in the hallway at one point had as many as three ballistic shields before finally breaching the door to the classrooms. Once they did, nearly two dozen people inside were dead.

“There was enough material in that room to stop this threat,” he said. “And it didn’t happen.”

There were an awful lot of good guys with guns (and vests and helmet and shields) at Robb Elementary School. They amounted to exactly zero when it came to stopping one guy from killing almost two dozen people, almost all children. That is a goddamn disgrace.

Uvalde’s police chief speaks

Jun 11th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’ll reserve judgment for now.

Only a locked classroom door stood between Pete Arredondo and a chance to bring down the gunman. It was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.

He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die.

“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo said.

The chief of police for the Uvalde school district spent more than an hour in the hallway of Robb Elementary School. He called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside, holding back from the doors for 40 minutes to avoid provoking sprays of gunfire. When keys arrived, he tried dozens of them, but one by one they failed to work.

“Each time I tried a key I was just praying,” Arredondo said. Finally, 77 minutes after the massacre began, officers were able to unlock the door and fatally shoot the gunman.

In his first extended comments since the May 24 massacre, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, Arredondo gave The Texas Tribune an account of what he did inside the school during the attack. He answered questions via a phone interview and in statements provided through his lawyer, George E. Hyde.

Aside from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which did not respond to requests for comment for this article, Arredondo is the only other law enforcement official to publicly tell his account of the police response to the shooting.

Arredondo, 50, insists he took the steps he thought would best protect lives at his hometown school, one he had attended himself as a boy.

“My mind was to get there as fast as possible, eliminate any threats, and protect the students and staff,” Arredondo said. He noted that some 500 students from the school were safely evacuated during the crisis.

Arredondo’s decisions — like those of other law enforcement agencies that responded to the massacre that left 21 dead — are under intense scrutiny as federal and state officials try to decide what went wrong and what might be learned.

Whether the inability of police to quickly enter the classroom prevented the 21 victims — 19 students and two educators — from getting life-saving care is not known, and may never be. There’s evidence, including the fact that a teacher died while being transported to the hospital, that suggests taking down the shooter faster might have made a difference. On the other hand, many of the victims likely died instantly. A pediatrician who attended to the victims described small bodies “pulverized” and “decapitated.” Some children were identifiable only by their clothes and shoes.

In the maelstrom of anguish, outrage and second-guessing that immediately followed the second deadliest school shooting in American history, the time Arredondo and other officers spent outside that door — more than an hour — have become emblems of failure.

As head of the six-member police force responsible for keeping Uvalde schools safe, Arredondo has been singled out for much of the blame, particularly by state officials. They criticized him for failing to take control of the police response and said he made the “wrong decision” that delayed officers from entering the classroom.

Arredondo has faced death threats. News crews have camped outside his home, forcing him to go into hiding. He’s been called cowardly and incompetent.

Neither accusation is true or fair, he says.

“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo said. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”

Arredondo’s explanations don’t fully address all the questions that have been raised. The Tribune spoke to seven law enforcement experts about Arredondo’s description of the police response. All but one said that serious lapses in judgment occurred.

Most strikingly, they said, by running into the school with no key and no radios and failing to take charge of the situation, the chief appears to have contributed to a chaotic approach in which officers deployed inappropriate tactics, adopted a defensive posture, failed to coordinate their actions, and wasted precious time as students and teachers remained trapped in two classrooms with a gunman who continued to fire his rifle.

Hyde, Arredondo’s lawyer, said those criticisms don’t reflect the realities police face when they’re under fire and trying to save lives. Uvalde is a small working-class city of about 15,000 west of San Antonio. Its small band of school police officers doesn’t have the staffing, equipment, training, or experience with mass violence that larger cities might.

That right there would seem to be a pretty damn good argument for trying to limit the availability of at least the kind of guns that can do the kind of damage described here. Surely even a Ted Cruz would have to admit that a teacher with a Glock is not going to be as effective as a professional police officer in this kind of situation, and if the cops themselves say they’re not up to the task, who are we to say otherwise?

Anyway, you can read the rest – it’s a long story – or you can read this “five takeaways” piece about the interview if you want more of a summary. I’ll wait to see what the Justice Department says – I suspect they will have some points of disagreement with Chief Arredondo. Reform Austin has more.

Justice Department starts its review of the Uvalde law enforcement response

Jun 10th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

We’ll see what they turn up.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that the Department of Justice’s investigation into the law enforcement response to the elementary school shooting in Uvalde won’t be criminal in nature.

Garland described the federal investigation as a “critical incident review,” which was done after other mass shootings such as in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida. The review will assess the law enforcement response and “give guidance for the future,” Garland said. The department will then produce a public report, which will include the investigation’s findings and recommendations.

“Nothing that these [investigators] can do can undo the terrible tragedy that occurred, and that we are just heartbroken about,” Garland said Wednesday. “But we can assess what happened and we can make recommendations for the future.”

Garland said the team reviewing the law enforcement response will conduct site visits to the school and interviews with witnesses, families, law enforcement officers and school officials.

He said that his department expects full cooperation from all law enforcement officers involved in the response to the shooting. Authorities have been criticized in the days after the massacre over their decision to wait over an hour before entering the school and confronting the shooter.

“We have been promised, assured and welcomed with respect to cooperation by every level of law enforcement: state, federal and local,” Garland said. “We will participate in that vein and we don’t expect any problems.”

See here for the background. Per Texas Public Radio, there’s no official timetable for this process, but they intend to move “as expeditiously as possible”. Uvalde law enforcement has stopped cooperating with DPS in the state’s investigation, so we’ll see if the feds have more luck. Maybe some subpoenas will be needed, but let’s hope not. As I said, I don’t expect much out of this, but if we learn more about what actually happened with how local law enforcement responded and why it went so very wrong, that’s enough of a reason to do this. The Chron has more.

If committees are all we’re going to get, then let’s get something from the committees

Jun 5th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Not too much to ask, I hope.

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan on Friday announced the creation of a legislative committee to investigate the Uvalde shooting.

“The fact we still do not have an accurate picture of what exactly happened in Uvalde is an outrage,” the Beaumont Republican said in a statement announcing the committee. “Every day, we receive new information that conflicts with previous reports, making it not only difficult for authorities to figure out next steps, but for the grieving families of the victims to receive closure. I established this investigative committee for the dedicated purpose of gathering as much information and evidence as possible to help inform the House’s response to this tragedy and deliver desperately needed answers to the people of Uvalde and the State of Texas.”

The three-person investigative committee will have subpoena power for its investigation and will be led by state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican who is an attorney. El Paso Democrat Joe Moody, a former prosecutor, will serve as the committee’s vice chair. Former Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who recently lost a bid to become the Republican nominee for attorney general, will also be a member of the panel.

Phelan said Burrows, Moody and Guzman have “decades of experience in civil and criminal litigation matters” that make them well-equipped to conduct the committee’s investigations.

The speaker’s latest announcement comes days after he voiced his support for ending the “dead suspect loophole” in Texas public records laws, which could impede the public’s ability to get answers about the police response to the shooting. Law enforcement agencies often use a statute in the law to shield from public release records related to incidents that don’t lead to a conviction, including in cases in which the suspect dies before a chance to prosecute.

“It’s time we pass legislation to end the dead suspect loophole for good in 2023,” he said on social media on Wednesday.

Better than its Senate counterpart, which is admittedly a low bar. I’d not heard of the “dead suspect loophole” before. I’m fine with closing it, but please don’t tell me it’s going to promote gun safety or reduce gun violence in any way. It’s worth doing on its own merits, and it would mean the Lege didn’t do absolutely nothing. It’s also an extremely small step to take, and we should not be close to satisfied with it.

I do hope this committee uses its subpoena powers, because good Lord there are so many things that still need to be explained.

The Uvalde school district police chief who led the response to last week’s shooting and made the decision to wait for reinforcements while the gunman and survivors were still in the building did not have a police radio when he first arrived on campus, possibly missing reports about the 911 calls coming from inside, according to news reports.

Pete Arredondo, police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, instead used a cellphone to call a police landline to tell officers about the shooter, The New York Times reported Friday. Arredondo told his department that the gunman had an AR-15 but was contained, the Times reported, and to send backup and surround Robb Elementary School.

Arredondo’s decision-making has been widely criticized after it took more than an hour for law enforcement to breach the classroom where the gunman was holed up. Parents begged the dozens of officers outside the school to take action and tried to enter the school themselves. Some were physically restrained.

It was Arredondo who decided to not immediately confront the gunman, who killed 19 children and two teachers and injured 17 others, state law enforcement officials have said. Instead, Arredondo chose to wait for backup and equipment and to treat the gunman as a “barricaded suspect” rather than an active shooter, Steve McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said last week.

Meanwhile, 911 calls from students trapped inside the classroom with the gunman were pouring in to local police dispatchers — including a student begging for police officers to show up. Those calls were routed to the Uvalde Police Department, which operates independently from the school district’s police force, Roland Gutierrez, the state senator who represents Uvalde, said Thursday.

Arredondo presumably did not know about the multiple 911 calls while he was on the scene. McCraw said Arredondo believed no children were in danger, possibly because he did not know any survived inside the classroom.

“Unless there was someone relaying him info, there was no way for him to know there were 911 calls coming from inside that room,” Gutierrez told TV news station WOAI on Friday.

Unbelievable, but at this point unsurprising. The problems go way deeper than one incompetent police chief, and while he deserves a lot of blame and needs to be made to answer a bunch of questions, scapegoating him doesn’t get us anywhere. Just again, don’t ever talk to me about “good guys with guns”. It was idiotic before, and it’s insulting now. Daily Kos has more.

The entire law enforcement response in Uvalde is messed up

Jun 2nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

What is going on here?

The official response to the mass shooting at an Uvalde elementary school — a response already marred by shifting narratives, finger-pointing and a general lack of timely and accurate information — took a further turn toward dysfunction on Tuesday.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said Uvalde school district’s police chief Pete Arredondo, who made the decision to wait for more resources rather than confront the gunman sooner, has stopped cooperating with state investigators and had not responded to requests for information for over two days. Arredondo contests the claim.

And the agency walked back an assertion that a teacher at Robb Elementary School propped open a back door prior to the shooting, allowing the gunman to enter and kill 19 students and two teachers. Earlier Tuesday the teacher’s lawyer had pushed back on the state’s account.

Texas Rangers investigating the response to the shooting want to continue talking to Arredondo, but he hasn’t answered a request made two days ago for a follow-up interview, according to two DPS spokespeople. The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s police department and the Uvalde Police Department have otherwise been cooperating with the Rangers’ investigation, DPS spokesperson Travis Considine said.

Arredondo did not return a call requesting comment. He told CNN in a brief interview that he is speaking “every day” with DPS investigators but declined to further discuss the shooting.

“I’ve been on the phone with them every day,” Arredondo said.

Amid the turmoil, Texas’ largest police union — the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT — urged its members Tuesday in a statement to “cooperate fully” with investigations into the police response to the Uvalde massacre — though they didn’t name Arredondo.

Both the police chief and the school teacher had been implicated by DPS officials as, in effect, having failed at their jobs. The change in narrative is likely to deepen the mistrust surrounding the investigation. Already, as in other mass shootings, conspiracy theories and misinformation have begun to proliferate online.

While the U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to review the response to the mass shooting, the ultimate responsibility for carrying out a credible, thorough and transparent investigation rests with the state — and so far, state officials have not offered much confidence in their abilities to carry out such a probe.

[…]

CLEAT, the police union, blamed state officials Tuesday for “a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy,” some of which “came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement.”

“Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false,” the union said in a statement.

Not much confidence indeed. It’s one thing for there to have been confusion and conflicting or missing information in the immediate aftermath of the murders. We’re more than a week out now, and it’s hard to understand why DPS and the locals aren’t on the same page. If they are unable to communicate or don’t trust each other, it speaks poorly of them all.

And where is Greg Abbott in all of this? He expressed anger after hearing about the botched local PD response, of which he had initially been “misinformed”. Does he have anything left in the tank for this? This is his law enforcement agency, and his hand-picked henchman in charge of it, that are out there stepping on rakes. Is that a problem, or is he going to do his usual thing of refusing to answer any questions about it until the press gets tired and moves on to something else? It’s nice that the Justice Department will do a review, but what happens if Uvalde police don’t want to cooperate with that? Who exactly is in charge here? The Chron, Daily Kos, and Reform Austin have more.

Justice Department to review what happened with Uvalde police

May 30th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Okay.

The U.S. Department of Justice will review the law enforcement’s response to the Uvalde school massacre as local police face intense scrutiny for not acting quickly enough to confront the shooter.

“The goal of the review is to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events,” Anthony Coley, a spokesperson for the U.S. Justice Department, wrote in a statement Sunday.

Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin requested the Justice Department investigation, Coley said.

Police officers made a crucial error in waiting to stop the 18-year-old gunman rampaging at Robb Elementary School because the school district’s chief of police wanted to wait for backup and equipment, said Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Meanwhile, students were still trapped inside with the gunman, repeatedly calling 911 for help.

By the time a specialized team of federal officers arrived and entered the school, more than an hour had passed since the shooter had arrived at the school, McCraw said.

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”

Since the shooting, state law enforcement officials have given vague and conflicting answers on what exactly happened after the gunman arrived at the school. In the days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety said the shooter was met by a police officer employed by the school district — and gave conflicting accounts about whether the officer fired at the gunman.

See here for some background. We may at least get some more honest and accurate answers about what happened and why the Uvalde police acted as they did. That’s nice, but I doubt it moves the ball forward for anything else. I’m always in favor of getting the facts right, I’m just trying to maintain perspective on this. It’s good on its own terms, just don’t expect more.

For example:

The Texas Senate Democratic Caucus is urging Gov. Greg Abbott to call an emergency special legislative session to consider a variety of gun restrictions and safety measures in the wake of a mass school shooting in Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead this week.

In a letter released Saturday morning, all 13 Senate Democrats demanded lawmakers pass legislation that raises the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21 years old. The Uvalde gunman was 18 and had purchased two AR-style rifles which he used in the attack.

The caucus is also calling for universal background checks for all firearm sales, “red flag” laws that allow a judge to temporarily remove firearms from people who are considered an imminent threat to themselves or others, a “cooling off period” for the purchase of a firearm and regulations on high capacity magazines for citizens.

[…]

Such laws are unlikely to gain traction in the Republican-controlled Legislature, which has a track record of favoring legislation that loosens gun restrictions. Only the governor has the power to call lawmakers back into a special session for emergency work.

Asked about a special session at a Friday press conference in Uvalde, Abbott said “all options are on the table” adding that he believed laws would ultimately be passed to address this week’s horrors. However, he suggested laws would be more tailored toward addressing mental health, rather than gun control.

“You can expect robust discussion and my hope is laws are passed, that I will sign, addressing health care in this state,” he said, “That status quo is unacceptable. This crime is unacceptable. We’re not going to be here and do nothing about it.”

Making things worse is always an option. The palaver about “addressing mental health” is as useless and empty as “thoughts and prayers”, since Abbott has said the same thing after each of the previous two mass shootings at schools that have happened during his reign, and all he has done in reality is cut funding for mental health care. Also, too, for the 597th time, the single biggest and best thing the state could do to improve mental health care in Texas is expand Medicaid, and we all know that ain’t happening as long as Abbott and his minions are in charge. Texas Public Radio has more.

Please don’t ever talk to me about “a good guy with a gun” or “hardening the schools” again

May 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

24 comments

The police were there but did nothing.

A gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at a South Texas elementary school walked unopposed onto school grounds, state law enforcement officials said Thursday — and once he was inside, it took police an hour to stop him.

In the days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety said the shooter encountered a police officer employed by the school district before charging through a back door — and gave conflicting accounts about whether the officer fired at the gunman.

Agency officials now say there was no police officer on campus when the shooter first arrived — but did not explain why they first believed there was.

The gunman crashed a truck in a ditch near the school at 11:28 a.m., fired at two passersby on the street, then entered the school 12 minutes later through a back door before police arrived, DPS officials said Thursday.

“He was not confronted by anybody,” Victor Escalon, a DPS official, said during a press conference Thursday. The agency is leading the investigation into the shooting along with Uvalde police.

The law enforcement response to the active shooter call has drawn mounting scrutiny in the days since the massacre. State law enforcement officials have given vague and conflicting answers on what exactly happened after the gunman arrived at the school, and parents have criticized police for not acting quickly enough to stop the shooter.

At a Wednesday press conference in Uvalde, DPS Director Steve McCraw said that a school police officer “engaged” with the gunman before he entered the school but did not exchange gunfire with the gunman. Other DPS officials were quoted in media reports saying there was an exchange of gunfire at that moment.

That was Wednesday. By Friday, they had gotten the story straight, and the local PD screwed it all up.

The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety criticized the police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District on Friday, saying he acted too slowly in responding to the elementary school gunman who killed 21 people, including 19 children.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the incident commander — identified by the San Antonio Express-News as Uvalde CISD police chief Pete Arredondo — believed the situation was no longer an active shooter, but that of a barricaded suspect.

But 911 calls, reviewed by Texas Rangers, reveal that at least two people inside the Robb Elementary School classroom called police and reported that there were children inside who were alive.

Meanwhile, the shooting continued periodically.

“With the benefit of hindsight, of course it was not the right decision,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision.”

He said once the shooting continued, the incident commander — who he did not identify directly — should have switched back to an active shooter response.

“We believe should have been an entry at that as soon as they (could),” McCraw added. “When there’s an active shooter, the rules change.”

Meanwhile, inside the classroom, children made terrified calls to 911, whispering and asking for help.

All of this has made Greg Abbott mad because he had been out there praising the Uvalde PD’s response before being clued in about how inept they were. He should maybe be mad that all of his party’s “solutions” for stopping mass shootings at schools just don’t work.

Four years after an armed 17-year-old opened fire inside a Texas high school, killing 10, Gov. Greg Abbott tried to tell another shell-shocked community that lost 19 children and two teachers to a teen gunman about his wins in what is now an ongoing effort against mass shootings.

“We consider what we did in 2019 to be one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in Texas but in any state to address school shootings,” Abbott said inside a Uvalde auditorium Wednesday as he sat flanked by state and local officials. “But to be clear, we understand our work is not done, our work must continue.”

Throughout the 60-minute news conference, he and other Republican leaders said a 2019 law allowed districts to “harden” schools from external threats after a deadly shooting inside an art classroom at Santa Fe High School near Houston the year before. After the Uvalde gunman was reportedly able to enter Robb Elementary School through a back door this week, their calls to secure buildings resurfaced yet again.

But a deeper dive into the 2019 law revealed many of its “hardening” elements have fallen short.

Schools didn’t receive enough state money to make the types of physical improvements lawmakers are touting publicly. Few school employees signed up to bring guns to work. And many school districts either don’t have an active shooting plan or produced insufficient ones.

In January 2020, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received $69,000 from a one-time, $100 million state grant to enhance physical security in Texas public schools, according to a dataset detailing the Texas Education Agency grants. The funds were comparable to what similarly sized districts received.

Even with more funds and better enforcement of policies, experts have said there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented any violence. Plus, they said, it can be detrimental to children, especially children of color.

“This concept of hardening, the more it has been done, it’s not shown the results,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University who studies school security practices and their effectiveness.

Khubchandani said the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.

After a review of 18 years of school security measures, Khubchandani and James Price from the University of Toledo did not find any evidence that such tactics or more armed teachers reduced gun violence in schools.

“It’s not just guns. It’s not just security,” Khubchandani said. “It’s a combination of issues, and if you have a piecemeal approach, then you’ll never succeed. You need a comprehensive approach.”

I was on the board of our elementary school’s PTA in 2012, when the Sandy Hook murders happened. Our school adopted the “only one entrance” idea then, so even though there were other entrances to the school, you had to go through this one, and be buzzed in, if you wanted to visit. That could easily be defeated by an attacker, of course, but it’s in line with the official Republican response. The other ideas, you know, about limiting access to extremely deadly automatic weapons that can fire dozens of rounds in a few seconds, we’re still waiting on that.

Again, there’s plenty of reporting and analysis out there. You don’t need me to regurgitate it all. What we need, all of us, is a change in political leadership in this state, plus at least two more Democratic Senators, to maybe have a chance to move this forward. (We’ll also have to deal with the radical Supreme Court, but with those two more Democratic Senators, bigger things are on the table.) We’re not going to get anything from the Greg Abbotts and Dan Patricks. We have to get them out of power to have a chance.

UPDATE: Here’s two more things for you to read if you haven’t had enough yet.

Ken Paxton finds a new thing to lie about

May 19th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

This counts as personal growth for him.

Best mugshot ever

The state police made him do it.

That’s the excuse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton gives on his Texas ethics disclosures in place of revealing, as required by law, the addresses of properties he owns in Austin and College Station.

“Redacted for security purposes on request of TX DPS,” the second-term Republican has written on every disclosure form since he began work as attorney general.

There are two problems with that statement: Nothing in the law allows him to refuse to provide the addresses, and none of the parties involved — the Department of Public Safety, Texas Ethics Commission or even Paxton’s own office — could produce any records proving such a request was ever made.

“The department doesn’t have any record of making that request,” DPS spokesman Travis Considine said.

An attorney general’s office spokesman and Paxton’s campaign spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

The ethics commission is barred from releasing Paxton’s home address in McKinney to the public. He provides that address to the agency annually. It’s unclear, however, why Paxton wouldn’t disclose the addresses of his other properties.

The agency, which enforces campaign finance and political ethics laws, keeps the information on file to ensure transparency for voters and guard against conflicts of interest. Paxton did include the properties’ counties, zip codes and acreage on the paperwork.

One of the unknown addresses is likely that of an Austin home that Paxton’s former aides claim was remodeled by Nate Paul, one of the various perks they said Paxton received in exchange for using his office to benefit Paul, a wealthy investor and campaign donor.

The home, in the Tarrytown neighborhood of Austin, was purchased by Paxton in 2018, county records show. Its appraised value in 2022 was nearly $1.7 million.

[…]

By state law, the ethics commission must redact a fair amount of information from the ethics commission forms before releasing them to the public, including: filers’ home addresses, telephone numbers and names of dependent children.

People who hold public office can check a box to indicate an address is a home address, as Paxton has done most years for his McKinney property, which has a market value of nearly $1.2 million. But those redactions are the commission’s purview.

“A filer may not choose to make their own redactions,” said J.R. Johnson, general counsel with the Texas Ethics Commission. “A filer must include all information required by law.”

Except that Ken Paxton doesn’t care about that. He’s a law unto himself, and he doesn’t answer to anyone else. More to the point, he has figured out that there isn’t anyone or anything that can hold him accountable for his utter contempt for laws and rules and other things that chumps subject themselves to. Well, maybe the voters, and maybe someday the criminal justice system. But until then, he’s gonna keep on giving the system the finger.

Treasury Department opens investigation into Abbott’s use of federal funds for border mission

May 14th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Good, though I have a hard time believing there will be any real consequences.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s use of COVID-19 relief dollars to support his border security mission has come under scrutiny in Washington this week as questions grow about whether it’s the proper use of the federal funds.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s inspector general opened an inquiry into the spending on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported. The action came a day after a group of Texas Democrats in the U.S. House called on U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to investigate.

Those steps followed a Post analysis of money intended to combat the effects of the pandemic, showing that Texas “leaders rerouted public health and safety funds to their border operations, while relying on federal pandemic funds to replace some of the money.”

Those border operations included Operation Lone Star, a state border security program that Abbott launched in March 2021 to deal with increased border crossings. The initiative involves the deployment of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department to the border. Abbott has used state resources to patrol the border, build border barriers and arrest migrants for trespassing on private land and then turn them over to immigration authorities.

The state has spent around $4 billion on the operations; the Post has reported that around $1 billion in coronavirus aid was used.

The money came from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, better known as the CARES Act, which had a key provision to support the medical response to the pandemic.

“In exercise of that responsibility … we are currently conducting a review of Texas’s uses of [Coronavirus Relief Fund] monies,” Richard K. Delmar, the U.S. Treasury Department’s deputy inspector general, said to the Washington Post.

[…]

Texas Democratic U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Veronica Escobar of El Paso spearheaded the letter to Yellen asking for her department to investigate the matter.

“It is negligent and irresponsible for Governor [Abbott] to direct additional funding to Operation Lone Star, especially if the funding in question was intended to help Texans rebuild from the pandemic,” the Texas Democrats wrote.

U.S. Reps. Colin Allred of Dallas, Lloyd Doggett of Austin, Marc Veasey of Fort Worth and Sylvia R. Garcia, Al Green, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher and Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston joined in signing the letter.

“As you continue your oversight of the Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Funds, we urge you to ensure all states are using these crucial funds for the reasons they were meant to be used,” they continued. “Governor Abbott must not be allowed to use federal coronavirus relief funds to further his political theater at the expense of Texas families.”

I’m happy for this, but let’s be clear that there are no circumstances under which Greg Abbott will be chastened by the outcome of the investigation, and no circumstances under which he will admit to any wrongdoing or make any changes in his behavior, except for the worse. Voting him out is still the only real hope at this point. Daily Kos has more.

Federal lawsuit filed over Abbott’s border arrest fiasco

May 7th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Meant to post this last week.

Three private defense attorneys, representing 15 migrant men arrested under Gov. Greg Abbott’s border operation, have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to end the governor’s policy of arresting migrants on criminal trespass charges, which the suit argues is racially discriminatory and infringes on the federal government’s immigration authority.

The lawsuit is the first to challenge Abbott’s Operation Lone Star in federal court, though defense attorneys have raised similar arguments in ongoing state litigation. The federal suit, filed Wednesday in the Austin-based U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, asks the court to scrap the governor’s border initiative altogether and order the release of migrants arrested under what it calls a “separate criminal prosecution and detention system.”

“The criminal process is rife with civil rights violations that have led to extreme, outrageous delays in cases that often end in dismissal or non-prosecution,” the lawsuit states, alleging state authorities filed “fraudulent probable cause affidavits,” failed to appoint attorneys for some defendants, and waited too long to file charges for numerous migrants.

Under orders from Abbott, state troopers and National Guard troops have arrested more than 3,000 migrant men since last July for allegedly trespassing on private property along the border. The operation has allowed Texas officials to jail migrants without running afoul of legal precedent that largely prevents states from enforcing federal immigration law.

The federal suit argues, however, that the entire program — including the trespass arrests — is “intended to rival or supplant federal immigration policy” and “interferes with federal enforcement priorities.” It argues that while the Biden administration has ordered immigration authorities to prioritize the most serious offenders, such as those with violent criminal history, Operation Lone Star “targets any and all suspected aliens without regard to dangerousness.”

Defense attorneys have used a similar argument in a pending state lawsuit that seeks to dismiss the cases of more than 400 migrants arrested under Texas’ border initiative. That lawsuit is modeled after an earlier case in which a Travis County judge tossed the trespass charge against Jesús Alberto Guzmán Curipoma, an engineer from Ecuador who was arrested in September.

Curipoma and his attorneys, Angelica Cogliano and Addy Miro, are also part of the federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

[…]

The federal lawsuit further alleges that migrants are routinely arrested under Operation Lone Star without probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and based on their perceived ethnicity and immigration status, resulting in “systemic discrimination.” The attorneys cited arrest affidavits filed by Department of Public Safety troopers that refer to detainees as Spanish or Hispanic and undocumented, or reference their country of origin.

Such statements “suggested that the individual’s perceived ethnicity was relevant to the DPS trooper’s understanding that that person was not welcome on the property,” the lawsuit reads.

The suit seeks monetary damages of $18,000 for each day that migrants were “unlawfully incarcerated or unlawfully re-incarcerated,” amounting to $5.4 million.

Much of the language from the lawsuit mirrors that of a complaint filed by civil rights groups with the U.S. Department of Justice last December, in which the groups urged the Biden administration to investigate Operation Lone Star. The Justice Department has yet to step in against Abbott’s initiative.

Meant to include this in that big roundup of border and legal stories, but I just missed it. My bad and my apologies. I don’t have anything to add other than I’m rooting for these plaintiffs and I’d like to see the Justice Department get off its ass and address that complaint from December.

A roundup of border and lawsuit stories

Apr 30th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Too much news, not enough time…

New federal lawsuit seeks to halt Texas’ border trespassing arrests, give more than $5 million to illegally detained migrants.

In a new challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial border security crackdown, a lawsuit filed Wednesday is asking a federal court to shut down Texas’ system of arresting migrants en masse along the Texas-Mexico border, and make the state pay more than $5 million to men who were illegally imprisoned under the system.

The lawsuit comes nearly a year after Abbott first ordered Texas police to arrest men suspected of illegally crossing the border on misdemeanor trespassing charges. The practice skirts constitutional restrictions that bar states from enforcing federal immigration law, and the lawsuit claims it discriminatorily targets mostly Black and Latino migrant men, usurps federal authority and is carried out in a way that violates the detainees’ rights.

“Under the guise of state criminal trespass law but with the explicit, stated goal of punishing migrants based on their immigration status, Texas officials are targeting migrants,” the filing stated. “Hundreds of those arrested have waited in jail for weeks or months without a lawyer, or without charges, or without bond, or without a legitimate detention hold or without a court date.”

Abbott’s trespassing initiative has drawn numerous state and local court challenges since it began in July, but this appears to be the first time attorneys are opposing it in federal court and seeking compensation for migrants swept into the governor’s “catch-and-jail” system. State and federal Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups have also called on the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in the Republican governor’s operation, but the federal administration has not acted.

The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Austin by three private attorneys on behalf of 15 individual migrants and is asking for a class certification to include everyone arrested under Abbott’s trespassing initiative. The migrants are suing Abbott, the directors of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, as well as Kinney County, a rural border county which accounts for the large majority of trespassing arrests, and its sheriff.

The complaint asks the court to find that the operation violates federal law and order the state to stop the arrests. It also argues each migrant illegally detained so far should be given $18,000 for each day they were imprisoned beyond what is allowed by state law. The attorneys said it is a typical amount awarded by courts in cases of over-detention. They estimated the total cost would be around $5,400,000.

Previously, state district judges have found that hundreds of men were detained illegally after trespassing arrests, locked in prison for more than a month without any charges filed against them in violation of state law. Lawyers have argued the practice is still occurring. Wednesday’s filing also alleges men have been held for days or weeks after they post bond, their charge is dropped or their sentence is complete.

This is one possible way to get this heinous activity stopped. I don’t know if it’s the most likely way to succeed, but it is the most direct.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Biden administration over asylum plan.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed his 11th immigration-related lawsuit against the Biden administration Thursday, asking a judge to block a plan to let asylum officers, rather than immigration judges, decide whether to grant some migrants’ asylum claims at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The new plan, scheduled to take effect May 31, “upends the entire adjudicatory system to the benefit of aliens,” the lawsuit says.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration finalized its plan to overhaul the process for migrants seeking asylum. The plan is supposed to reduce the average wait time for asylum-seekers to receive a decision in their case from five years to six months. As of March, immigration judges had nearly 1.7 million pending cases — the largest backlog in the country’s history, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Under the new process, asylum-seekers could be released into the country pending the outcome of their cases instead of being held in custody. If a migrant apprehended at the border claims they could be persecuted or tortured if they return to their home country, the asylum officer would decide if they have a credible claim. If the officer declines an asylum claim, migrants could appeal to an immigration judge.

“The current system for handling asylum claims at our borders has long needed repair,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, said in a statement in March when the plan was finalized. “Through this rule, we are building a more functional and sensible asylum system to ensure that individuals who are eligible will receive protection more swiftly, while those who are not eligible will be rapidly removed.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Amarillo overseen by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, also argues that the new plan violates the Constitution’s appointments clause because asylum officers are members of the general civil services and are not appointed like judges are.

[…]

Texas has filed nearly two dozen lawsuits in Texas-based federal courts, most of them led by Paxton, against the Biden administration over everything from federal mask mandates to the administration’s decision to halt the long-disputed Keystone XL pipeline. Trump-appointed judges have heard 16 of the cases and ruled in favor of Texas in seven. The other nine are pending as of March 15.

The state’s favorite targets have been Biden’s immigration policies, which have sparked seven of the 20 lawsuits in Texas courts. Paxton’s office has also sued the administration in Washington, D.C., federal courts and joined lawsuits led by attorneys general from other states.

Another day, another Trump judge. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what is likely to come next. There’s plenty that the Biden administration could and should have done differently with immigration policy, but nearly everything he has tried to do has run into this kind of legal obstacle. It would be nice if Congress were to act, but that’s just not in the cards.

Judge orders Biden administration to send Central American migrants to Mexico rather than their home countries.

A federal judge in Louisiana on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Biden administration from increasing the number of deportations of some Central Americans back to their home countries and ordered the administration to instead send them to Mexico under an emergency health order used to expel migrants from the country, including asylum-seekers.

The judge also set a May 13 hearing to decide whether to block the administration from canceling the health order, known as Title 42. The judge indicated in the order that he plans to block the Biden administration from lifting Title 42 altogether.

During a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, a Biden administration immigration official was asked about the Louisiana judge’s impending order and said the administration plans to comply with it but remarked, “We really disagree with the basic premise.”

The Biden administration had announced that it will stop expelling migrants under Title 42 starting May 23 and instead go back to detaining and deporting migrants who don’t qualify to enter and remain in the U.S.

On April 3, Arizona, Missouri and 19 other states filed a lawsuit in the Western District of Louisiana, asking District Judge Robert R. Summerhays, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, to stop the Biden administration from ending Title 42.

Then on April 20, Fox News reported that the Biden administration had stopped using Title 42 for some migrants from certain Central American countries and instead was deporting them to their home countries. The next day, Arizona’s lawyers asked Summerhays to block the Biden administration from deporting those migrants and instead expel them to Mexico.

“A major media outlet reported that ‘Border Patrol is not using the Title 42 public health order to remove many migrants from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,’” Arizona’s request to the judge says, quoting the Fox News article.

Immigration officials had stopped expelling some single adult migrants from those countries under Title 42 and instead processed them under Title 8, a law that allows agents to deport migrants to their home countries without a court hearing. Deportations to those countries had historically accounted for 5% of cases. After the move to process migrants under Title 8, those cases increased to 14%, and the judge has ordered the government to aim for a return to that lower historic rate.

“We’re in a strange world right now where Greg Abbott is giving free bus rides to migrants and [Arizona Attorney General] Mark Brnovich has forced [the Department of Homeland Security] to deport fewer people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an analyst with the American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C., group that advocates for immigrants, referring to the Texas governor’s program that transports asylum-seeking migrants to the country’s capital.

See here for the background. I don’t even know what to say about this one. I do know that Texas filed its own lawsuit over Title 42. At least that makes sense to me.

U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on whether Biden can toss Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday morning on whether the Biden administration can scrap a Trump-era policy that forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases make their way through U.S. immigration courts.

During two hours of arguments, the lawyers largely focused on a central question: Does the executive branch have the sole authority to set U.S. immigration policies?

The case reached the Supreme Court after a federal district judge in Texas last year ruled that the Biden administration violated immigration law by not detaining every immigrant attempting to enter the country. U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk ordered the Biden administration to restart the Migrant Protections Protocols, also called “remain in Mexico,” which the Trump administration first implemented in January 2019 and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas canceled in June 2021.

That decision led Texas and Missouri to sue the Biden administration in April 2021, arguing that canceling MPP violated administrative law and that without the program, human trafficking would increase and force the states to expend resources on migrants — such as providing driver’s licenses, educating migrant children and providing hospital care.

The Biden administration argued it has the discretion to end the program and that it was not an effective way to deal with migrants seeking asylum.

[…]

The court’s liberal justices brought up the issue that the lower court’s decision has forced the White House to enter into a deal with Mexico — which has to agree to receive migrants sent over the border through MPP — when presidents historically have had broad authority on foreign policy issues.

“It puts the United States essentially at the mercy of Mexico,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “Mexico has all the leverage in the world to say, ‘Well, you want to do that, you want to comply with the court’s order? Here are 20 things that you need to do for us.’ Or maybe Mexico says, ‘No, we’d like to see you squirm and not be able to comply with the court’s order.’”

Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said the justices will have to wrestle with the fact that at any point Mexico could change its mind on whether it wants to continue to accept migrants expelled from the U.S. through the program.

“How can a court require the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security to dump busloads of people into Mexico if Mexico doesn’t comply?” she said.

Note that this is the same judge as in the second story. Do we let federal district court judges dictate foreign policy, which is what this is, or is that something Presidents are still allowed to do? I guess we’ll find out.

Gov. Greg Abbott asks for private donations to bus migrants to D.C. after criticism for using taxpayer money.

On Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on Fox News touting a program he’s been pushing for weeks — sending migrants who enter into Texas to Washington, D.C., by charter bus.

But this time, Abbott asked Texans to personally contribute their own money to pay for the trips.

The decision to crowdfund the free bus trips for migrants is a new development from when he initially announced on April 6 that it would be paid for by Texas taxpayers. At the time, Abbott proudly presented the trips as a tough-on-immigration act of defiance against the Biden administration.

But the shift to ask private donors to pay for the charter buses comes as his plan has been increasingly praised as an act of generosity by Democrats, immigration rights groups and even the migrants who rode the buses, while those further to Abbott’s right politically have panned it as a misuse of taxpayer dollars that incentivizes migrants to cross into Texas.

“Congratulations to Governor Abbott,” Texas Rep. Gene Wu said Tuesday in a tweet. “Word will be passed from community to community that if you can just get to Texas, the Governor there will pay for your transportation anywhere in the USA.”

[…]

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the governor may be trying to escape blowback.

“I think it’s a quiet way of protecting himself from criticism that he’s using taxpayer dollars to provide free transport for undocumented immigrants,” Jones said. “Many conservatives pounced on him as all hat and no cattle, in that he was talking tough but in the end all his busing was going to do was provide a free trip for undocumented migrants to the East Coast that they otherwise would have had to pay for or that liberal nonprofits would have had to pay for.”

Abbott’s office has said at least 10 buses have arrived in the nation’s capital, but his office has not provided costs for the trips or the total number of migrants who have been transported.

During the 30-some-hour coach bus ride, passengers were provided with meals, the migrants said. Many of the buses’ passengers said they had saved up thousands of dollars just to arrive at the border and had little money left by the time they arrived in Texas.

“We are very thankful for all the help that has been given to us,” Ordalis Heras, a 26-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, said earlier this month to the Tribune, hours after arriving in Washington on Abbott’s first bus from Del Rio. Heras, like many other passengers, had intended to travel north of Texas anyway.

“Frankly, we did not have the money to get here otherwise, so we are very thankful for the help,” she said.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

And finally:

With the approval of Republican state leaders, Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday pulled nearly half a billion dollars from various state agency budgets to fund the swelling cost of deploying thousands of National Guard troops to the southern border.

The $495 million transfer comes weeks after Texas military leaders warned they would soon run out of money to fund the 10,000-member deployment under Abbott’s border initiative, known as Operation Lone Star. More than 6,000 National Guard soldiers are stationed along the border to help state troopers apprehend and jail migrants suspected of trespassing on private property.

State lawmakers last year allotted more than $400 million for the Texas Military Department to participate in the operation over the current two-year budget period, part of a $1.8 billion spending package that is also paying for a surge in Department of Public Safety troopers to the border region.

But in late January, facing funding shortfalls just several months into the fiscal year, Abbott and GOP state leaders shifted about $480 million from three state agencies to fund the National Guard deployment. The additional transfer Friday means it will cost Texas more than $1.3 billion to keep National Guard soldiers stationed along the border through the end of the fiscal year in August, more than triple the amount originally budgeted.

In all, Texas’ border security budget now stands at about $4 billion for the current two-year cycle, roughly five times the amount spent in 2019-2020. State leaders will need to drum up additional funds to keep National Guard soldiers stationed at the border beyond August.

Your tax dollars at work. You can do something about that this November.

Keeping the world safe from low tire pressure

Apr 23rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Such a visionary.

State troopers ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott to inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico earlier this month — which clogged international trade with Mexico — found zero drugs, weapons or any other type of contraband, according to data released by the Department of Public Safety to The Texas Tribune.

Earlier this month, Abbott ordered troopers to thoroughly inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico’s four border states in what he described as an effort to stop illegal drugs and migrants from being smuggled into Texas. His order for increased state inspections was part of his response to the Biden administration’s announcement that it will lift Title 42 — the pandemic-era health order used by federal immigration officials to expel migrants, including asylum-seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border. The expiration of the order is expected to increase the number of migrants seeking entry to the U.S.

Over eight days, starting April 8, troopers conducted more than 4,100 inspections of trucks. Troopers didn’t find any contraband but took 850 trucks off the road for various violations related to their equipment. Other truckers were given warnings, and at least 345 were cited for things such as underinflated tires, broken turn signals and oil leaks.

DPS Director Steve McCraw said at a Friday news conference with Abbott that the reason troopers hadn’t found any drugs or migrants in commercial trucks is because drug cartels “don’t like troopers stopping them, certainly north of the border, and they certainly don’t like 100% inspections of commercial vehicles on the bridges. And once that started, we’ve seen a decreased amount of trafficking across bridges — common sense.”

But Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, said it’s not likely cartels stopped the smuggling of drugs because of the state’s inspections. He said many illegal drugs smuggled into the United States are hidden in small compartments or spare tires of people’s vehicles going through international bridges for tourists. He said if smugglers were trying to hide illegal drugs in a commercial truck, it’s most likely federal immigration officials found them before the trucks were directed to the DPS secondary inspections.

“It just seems odd to me that DPS would be that much of a deterrent for smugglers deciding whether to bring something after already passing through the gauntlet of CBP,” he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection routinely inspects commercial cargo coming from Mexico for illegal drugs and people being smuggled as soon as truckers cross the international bridges. CBP called Texas’ inspections duplicative and “unnecessary.”

Emphasis mine, and see here for the previous entry. Beto is out there talking about this stuff. We need more people on our team joining him in this.

On a related note:

According to an analysis by the Waco-based Perryman Group, the U.S. lost an estimated $8.97 billion due to shipping delays between April 6 and 15, the time in which Abbott’s rule was in effect. Texas alone lost $4.23 billion in gross product.

The economics firm based its estimates on a 2019 study it conducted on a separate border slowdown and updated the data to account for this month’s different circumstances, CEO Ray Perryman told Axios.

Perryman promised to release more detailed numbers later this week.

I haven’t looked to see if Perryman has followed through on that. I tend to like Ray Perryman’s projections in the sense that they generally align with my worldview, but I’m a bit skeptical of their provenance sometimes. I have no doubt that Abbott’s dictum had a negative effect on the economy – hell, that was the plan all along – but I don’t think it’s that easy to put a number on it. Anything that doesn’t come with wide error bars alongside it should be viewed with some side-eye. The concept is sound, the details are fuzzy, that’s all I’m saying.

Abbott ends his border hostage-taking

Apr 17th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

I cannot get over how stupid and cynical this was, and yet it may be politically successful.

Gov. Greg Abbott reached a fourth and final deal — this one with Tamaulipas’ governor on Friday — to end state troopers’ increased inspections of commercial vehicles at international bridges that gridlocked commercial traffic throughout the Texas-Mexico border for more than a week.

The latest deal should bring trade back to normal after Abbott-ordered enhanced inspections at key commercial bridges caused over a week of backups that left truckers waiting for hours and sometimes days to get loads of produce, auto parts and other goods into the U.S.

At a press conference with Abbott in Weslaco, Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca said his state will continue its five-part security plan, launched in 2016, that includes stationing police every 31 miles on state highways, personality and polygraph tests for officers in the state police department, increasing salaries for police officers and offering scholarships for the children of state police officers.

Abbott said the deals with Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas were “historic,” calling them an example of how border states can work together on immigration. But three of the four Mexican governors said they will simply continue security measures they put in place before Abbott ordered the state inspections.

[…]

When he announced the initiative last week, Abbott said the goal was to stop illegal drugs and migrants from being smuggled into the state. As of Friday, the Department of Public Safety had not reported any drugs seized or migrants apprehended as a result of the state inspections.

Emphasis mine. Keep that in mind, that in the end basically nothing has changed and nothing was accomplished. Sound and fury, all the way down.

Abbott’s critics say the Texas governor’s order was a political ploy to raise his profile in his reelection campaign which has disrupted the economies of Texas and the four Mexican border states.

“A lot of our members are absolutely flabbergasted that this was allowed to happen and that it happened for so long for the sake of border security,” said Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association. “We feel like we were used as bargaining chips.”

Beto O’Rourke, Abbott’s Democratic opponent in the November election, said Abbott is doing a victory lap for a problem he created.

“Abbott is the arsonist who torched the Texas economy by shutting down trade with Mexico to score cheap political points,” he said. “Now he wants credit for putting out the fire by announcing these ridiculous ‘security agreements.’ Texans aren’t buying it and we’ll never forget the chaos Abbott has caused to our economy and our border communities.”

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, said Abbott may have made a political miscalculation with the inspections.

“This seems like it’s not working out for him. His base is pro-business and anti-immigrant and he has just antagonized business while giving voluntary free rides to immigrants,” he said, referring to another Abbott order that has provided bus rides to Washington, D.C., to transport asylum-seekers who have been processed and released by federal authorities — if they volunteered to go.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political science professor at George Mason University who studies U.S.-Mexico relations, said she struggled to understand why Abbott would issue a border directive that would inflict so much damage on his own state’s economy.

“Why shoot himself in the foot? Well, he’s not. He’s calculating,” she said. “This is part of a political spectacle because we are in midterm elections and the economy is bad.”

Abbott can take action that would negatively impact the state economy and not have to pay a price for it because voters are already blaming the Biden administration for inflation, Correa-Cabrera said.

“He’ll probably blame Washington for the unrest and anger that this crisis is going to cause voters,” she said. “You have the perfect excuse to run in an electoral year and to support your party in an electoral year but [you generate] the sense that the other party is to blame for the situation.”

See here, here, and here for the background. We have noted the strategy behind Abbott’s otherwise empty and meaningless actions, and there is certainly a logic and appeal to them. We like to think that reality is a good defense against this kind of concentrated bullshit, but in the year of our Lord 2022 we should know better. Talking about why it’s bullshit is the main hope. Stories like this are good for that effort.

Eladio Cordero, a produce worker at Trinidad Fresh Produce in the McAllen Produce Terminal Market, sorted through jalapeños Thursday — about one in three had orange spots. A few feet away from him, dozens of flies buzzed around a pile of browning onions.

Every day at the terminal, where hundreds of trucks pass through to drop off tons of Mexican-grown goods, the fruits and vegetables that have gone bad are picked out and thrown away.

“The merchandise comes from Mexico and by the time it crosses it can go bad, and those are losses,” said Gustavo Garcia, a floor manager for Trinidad Fresh Produce, a distributor at the terminal.

After Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state inspections on commercial vehicles entering from Mexico last week, the stack of garbage-bound onions grew taller. The jalapeños that didn’t survive the long journey into the U.S. were discarded. Garcia said he doesn’t know if retailers will still want to buy the aging produce he keeps, but if they do, the price will be marked down at least 30%.

[…]

Felix, a 60-year-old Mexican trucker who was transporting tomatoes, onions and avocados, waited about 13 hours in line at the bridge. He asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from CBP officials.

Hearing of the delays at the border, he packed water and food for a few days. But other truckers didn’t come as prepared and were sitting in standstill traffic without anything to eat or drink. Felix said he was told by a CBP official that the agency would put portable bathrooms along the bridge for the gridlocked truckers, but he never saw them.

Once Felix made it to the state troopers’ inspection point around 9 p.m., he said they didn’t even peer into his truck, which had been sealed since Mexican authorities inspected it about 600 miles away in the state of Sinaloa.

“There’s no possibility of bringing illegal immigrants in the merchandise or in the cabin,” he said, referencing one of Abbott’s explanations for the inspections. “I can’t bring an illegal immigrant here for money because I know [inspectors] are going to discover them. It’s not a thing here. I don’t know what the politicians’ ideas are. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

[…]

The delays caused by the state’s inspections are the latest blow to farmers and produce businesses in the Rio Grande Valley since 2020. Last year’s winter freeze damaged millions of pounds of product. The pandemic forced companies to size down their workforce and implement virus mitigation strategies. And inflation is sending costs for business needs like fertilizer, diesel and packaging materials soaring.

But Bret Erickson, former president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association and a current executive with Little Bear Produce, a Texas produce grower and distributor, said this latest setback is different.

“There’s nothing you can do about Mother Nature; that’s just part of the farming business,” Erickson said. “But when you’ve got a politician go out and make a decision like Gov. Abbott did, it’s like a slap in the face.”

“Anytime that we are losing a day of business, there’s always a lasting impact,” he added. “Every day that goes by that we haven’t been able to receive these loads, those are sales dollars that we will not get back. Those are dollars that are not going to be returned to our employees’ paychecks, because they didn’t work.”

Seems like that could put a bit of a dent into the Republicans’ much-vaunted strategy to main gains in South Texas. But for that to happen, we’ve got to talk about it, and by “we” I mean Democrats at every level, from the President on down. And more importantly, we’ve got to talk to the people who were on the short end of this stick, to hear their concerns and make sure they know whose fault this was. And not for nothing, but there’s a ton of material for political ads in this. The Chron has another example of people who were directly affected speaking up, in this case some folks who are otherwise aligned with Abbott.

“Governor Abbott is directly responsible for applying these new senseless inspections on our industry as well as the adverse impact they are having on the economy and hardworking Americans, including truckers,” said American Trucking Associations President and CEO Chris Spear. “We ask that the Governor scrap his misguided scheme immediately.”

[…]

When Abbott ordered the inspections earlier this month, he told DPS officials it was because drug cartels “do not care about the condition of the vehicles.” On Friday he said through the inspections DPS has taken hundreds of trucks off the road that could have injured Texans on the roads and highways.

But as the inspections snarled commerce at the border, Abbott was getting increasing blowback from businesses and other Republicans who worried he was blocking legal transportation across the border and not really slowing illegal immigration.

The American Trucking Association said the impact of Abbott’s inspection program was too much for their workers.

“Additional layers of new screening for motor carriers – who are already subject to significant screening and have a strong record of compliance – provides little safety benefit, while the congestion and impact on our already stressed supply chain will cause the price of goods to rise,” Spear said.

The ads write themselves, but someone has to make them and run them. What are we waiting for?

One more thing, in regard to how much safer these dumb inspections supposedly made Texas highways:

.
Thank God @GregAbbott_TX took a few “unsafe trucks” off the road with this stunt because last year he signed a law making it harder to sue if one of them runs you over #txlege

— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 3:51 PM – 15 April 2022

.
Of course not they can’t even look inside the trucks without a warrant. What a waste of everybody’s time and resources.

— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 3:49 PM – 15 April 2022

If we’re not talking about it then nobody is.

Greg Abbott is still a threat to international trade

Apr 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

This is at best window dressing.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott relented Wednesday, agreeing to ease the additional safety inspections of trucks at the busiest border entry point near Laredo in exchange for promises of more border security by Mexican officials along one 8-mile stretch of the border.

The move comes after Abbott endured days of withering criticism from both Democrats and Republicans and faced pushback from shipping companies and the Texas Trucking Association.

Since he implemented the more thorough inspections a week ago, truck traffic at many of the Texas ports of entry have stalled. In Laredo, the nation’s biggest trucking port, the normal 30 minutes or less to get across ballooned to three hours or longer, delaying shipments of everything from produce to electronics and driving up costs for trucking companies.

But Abbott said on Wednesday that the easing of inspections is only happening along the 8-mile stretch of border with Nuevo Leon, which has just a tiny portion of the 1,254-mile border with Texas. Abbott said he’s talking to leaders of other Mexican states to work out similar agreements in return for speeding up inspections in Texas.

“Since Nuevo Leon has increased its security on its side of the border, the Texas Department of Public Safety can return to its previous practice of random searches of vehicles crossing the the bridge from Neuvo Leon,” Abbott said with the Nuevo Leon Gov. Samuel Alejandro García Sepulveda at his side.

[…]

In Mexico, the governor’s order triggered a revolt from truckers who have set up blockades shutting off all U.S. trucks from entering the country at key points in Hidalgo County and in El Paso.

The White House slammed Abbott on Wednesday, saying his actions were resulting in more supply chain disruptions and hindering U.S. Customs checks at the border.

“The continuous flow of legitimate trade and travel and CBP’s ability to do its job should not be obstructed,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in the statement.

Even Abbott’s biggest allies began to turn against his policy over the last few days. The Texas Trucking Association, which just two months ago endorsed his re-election, released a statement criticizing the policy.

“Unfortunately, this new initiative duplicates existing screening efforts and leads to significant congestion, delaying the products Americans rely on from our largest trading partner, Mexico,” TXTA President & CEO John D. Esparza said.

See here and here for the background. The TXTA is welcome to reconsider their endorsement, since it might be occurring to them that Abbott will throw anyone under the bus (or the truck, as it happens) to further his own political fortunes. Can we pause to note that this is a governor engaging in a combination of foreign policy and blatant extortion, neither of which are supposed to be in his job description? What’s scary to me is that it’s not clear what power the federal government has here to make him stop. Our entire system is based on the presumption that everyone in a position of power will more or less follow a basic set of rules and norms and expectations, and if there’s one thing that the last few years have made especially clear, it’s that there’s not a whole lot we can do when bad actors refuse to play along. I’m at a loss here.

TPM summarizes as follows:

The U.S. continues to be wracked by supply chain disruptions and inflation. This move seems designed — and well designed — to exacerbate both. Abbott’s calculation, probably accurate, is that he can create chaos and price spikes to pressure Biden and it’s no skin off his back since Biden will be blamed anyway. It’s all gravy.

Literally, the one thing that can be done is to vote Abbott out in November. That would not only put a stop to these particular shenanigans, it would also send a clear message that there is a price to pay for political vandalism. The problem is that if Abbott wins, and he’s certainly favored to do so right now, the exact opposite message gets sent. It’s one that Republicans have been getting for over a decade now, and it has very much incentivized more and more of this same malevolence. I don’t know what else to say. The Trib, the Current, TPM, and the Trib again have more.

Even Sid Miller thinks Abbott is being an idiot

Apr 13th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I mean…

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller called on Gov. Greg Abbott to halt his recent policy of additional commercial inspections at the border, calling the measure “political theater” and predicting it will leave grocery store shelves empty within weeks.

In an open letter addressed to the governor Tuesday, Miller said Abbott’s “economy killing action” is exacerbating already strained supply chains and causing massive produce shortages resulting in “untold losses” for Texas businesses.

“Your inspection protocol is not stopping illegal immigration,” Miller said in his letter. “It is stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks — many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies. … The people of Texas deserve better!”

Abbott announced last week that state troopers would conduct inspections of northbound commercial vehicles in addition to those performed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at ports of entry between Texas and Mexico.

“Officials with the United States Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protections already conduct extensive inspections of commercial vehicles entering the United States at Texas border crossings. Resources should be placed where illegal crossings take place, not to create a crisis where they do not,” Miller wrote.

See here for the background. Miller himself is of course well acquainted with idiocy, so I don’t want to put too much stock in this. We’re firmly in stopped-clock territory here. But anytime someone says that Texans deserve better when talking about Greg Abbott, well, I’m going to have to agree with them.

Greg Abbott is a threat to international trade

Apr 12th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

We live in such strange times.

Commercial traffic at a key South Texas border crossing has stopped after Mexican truckers on Monday blocked north- and southbound lanes on the Mexico side of the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge in protest of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to have state troopers inspect northbound commercial vehicles — historically a job done by the federal government.

The bridge connecting Pharr and Reynosa is the busiest trade crossing in the Rio Grande Valley and handles the majority of the produce that crosses into the U.S. from Mexico, including avocados, broccoli, peppers, strawberries and tomatoes. On Monday, with trucks backed up for miles in Reynosa for the fifth day in a row, some produce importers in Texas said they have waited days for their goods to arrive and already had buyers cancel orders.

“One of our customers canceled the order because we didn’t deliver on time,” said Modesto Guerra, sales manager for Sterling Fresh Inc., which imports broccoli from Central Mexico via the Pharr bridge before shipping it to the Midwest and East Coast. “It’s something beyond our control.”

While many companies cross perishable foods in refrigerated trucks, Guerra said the bottlenecks could lead to equipment failures that cause produce and other products to spoil in the heat.

“Those refrigerated units are powered by diesel,” Guerra said. “These trucks are in line and when the diesel runs out they have no way of refueling.”

International bridges elsewhere in the Valley, as well as in Eagle Pass, El Paso and Laredo, have also seen delays, with many commercial products produced in Mexico — like electronics, vehicle parts and medical instruments — also held up.

In response to the Biden administration’s recent announcement that it plans to end Title 42 — a pandemic-era emergency health order that lets federal officials turn away migrants at the border without the chance to request asylum — Abbott on Wednesday ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to increase its inspections of commercial vehicles, which he said drug cartels use to smuggle humans and drugs into the United States.

At times, DPS troopers appear to be checking every commercial vehicle that crosses select international bridges, with each inspection taking between 45 minutes and an hour.

Mexican news outlets reported that about 500 truckers are blocking southbound traffic into Mexico to prevent the entrance of U.S. trucks. Truckers told El Mañana in Reynosa that they had waited three to four days at the international bridge and were running out of fuel while they waited.

One trucker told the news outlet that prior to Abbott’s order, he made two crossings into the U.S. a day. Now, he’d be lucky to have one or two a week given the long delays at the bridges.

“We are losing just as much as them,” he said. “When they start needing more produce, the prices are going to go up.

“No one has told us what the reason for this is or asked what solutions we can come up with together,” he added, saying the blockade will continue until their issues are resolved. “All we know is that it’s an order from the governor of Texas.”

Time to make sure everyone is aware of that. Not just in Texas, but every Democrat around the country needs to pile on this, because it’s going to affect us all. And just out of curiosity, what are those Canadian truckers up to these days? Maybe they could drive down and surround the Governor’s mansion for a few days if they don’t have anything better to do.

Voting Rights Groups Sue Texas for Failure to Disclose Records Related to Voter Purges

Feb 3rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

From the inbox:

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Texas, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and DĒMOS filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to order Texas’ Secretary of State to produce records responsive to their previous requests seeking information about a state program that threatens to remove naturalized citizens from the voter rolls.

On August 20, 2021, the Office of the Attorney General of Texas sent a letter today stating that Secretary John Scott’s office had initiated a process to identify alleged non-U.S. citizens on the voter rolls and send the identified registrants’ information to county election administrators to either verify their citizenship status or cancel their voter registration. Scott’s office has identified thousands of registrants for potential removal under this program. Soon after the program was initiated, local registrars quickly identified many of these individuals as naturalized citizens whose registration should not be in doubt. Recent reporting suggests that the Secretary’s program sweeps too broadly and endangers the registrations of thousands of eligible citizens.

In August and October 2021, CLC, ACLU of Texas, MALDEF, Lawyers’ Committee and DĒMOS submitted records requests to Secretary Scott for records related to the new voter purge program and the data the Secretary of State relied on to determine each voter’s citizenship status. Under the National Voter Registration Act, the Secretary of State is required to keep this data and disclose it upon request. However, Texas has so far failed to produce any records.

“The right to vote is what makes this country a free one and naturalized citizens in Texas, and every U.S. state, should not have to worry about being purged from the voting rolls. We all deserve the chance to cast our ballots freely, safely and equally,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president at Campaign Legal Center. “Sadly, it is clear that the court now needs to step in and protect that freedom by compelling the state to produce the records for this program—thereby making our elections safe, accessible and transparent.”

“Texas can’t shirk its obligations under federal law to release information about its new voter purge program,” said Ashley Harris, attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “The public deserves to know why Texas continues to falsely flag U.S. citizens for removal from the voter rolls.”

“The Secretary of State’s voter purge program once again surgically targets naturalized U.S. citizens for investigation and removal from the voter rolls,” stated Nina Perales, MALDEF Vice President of Litigation. “Naturalized U.S. citizens have the same right to vote as all other citizens, and this new lawsuit seeks to ensure that Texas treats its voters fairly.”

“It seems that Texas is incapable – or worse, unwilling – to learn from the past. Racial and ethnic discrimination in voting has been a sad part of Texas’s history continuing in the present. And discriminating against naturalized citizens falls into this unfortunate pattern,” commented Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We need to shed light on precisely how Texas is identifying voters it wants to purge from the rolls in order to ensure that the precious right to vote is not snatched from eligible voters, whose only ‘crime’ is that they are naturalized and not native-born citizens.”

“This effort to block Black and brown Texans’ access to the ballot is part of a larger, nationwide effort to dismantle the fundamentals of our democracy. Naturalized citizens who are registered to vote have every right to have their voices heard in every election,” said Brenda Wright, Senior Advisor for Legal Strategies at Demos. “The state owes the people of Texas transparency regarding its voter purge practices to ensure fairness and confidence in the democratic process.”

In 2019, CLC, ACLU Texas, MALDEF, Lawyers’ Committee, and DĒMOS all represented clients suing Texas’ former Secretary of State for inaccurately flagging tens of thousands of naturalized U.S. citizen registered voters as non-U.S. citizens. After a district court found the program likely unlawful, Texas entered into a settlement agreement to reform its flawed voter purge program. But the reintroduction of this program has been riddled with reported errors. While the state claims to be applying the procedures outlined in that settlement agreement, Secretary Scott’s refusal to turn over basic information has made this difficult to verify.

Early indicators show that the state may not be following the procedure outlined, leading voters to be inaccurately flagged as non-U.S. citizens. According to public statements from the Texas Secretary of State’s office, 2,327 of the over 11,000 registered voters flagged as being potential non-U.S. citizens have had their voter registrations canceled. Yet, the state has only confirmed that 278—approximately 2%—of the voters flagged are non-U.S. citizens.

The court must ensure that the state produces lists of every registered voter identified under its new voter deletion program as a potential non-U.S. citizen and the data the Secretary of State relied on to flag individuals as potential non-U.S. citizens. This will enable good government and civil rights groups to continue to protect Texans’ freedom to vote, ensure that their voices are heard and guarantee that the state’s elections are safe and accessible for all.

A copy of the complaint is available here: https://www.aclutx.org/sites/default/files/tx_nvra_complaint_.pdf

See here and here for the most recent chapters in this long story. Raise your hand if you’re even a little bit surprised that the state of Texas has been less than forthcoming with its data. It’s annoying as hell that all this work needs to be done for this very basic function of our government, and I’m grateful to the groups that are doing it. The Dallas Observer has more.

How’s that online voter registration thing going?

Dec 28th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Pretty well, it seems. So well, perhaps, that the state of Texas doesn’t want to tell you how well.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Since a federal judge forced Texas nearly a year and a half ago to offer limited online voter registration, 1.5 million Texans have used the option, according to new state data.

The August 2020 ruling, which found Texas in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, required state officials to give residents the opportunity to register when they renew their driver’s license online. The system was in place a month later.

Advocates say the new data speaks to the success of online registration — and is evidence that Texas, one of just a few states that does not offer an online option for every registrant, should implement the program statewide. Republican leaders in state government have resisted such change, instead pursuing new voting restrictions in the name of election security.

“The very best thing you can do is have systems where the government is seamlessly integrating voter registration into other processes,” said Mimi Marziani, the president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which represented the plaintiffs in the case that spurred the creation of the online system.

[…]

“Getting registered to vote is not something that many people necessarily remember,” said Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project. “And in the process of moving, it’s very likely that this would not be on the top of their list of things to address, like changing their electricity, gas providers and forwarding all their mail.”

Without more granular data on first-time voter registrations filed online, it’s difficult to determine whether the option has had a significant impact on Texas’ overall registration numbers, Blank added. More than 17 million people are registered to vote in Texas.

Still, it’s doubtful that GOP leaders would embrace an expansion of online registration in Texas, which has some of the nation’s strictest voting laws. Republicans have long declined to allow any online voter registration, saying it would lead to an increase in election fraud — even as 63 percent of Texas voters would support such a system, according to an October 2020 poll by the Texas Politics Project.

The availability of online registration “flies in the face” of Texas’ current approach to voting policies, Blank said. The GOP-led Legislature spent months earlier this year campaigning for a sweeping elections bill that, in part, restricted voting hours in some parts of the state, prohibited drive-thru and overnight voting, and introduced new ID requirements for mail-in ballot applications.

“Texas has been at the forefront recently of enacting strict voting laws, and, in truth, has been at the forefront of enacting strict voting laws for much of the last decade,” Blank said. “Even in an area like this, where I think a majority of voters … say that we should expand online voter registration, it’s unlikely that you’d see something like this move in Texas.”

But advocates say they’ll continue to push for a extensive online registration system — and, if possible, automatic voter registration. Both changes would not only facilitate access to the ballot box, but also address longstanding racial inequities in Texas’ voter rolls, said Marziani of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

See here and here for some background. As the story notes, the state would not break down the data by new voters versus existing voters who are updating their address. My guess is that it’s overwhelmingly the latter, but that’s also a big deal because it keeps those folks from getting caught in the various voter purges that the state and some counties engage in. There is of course no justification for not allowing people to handle voter registration matters online – any legal security measure can be done just as readily – it’s just that the Republicans who are in control don’t want it. Here, for once, they had no choice. Now imagine what it would be like if we had a more robust federal voting rights law to force them on some other matters.

The botched “non-citizen” voter purge continues

Dec 21st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

At some point we need to recognize the fact that our Secretary of State’s office is completely, and maybe maliciously, inept at doing this.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas’ last attempt to scour its voting rolls for noncitizens two years ago quickly devolved into a calamity.

The state flagged nearly 100,000 voters for citizenship checks and set them up for possible criminal investigation based on flawed data that didn’t account for immigrants who gained citizenship. After it became clear it was jeopardizing legitimate voter registrations, it was pulled into three federal lawsuits challenging its process. Former Secretary of State David Whitley lost his job amid the fallout. And the court battle ultimately forced the state to abandon the effort and rethink its approach to ensure naturalized citizens weren’t targeted.

This fall, the state began rolling out a new, scaled-down approach. But again, the county officials responsible for carrying it out are encountering what appear to be faults in the system.

Scores of citizens are still being marked for review — and possible removal from the rolls. Registrars in some of the state’s largest counties have found that a sizable number of voters labeled possible noncitizens actually filled out their voter registration cards at their naturalization ceremonies. In at least a few cases, the state flagged voters who were born in the U.S.

The secretary of state’s office says it is following the settlement agreement it entered in 2019 — an arrangement that limited its screening of voters to those who registered to vote and later indicated to the Texas Department of Public Safety that they are not citizens. Flagged voters can provide documentation of their citizenship in order to keep their registrations, officials have pointed out.

But the issues tied to the new effort are significant enough that they’ve renewed worries among the civil rights groups that forced the state to change its practices. They are questioning Texas’ compliance with the legal settlement that halted the last review. And for some attorneys, the persisting problems underscore their concerns that the state is needlessly putting the registrations of eligible voters at risk.

“We’re trying to get a grasp of the scale, but obviously there’s still a problem, which I think we always said would be the case,” said Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, which was involved in the 2019 litigation. “It’s definitely something we were concerned would happen if they tried to restart this process.”

[…]

Texas’ voter citizenship review has persisted through the tenure of multiple secretaries of state and has been backed by state Republican leaders who have touted the broader review effort as a way to ensure the integrity of the voter rolls, though there is no evidence that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote.

The current iteration was formally initiated in early September before the appointment of the state’s new secretary of state, John Scott, who helped former President Donald Trump challenge the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania.

That’s when the state sent counties 11,737 records of registered voters who were deemed “possible non-U.S. citizens.” It was a much smaller list than the one it produced in 2019, when it did not account for people who became naturalized citizens in between renewing driver’s licenses or ID cards they initially obtained as noncitizens.

But when Bexar County received its list of 641 flagged voters, county workers quickly determined that 109 of them — 17% of the total — had actually registered at naturalization ceremonies. The county is able to track the origin of those applications because of an internal labeling system it made up years ago when staff began attending the ceremonies, said Jacque Callanen, the county’s administrator.

Election officials in Travis County said they were similarly able to identify that applications for 60 voters on the county’s list of 408 flagged voters — roughly 15% of the total — had been filled out at naturalization ceremonies.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, another group that sued the state in 2019, is still assessing the extent to which the state’s new attempt to review the rolls may be defective. But those figures alone should give everyone pause, ACLU staff attorney Thomas Buser-Clancy said after The Texas Tribune provided him those tallies.

“What we do know is that every time the secretary of state tries to do something like this it fails and that these efforts, which inevitably ensnare eligible voters, should not be happening,” Buser-Clancy said.

In an advisory announcing the revised process, the secretary of state’s office told counties that they should first attempt to “investigate” a voter’s eligibility. If they are unable to verify citizenship, the county must then send out “notices of examination” that start a 30-day clock for the voter to submit proof of citizenship to retain their registration. Voters who don’t respond with proof within 30 days are removed from the rolls — though they can be reinstated if they later prove their citizenship, including at a polling place.

Beyond the figures from Bexar and Travis counties, local election officials in other counties, including Cameron and Williamson, confirmed they’ve heard back from flagged voters who are naturalized citizens. After mailing 2,796 notices, officials in Harris County said 167 voters had provided them with documentation proving their citizenship. In Fort Bend, officials received proof of citizenship from at least 87 voters on their list of 515 “possible noncitizens.” Last week, Texas Monthly reported on two cases of citizens in Cameron County who were flagged as possible noncitizens.

See here, here, and here for not nearly enough background on this. The simple fact is that if the SOS process is generating such high error rates, especially for things that should be easily checked and thus avoided, the process itself is clearly and fatally flawed. Some of this is because, as anyone who works with databases can tell you, data is hard and messy and it’s easy to make mistakes when trying to figure out if two different text values are actually the same thing. And some of it is clearly because the SOS and the Republicans pushing this don’t care at all if there’s some collateral damage. That’s a feature and not a bug to them. If it’s not time to go back to the courts and get another stick to whack them with, it will be soon. Reform Austin has more.

A kinder, gentler voter purge

Sep 19th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

How nice.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Two years after Texas officials fumbled an effort to double-check the voting rolls on a hunt for non-citizens — and instead threatened the voting rights of nearly 60,000 eligible Texans — similar efforts to purge non-citizen voters are now the law of the land, thanks to provisions tucked into the massive elections bill enacted earlier this month.

The Secretary of State will once again be allowed to regularly compare driver’s license records to voter registration lists in a quest to find people who are not eligible.

But while Republicans are determined to make another run at the controversial purge that alarmed civil rights groups two years ago, they insist they’ve made key changes to prevent a repeat of the same mistakes.

“They blew it last time,” acknowledged Republican State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston.

So much so, then-Secretary of State David Whitley resigned his position in the aftermath and triggered a public apology from his office. Civil rights groups also sued his office and blocked the state from continuing the purge at the time.

Starting by December of this year, the Secretary of State will review Department of Public Safety records every month looking for potential non-citizens. But this time lawmakers have put in a provision that intentionally bars the Secretary of State from going too far back in time as it scours drivers’ license records, something that led to some of the problems in 2019.

In some instances, the state flagged legal voters who had become naturalized citizens since the time they first applied for a driver’s license a decade or more earlier. Non-citizens, including those with visas or green cards to stay in the U.S., are able to get Texas driver’s licenses. The state’s 2019 analysis flagged those drivers, but it never accounted for the fact that about 50,000 Texans become naturalized citizens each year.

The result was many legitimate voters receiving letters warning they were at risk of being knocked off the voter rolls and facing potential legal action because of faulty data.

By hastening to send out the written warnings, civil rights groups said the state caused a lot of fear and confusion, particularly for naturalized citizens.

“Definitely this is substantially better than what they were doing before,” said Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

But Gonzalez said he’s still worried about the reliability of Department of Public Safety drivers’ license databases and the inherent pitfalls of trying to compare millions of records against millions of other records. He said there is just too much room for error.

“There are still concerns that they will be falsely flagging people,” he said.

There’s too much to even sum up, so just go here for all things David Whitley. The provision the Democrats fought for should limit the damage, and for that we can be thankful. But there’s still no reason to trust anything the state is likely to want to do to “clean up” the voter rolls. They have not earned any benefit of the doubt. I will be delighted to be pleasantly surprised by this, but we very much need to keep a close eye on the process, because again, the state cannot be trusted.

Abbott’s migrant roundup order still blocked

Aug 16th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Good.

A federal judge in El Paso on Friday extended her order blocking Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive to state troopers to pull over drivers transporting migrants “who pose a risk of carrying COVID-19.”

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone lengthened her restraining order by another two weeks after a hearing Friday, according to a court filing. Her original order on Aug. 3 was set to expire Friday.

In July, Abbott ordered state troopers to pull over civilian drivers giving rides to recent immigrants who may be infected with the virus and redirect the drivers to their origin point. If the driver didn’t comply, the troopers should seize their vehicles, the order said.

Soon after, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Texas and Abbott, describing the governor’s executive order as “dangerous and unlawful.”

In the lawsuit, the DOJ said Abbott’s order would disrupt federal immigration officials’ network of contractors and nongovernmental organizations that help host recently arrived migrants while their legal cases are pending.

See here and here for background on the suit filed by the Justice Department. There’s also now another lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of several groups; as far as I know there has not yet been a hearing for that. In keeping with my earlier posts, I don’t know how this is likely to play out, but as a rule any time Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton lose in court, it’s probably a good thing.

Alvarado’s filibuster ends

Aug 13th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

It was a strong effort, and she deserves credit for it.

Sen. Carol Alvarado

After 15 hours of speaking nearly nonstop against the GOP’s priority elections bill, State Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, concluded her filibuster on Thursday morning.

“Voter suppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere,” Alvarado said in her closing remarks, as fellow Democrats surrounded her to show their support.

Yet, as expected, after Alvarado got some hugs and took a seat to rest her feet, the Senate voted 18-11 along party lines to advance the bill and send it to the House, where it will be stalled by a Democratic walkout that has lasted a month.

While Alvarado’s filibuster could not — and did not — kill the bill, it exemplifies the at-all-costs attitude the Democrats are bringing to their opposition to it. Alvarado acknowledged that the tactic was a temporary measure in an interview with the Texas Tribune.

“I’m using what I have at my disposal in the Senate,” Alvarado told the outlet. “The filibuster isn’t going to stop it, but a filibuster is also used to put the brakes on an issue — to call attention to what is at stake — and that is what I am doing.”

See here for the background. The point here isn’t about winning – Dems know they’re outnumbered and cannot hold off any of these bills if they come to the floor. The point is about fighting, and showing your voters that you’re fighting. Midterms are about turnout, and you can’t win if your voters aren’t engaged. It’s the same principle as with the quorum-busting, though that also had other purposes, such as directly lobbying Congress and focusing national attention on the issue. You do what you can so that in the end you can say you did all you could. Sen. Alvarado did all she could.

As for the quorum-busters, they’re back on the lam.

The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday overruled a Houston judge who had provided Texas House Democrats with the legal shelter they requested to avoid civil arrest for absconding from the state Capitol.

After Houston Rep. Gene Wu successfully challenged his warrant in Harris County state district court on Wednesday, 44 additional Democrats had followed in his footsteps, hoping for the same outcome.

The stay from the state’s highest civil court came swiftly, potentially scrambling the plans of those Democrats and others who’d made plans to return home.

A dwindling number of House members remain in Washington, D.C., where they have spent a month rallying for federal voting rights legislation that would supersede existing Texas elections laws as well as bills that Republicans are pushing in Austin. The Democrats have until Monday to respond in court.

“Despite the high court’s ruling, Texas House Democrats remain committed to fighting back with everything we have to protect Texans from Republicans’ repeated attacks on our freedom to vote,” Wu said in a statement on behalf of the caucus. “Instead of trying to calm the situation and find ways to peacefully resolve the situation, Texas Republicans continue to add more fuel to this fire. We will not be deterred. If anything, this action continues to solidify our resolve to stand up for Texans.”

In his motion to the high court, the state’s Solicitor General Judd E. Stone had warned that Wu’s court order could have a domino effect.

“Without this court’s intervention, every truant member of the House will follow the lead of Representative Wu, file habeas petitions in trial courts throughout the state, disrupt the ability of the Legislature to obtain a quorum, and undercut this court’s ability to achieve an orderly and efficient resolution of identical issues presented,” Stone wrote.

[…]

Several Houston-area representatives, including Reps. Senfronia Thompson and Hubert Vo, were pre-emptively released from potential custody on Thursday as a result of the newest writs, attorney Romy Kaplan said.

Three hearings tomorrow concern non-Houston-area representatives, who will be appearing via Zoom to put themselves in Harris County’s jurisdiction, Kaplan said.

A hearing is also scheduled for next Thursday in district Judge Chris Morton’s court. He said his approval of Wu’s writ on Wednesday was conditional, and he will further explore his jurisdiction over the case and over the House of Representatives’ sergeant-at-arms in Austin.

See the same link for the background; I’m trying to conserve resources by combining some of these stories into single posts. The Trib adds some details.

Texas law enforcement was deputized Thursday to track down Texas House Democrats still missing from the chamber and bring them to the state Capitol in Austin, a process that Speaker Dade Phelan’s office said “will begin in earnest immediately.”

The news came as the Texas Supreme Court cleared the way for their civil arrests after it temporarily blocked Harris County judges’ orders protecting 45 Democrats from such a move.

Law enforcement was tapped “to assist in the House’s efforts to compel a quorum,” Phelan spokesperson Enrique Marquez said in an emailed statement. Earlier this week, Phelan, a Beaumont Republican, signed warrants for those missing lawmakers, many of whom have refused to return to the chamber for weeks to block a GOP elections bill. Their absence has prevented the chamber from having a quorum, the number of present lawmakers needed to move legislation.

If lawmakers are arrested, they will not face criminal charges or fines and could only be brought to the House chamber.

[…]

After Wu was granted his request for temporary protection Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made clear he would fight that order in a similar manner to how the state fought a previous temporary restraining order by a state district judge in Travis County that also sought to block the arrest of the quorum-breaking Democrats.

In that case, the Supreme Court voided the order temporarily on Tuesday, though Democrats have said they plan to push forward in their request for a temporary injunction on Aug. 20. If granted, that injunction could again grant them protection from arrest.

I mean, the real question at this point is what exactly happens when a law enforcement officer finds a wayward lawmaker? Are they going to slap cuffs on them, throw them in a car and drive them to Austin? Call Speaker Phelan and tell him to, I don’t know, send an Uber? This may wind up being a lot of commotion over nothing, because I just can’t quite see how any of this brings a currently absent member to the House floor. Maybe we’ll find out – I hope we don’t, but we are in completely uncharted waters. I just have no idea what to expect.

In the meantime, as the Senate passed SB1, the House prepped HB3 to bring to the floor, with no public hearings because why would they want to do that. We know what will happen if there is a quorum again. Until then, I have no freaking idea.

Another lawsuit filed against Abbott’s migrant transport order

Aug 7th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Bring them on.

Immigrant rights groups backed by the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against Texas Governor Greg Abbott over his executive order restricting the transportation of migrants, claiming it goes against federal law and amounts to racial profiling at the southern border.

The legal challenge was brought by the nonprofit Annunciation House, a migrant shelter provider in El Paso, along with immigrant advocacy groups Angry Tias & Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley and FIEL Houston,. They are represented by attorneys with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and the ACLU of Texas.

This lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in El Paso federal court, comes six days after the U.S. Department of Justice sued Abbott to block the order. On Tuesday, a federal judge in that case issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the order until a hearing on an injunction can be held.

Echoing the DOJ’s claims, the ACLU and immigration groups allege that the order violates the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution by attempting to regulate the movement of migrants, which is for the federal government to decide. They also say the order unlawfully attempts to regulate the federal government.

[…]

In Wednesday’s lawsuit, the ACLU argues the order will directly impact people who have been released from the federal government’s custody into the country to await their immigration hearing. Those people will be unable to get any form of transportation after being released from CBP custody, according to the complaint, which points out that state law enforcement officials would be taking migrants back to CBP after the agency released them.

The groups also claim the order allows Texas police to racially profile travelers along the border region.

“It directs state officers to make their own determinations about passengers’ immigration status, wholly independent of the federal government, and to impose harsh penalties based on those unilateral immigration decisions,” the lawsuit states. “It opens the door to profiling, standardless detention, questioning, vehicle seizure, rerouting, and heavy fines. The executive order is already having a profound chilling effect on people’s movement in border communities and throughout the state.”

In addition, the immigrant advocacy organizations say they will be directly affected by the order if it is allowed to be enforced. Annunciation House transports migrants who have been released from federal immigration custody to its facility, which houses migrants in the El Paso area. Angry Tias funds numerous services for migrants, including a taxi service that is kept on retainer. Both groups say they would be unable to provide such services under the governor’s order, would face having their vehicles impounded and would be left with no way of assisting migrants.

See here and here for background on the suit filed by the Justice Department. As before, I don’t really know enough to say much of value – I’m not fully clear on the differences in the claims made by the two groups of plaintiffs. It may be that this suit winds up getting combined with the other one, as often happens. Whatever the case, I’m rooting for the plaintiffs. The Texas Signal and Daily Kos have more.

Judge halts Abbott’s “pull over migrants” executive order

Aug 5th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

For now, anyway.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Gov. Greg Abbott and the state of Texas from ordering state troopers to pull over drivers transporting migrants “who pose a risk of carrying COVID-19.”

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a temporary restraining order against Abbott’s move, meaning it will be blocked while the case continues to unfold. The U.S. Justice Department sued Abbott and Texas on Friday, a day after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to take legal action if Abbott didn’t rescind his order, calling it “dangerous and unlawful.”

In a statement later Tuesday, Abbott’s press secretary said the state looks forward to presenting evidence that supports his order.

“The Court’s recent order is temporary and based on limited evidence,” Press Secretary Renae Eze said in the statement.

Cardone still must decide whether Texas’ move is constitutional, and her temporary restraining order is set to last until the court’s next hearing on Aug. 13. Abbott has defended his order as necessary to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Texas, while advocates for migrants say it would disrupt federal immigration efforts and invite troopers to racially profile people.

See here for the background, and here for a copy of the restraining order. This is all pretty technical and I don’t have the knowledge to say anything cogent, so I will give you a bunch of links at the end of the story for more reading, and we’ll go from there. This tweet made me think about what may come next:

.
The lawyers can correct me, but 212(f) authority is pretty damn broad compared to what states can do within the legal framework of the immigration system, especially in the wake of Arizona v. United States. So Abbott can try to evade these decisions without the same wiggle room.

— Cris Ramón (@CramonMigration) 6:05 PM – 3 August 2021

It certainly won’t surprise me if Abbott takes another crack at this if he loses. He has every incentive to push at this until he can claim a victory of some kind. Buzzfeed, the Chron, Daily Kos, and TPM have more.

Final settlement in Motor Voter 2.0 lawsuit

Aug 4th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

From Democracy Docket:

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Last Friday, individual Texan voters, the Texas Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) settled a five-year long lawsuit with Texas over its noncompliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The settlement outlines the state’s plans to permanently offer simultaneous voter registration when an eligible voter renews or updates his or her driver’s licenses or ID cards online — an option not offered before this litigation.

The lawsuit, filed in March 2016 by the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of individual Texas voters, challenged the state’s misleading practice of providing the option to register to vote when completing online transactions with the transportation agency. Notably, checking this option did not actually register someone to vote, which violated the NVRA’s requirement that states offer voter registration or the ability to update registrations when an eligible voter obtains, renews or updates his or her driver’s license. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found that this practice violated the NVRA and 14th Amendment and struck the law down, but after the voters updated their registration, the court found that they no longer had standing to sue. The Texas Democratic Party, DSCC and DCCC successfully intervened in the case to expand this victory. The court ordered the state to comply with the NVRA in August 2020 and since then, over one million Texans have registered to vote while completing an online driver’s license transaction. The settlement makes the court-ordered compliance permanent throughout the state.

Read the key filings from the case here.

See here and here for some background; there are more links at that second post. This KUT story, referenced above, came out a day or so before the final settlement agreement.

After a lengthy court battle, the Texas Department of Safety has started allowing voters to update their voter information at the same time they update their driver’s license information online.

The Texas Civil Rights Project filed a federal lawsuit against the state on behalf of three voters in Texas who thought they had updated their addresses on their voter registration through the DPS website. They later found out that never happened because online voter registration is illegal in Texas.

The plaintiffs in the case were Jarrod Stringer, Nayeli Gomez and John Harms, as well as two organizations, MOVE Texas and the League of Women Voters of Texas.

The lawsuit claimed Texas was violating the National Voter Registration Act — which includes federal motor voter laws — and the U.S. Constitution. The Texas Civil Rights Project first sued the state five years ago, but the lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality. The group sued again shortly after.

A federal judge sided with the Texas Civil Rights Project and ordered the state to change its practices last year, forcing Texas to “create the first-ever opportunity for some Texans to register to vote online” starting in September, the group said in a press release.

Mimi Marziani, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told KUT that DPS data shows that about a million voter registration transactions have occurred in the past ten months.

“That means that’s an average of a 100,000 Texans per month are now registering to vote — or updating their voter registration — with their online drivers’ transaction,” she said. “That’s a lot of people.”

Here’s a Twitter thread from the TCRP that breaks this down by month since last November. Note the qualification “or updating their voter registration”. That means that anyone who updated their drivers license information – name change, address change, etc – are counted in this total, as they were then able to update their voter registration information at the same time. That’s a big deal and a much-needed bit of convenience for Texans who now don’t have to do that same transaction twice, but it is not one million new voters registered. I don’t want to downplay this because it is a big deal, but I also don’t want to overstate it.

Marziani told KUT that this should prompt the state to expand online voter registration to all eligible Texans, not just those updating their drivers’ license information. Currently, 42 states and D.C. have online voter registration. Texas is among the small minority of states that doesn’t.

Marziani said Texas now has “absolutely no practical reason” not to expand and implement full online voter legislation.

“Now with the state implementing this online voter registration with driver’s license transactions, the state completely has the backend infrastructure to roll out online voter registration,” she said.

Absolutely, and it remains a disgrace that Texas doesn’t have online voter registration. But we all know why, and we know what is going to be needed to make it happen. This is a step in the right direction, but the rest of the way is up to us winning more elections.

Justice Department sues over Abbott’s anti-migrant executive order

Jul 31st, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

Good.

The Biden administration sued Texas on Friday, asking a federal judge to block Gov. Greg Abbott’s order that state troopers pull over drivers transporting migrants who pose a risk of carrying COVID-19 as a way to prevent the spread of the virus.

The lawsuit comes a day after the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a letter to the governor, threatened to take legal action against Texas if Abbott didn’t rescind his order. Garland described the order as “dangerous and unlawful.”

The Department of Justice said in the lawsuit that Abbott’s order will contribute to the spread of COVID-19 and it will disrupt immigration officials’ network of contractors and non government organizations that help host recently arrived migrants as their legal cases are pending.

“In our constitutional system, a State has no right to regulate the federal government’s operations,” the DOJ argued in a motion asking the judge to block Abbott’s order, adding “this restriction on the transportation of noncitizens would severely disrupt federal immigration operations.”

[…]

The lawsuit says that if migrants are not allowed to be transported by volunteers or contractors they would have to be confined to immigration facilities where there would not be enough space for every migrant.

I’d not blogged about this before, so here’s the background for you:

Gov. Greg Abbott draws criticism for ordering state troopers to pull over vehicles with migrants, saying it will stem COVID-19 risk
U.S. attorney general blasts Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest border directive and threatens a legal battle
‘Dangerous and unlawful.’ AG Merrick Garland threatens to sue over Gov. Abbott’s latest border order

Yes, the same Governor who has banned mask mandates and vaccine mandates for local government employees somehow thinks this will have a positive effect on COVID, even though 90% of migrants are vaccinated, nearly double the rate of the Texas population as a whole. For more on the lawsuit, which is an emergency motion seeking an injunction or temporary restraining order, see here. For a copy of the lawsuit itself, see here. For an analysis of why the Abbott executive order is “*flagrantly* illegal and unconstitutional”, see here. For more in general, see Dos Centavos and the Chron.

Here are your new SB7s

Jul 9th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

We start with the House.

The Texas House is starting off on a new foot on the contentious elections proposal that blew up the regular legislative session.

As a special session reviving the Republican-priority bill got underway Thursday, there were ample signs that the lower chamber was taking a fresh approach to the legislation, at least procedurally. The bill has a new author who is moving early to get colleagues’ input, and it is going through a new committee that House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, says he created to bring more diverse perspectives to the issue.

[…]

The House’s revised approach to the voting legislation is in contrast to the Senate. In that chamber, Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Mineola Republican, is again carrying the omnibus election proposal, which for a second time will be considered before the upper chamber’s State Affairs Committee, which Hughes chairs. The committee is set to consider the legislation Saturday.

One of the starkest changes to the elections bill in the House for the special session was its author. Rep. Briscoe Cain, the Deer Park Republican who chairs the House Elections Committee, carried the bill in the regular session, but Phelan tapped Rep. Andrew Murr, R-Junction, to take the lead on it during the special session. Murr currently chairs the House Corrections Committee.

On Wednesday, Murr sent a letter to House colleagues announcing he had filed House Bill 3 and was soliciting their feedback.

“Because this subject is important to all Members and their constituents, and given the compressed time frame of the special session, I welcome any questions, discussions or comments you may have,” Murr wrote, inviting members to call him or come by his office.

[…]

Phelan did not put Cain on the new panel, nor did he tap Rep. Jessica González, a Dallas Democrat who serves as vice chair of the Elections Committee. But he did tap Rep. Travis Clardy, R-Nacogdoches, a member of the Elections Committee who had helped Cain with the elections bill during the regular session.

On Thursday, the main elections bill for the special session — HB 3 — as well as other voting-related proposals were referred to the select committee instead of the Elections Committee. The election bill was set for a hearing set to start 8 a.m. Saturday.

During Democrats’ news conference Thursday, Rep. Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat who chairs his party’s caucus, said that the legislation, despite any changes that may be made to it, “is inherently flawed.”

“The bottom line on HB 3 is, just like SB 7, it’s based on a lie,” Turner told reporters. “It’s based on a lie that there’s rampant problems in our elections and the big lie that Donald Trump actually won the last election.”

As noted, the Senate will also have a hearing on Saturday. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

This story covers the differences between the House and Senate bills, and how the differ from what had been done in the regular session. It’s nice that some of the more egregious things like the restriction on Sunday early voting hours and the lessening of legal standards to challenge an election were removed, but there are still some truly bad things in these bills, and they’re not getting enough attention. For example:

SB 1 strays from the House’s legislation by setting up monthly reviews of the state’s voter rolls to identify noncitizens — harkening back to the state’s botched 2019 voter rolls review. The bill would require the Texas secretary of state’s office to compare the massive statewide voter registration list with data from the Department of Public Safety to pinpoint individuals who told the department they were not citizens when they obtained or renewed their driver’s license or ID card.

That sort of review landed the state in federal court over concerns it targeted naturalized citizens who were classified as “possible non-U.S citizens” and set up to review notices from their local voter registrar demanding they prove their citizenship that their registrations are safe.

State election officials ultimately ended that effort as part of an agreement to settle three legal challenges and agreed to rework their methodology to only flag voters who provided DPS with documentation showing they were not citizens after they were registered to vote. But they do not appear to have ever taken up the effort after that debacle.

While the Senate bill does not reference that agreement, it indicates that the secretary of state’s office would be responsible for setting up rules to implement the review.

I guarantee you, the implementation of this will be a disaster. This provision is heavy-handed, the mandated frequency will make it error prone, and the end result will be many people thrown off the rolls incorrectly. I don’t care how the Secretary of State sets up the rules, there is no reason to trust this process.

Both bills include language to strengthen the autonomy of partisan poll watchers at polling places by granting them “free movement” within a polling place, except for being present at a voting station when a voter is filling out their ballot. Both chambers also want to make it a criminal offense to obstruct their view or distance the watcher “in a manner that would make observation not reasonably effective.”

Currently, poll watchers are entitled to sit or stand “conveniently near” election workers, and it is a criminal offense to prevent them from observing.

What this will lead to is some Republican knucklehead uploading a video of something he will claim is “proof” of “voter fraud”, when it will be nothing of the sort. But because he will have been there, at the scene, acting in an “official” capacity, people will believe him. Nothing good can come of this. We need more protection from partisan poll watchers, not protections for them.

Anyway. Watch the hearing if you can, register to leave written feedback if you can, and then work like hell to boot the people pushing this crap out of office in 2022. It’s all we can do.

ACLU warns counties to stay away from the Abbott wall

Jun 28th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

From the inbox:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas sent letters today to 34 counties informing top officials that implementing Gov. Greg Abbott’s unlawful plan to engage in immigration enforcement would violate the U.S. Constitution.

The letters, sent to the counties targeted by Abbott, advise against local law enforcement participation in Abbott’s unilateral efforts to set federal immigration policy, arrest and detain immigrants, and deter people from seeking protection in the United States. Noncitizens in the U.S. have the legal right to seek asylum and other protections. Arresting and detaining immigrants due to their immigration status or as a result of enforcing or altering federal immigration law is unconstitutional.

“Gov. Abbott cannot seek to enforce his own version of immigration policy,” said Kate Huddleston, attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “County officials will be in violation of the law if they enforce the governor’s plan. The federal government, not states or local governments, sets immigration policy and enforces immigration law. Yet again, the governor is targeting immigrants and inciting fear and xenophobia in our state. These moves are a cruel distraction from the real problems facing the state, such as fixing the failing state electrical grid.”

The letters also request under the Texas Public Information Act information about guidance that local officials have received from the state, as well as local cooperation with state efforts to arrest immigrants to date, including any arrests or prosecutions by their locality.

In addition, the letters advise localities to train local law enforcement officers to ensure they do not violate the Constitution or federal law when interacting with immigrants. The ACLU of Texas is asking agencies to adopt policies that comply with constitutional policing and limitations on immigration enforcement, including training officers to refrain from making stops based on perceived immigration status, race, ethnicity, or language.

The 34 counties that received the letter are: Brewster, Brooks, Cameron, Crockett, Culberson, Dimmit, Duval, Edwards, El Paso, Goliad, Gonzales, Hidalgo, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Jim Hogg, Kenedy, Kinney, La Salle, Lavaca, Maverick, McMullen, Pecos, Presidio, Real, Reeves, Starr, Sutton, Terrell, Uvalde, Val Verde, Webb, Willacy, Zapata, and Zavala.

See here and here for the background. A copy of the letter is here. It seems clear that this is a precursor to a lawsuit, serving both as a warning to the counties that if they follow along with Abbott’s folly they will be named in the suit as well, plus an early effort to gather evidence. The Public Information Act request in this letter specifically asks for the following:

1. Any and all records regarding the May 31, 2021 disaster declaration and its implementation;

2. Any and all records regarding Operation Lone Star and its implementation;

3. Any and all records regarding your locality’s participation in or cooperation with Texas Department of Public Safety officials engaged in Operation Lone Star or any other immigration enforcement efforts; and

4. Any and all records regarding arrests and/or prosecutions pursuant to Operation Lone Star, the May 31 disaster declaration, or for immigration-related enforcement purposes by your locality from March 6, 2021, to the present, including but not limited to arrests and prosecutions for criminal trespass, smuggling, or human trafficking.

We’re unlikely to get any of that information from Greg Abbott, so no matter what else happens this should be valuable.

Abbott’s border wall

Jun 12th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

9 comments

I have many questions about this, but for this post I will limit myself to three.

Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday that Texas will build a border wall along the state’s boundary with Mexico — but provided no details on where or when.

Abbott declared his plans during a press conference in Del Rio. He said he would discuss the plans next week. The Biden administration issued a proclamation that stopped border wall construction on his first day of office.

Abbott announced the news while discussing a slew of border initiatives, such as a $1 billion allocation for border security in the state budget lawmakers just passed and a plan to establish a Governor’s Task Force on Border and Homeland Security with public safety and state government officials.

“It will help all of us to work on ways to stem the flow of unlawful immigration and to stem the flow of illegal contraband,” Abbott said, while seated next to officials from the National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Division of Emergency Management.

At the conference, Abbott also announced plans to increase arrests along the border — and increase space inside local jails.

“They don’t want to come to across the state of Texas anymore because it’s not what they were expecting,” Abbott said before being met with applause from those at the conference. “It’s not the red carpet that the federal administration rolled out to them.”

He also announced an interstate compact with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to resolve the border “crisis,” and called on other states to do the same.

1. How exactly is any of this going to be paid for? I know Abbott has promised more details next week, but we just had an entire legislative session, with a budget being passed, and I don’t remember “building a border wall” being part of it. Also, arresting however many people and putting them in jail – who will be paying for that? Even if one can claim that there is a line item in the budget for this, does anyone believe it’s enough?

2. How many lawsuits do you think this will generate? There’s federal-state issues, such as whether states can arrest migrants for trespassing, likely questions about how various funds may be spent on this ill-conceived idea, and who knows what else. Some number of lawyers are going to make a lot of bank on this.

3. We’re totally going to start seeing “Abbott for President 2024” speculation because of this, aren’t we? Time to find a nice Internet-free cabin in the woods, I suppose. More from the Trib here.

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