Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

A couple of water stories

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Story #!: Texas’ Refusal to Plan for Climate Change Created a Crisis in Corpus Christi.

A decade ago, Corpus Christi’s regional water plan projected shortages as soon as 2050. The next plan, released five years later, shortened that timeline to 2030.

The next plan, released this year, said shortages were imminent, putting city leaders in a desperate scramble to avoid an emergency.

Something’s not right with the calculations that underpin these plans, said John Michael, an engineering executive who has worked on local water infrastructure for 44 years.

“Whether it’s climate change or something else, our reservoir system is not as dependable as we once thought,” he said at his office in May.

He pointed to the regional water plans on his office table—700 pages in four-inch binders—which are prepared every five years by local committees using methodology provided by the State of Texas. These plans never factored in climate science or considered the projections that a warming planet could contribute to a drought as extreme as the one Corpus Christi now faces.

In fact, as climate models predicted, every drought for the last 30 years in Corpus Christi has exceeded the parameters contemplated in local plans, thanks to fatal delusions deep in the heart of Texas’ methodology: Texas doesn’t plan for droughts to get worse.

“The droughts keep getting worse,” said Michael, vice president of Hanson Professional Services in Corpus Christi.

Four droughts have punctuated his career, each hotter and drier than the last. Each one left the city scrambling to build out its water plans ahead of schedule. For decades, intensifying droughts consistently outpaced planning efforts until, by the start of this drought, the region ran out of plans.

The problem is that methods developed by the Texas Water Development Board, an agency headed by appointees of the governor, use the worst drought conditions on record as a worst-case scenario for the future.

“Drought‑of‑record planning is a foundational element of Texas water planning,” said a TWDB spokesperson, Kaci Woodrome. “It provides a consistent, statewide minimum baseline for evaluating water supply reliability.”

The TWDB guides water planning processes for 16 regions in Texas, some of which plan for conditions worse than the drought of record, Woodrome said. It is well known that droughts worse than the drought-of-record can occur, she said. Climate scientists have concluded that the Earth’s warming atmosphere has made droughts worse over the past 25 years and will continue to do so over the next 25.

But that isn’t reflected in Texas’ water plans. “Climate-related projections are not something that any of Texas’ state water plans have included,” Woodrome said, referring questions about climate to the Office of the State Climatologist.

“The majority of factors point toward increased drought severity,” said an assessment of weather trends by the climatologist’s office in 2024, Corpus Christi’s hottest year on record. “Future rainfall deficits comparable to those earlier in the 20th century will have greater impacts due to higher temperatures.”

The region’s 2026 water plan, released in January, “explicitly recognized that, in the event of a repeat of the drought of record, the City of Corpus Christi, as a major water provider, was already facing an immediate shortage,” Woodrome said.

She added: “Such a shortage might increase if a new drought of record were to occur,” which is exactly what happened.

By early this year, officials suspected that drought conditions in Corpus Christi had again surpassed the worst on record. The city’s models never indicated the reservoirs would get this low, said Corpus City Manager Peter Zanoni. But the models didn’t consider the possibility, or the science describing the likelihood, of a drought as severe as the region now faces.

“We based it on the last drought-of-record,” Zanoni said. “This is the worst one yet.”

[…]

“The water plan has to be realistic,” said Larry Soward, a former executive director of the Texas Water Commission. “If you seriously looked at climate change, it would say: We can’t grow anymore unless we make some major changes.”

Political leaders in Texas have intentionally ignored this reality for decades, said Soward, who spent 35 years in state government. Acknowledging the risks of climate change would disrupt their economic agenda, Soward said, and interfere with the growth of business and industry.

Soward witnessed Texas’ irrepressible growth as an attorney for the Water Quality Board in the 1970s, director of the Texas Water Commission in the 1980s and in the 1990s as special counsel on water for the Texas Department of Agriculture. During that time, the state built its last reservoirs but failed to devise a subsequent strategy, Soward said. So Texas kept growing, but its water supply didn’t.

“There’s been a real lack of leadership,” he said. “Especially at the state level.”

Climate change and the current water crisis in Corpus Christi, for which the start date has been pushed back into 2027 thanks to the recent rains, are not likely to be high on anyone’s issues priority list this year. But they still fit into the message that I’ve been suggesting, which is that everything that is a problem in Texas today is the Republicans’ fault. That’s partly because they have bad policies, and partly because they’ve been in charge for 25 years, longer than that at the statewide level. Anything they say needs fixing is something they could have started fixing before now or something they could have prevented or at least made less bad, but didn’t. They don’t get to run away from anything, and we can’t let them. Whatever it is, they own it.

Story #2: How a Tiny Texas River Agency Plans to Build the Largest Desalination Plant in the Country.

Something moved John Byrum. He believed he could succeed where others had not.

The executive director of the Nueces River Authority (NRA)—a small, rural agency based 200 miles from the coast—decided to take up the banner, in 2024, of a desalination plant on Corpus Christi Bay.

Plans to build seawater desalination plants had floundered for years near Corpus Christi, which provides water to a major complex of chemical plants and refineries, and the likelihood of water shortages was growing.

“Texas needed a sustainable supply of water in that area to protect the industry,” said Byrum, a veteran water manager with silver hair and a charming drawl. “This was the way to do it.”

The Port of Corpus Christi never secured financing for the multi-billion-dollar project, so Byrum would fund it one piece at a time. He took up collection, not from the region’s large industrial water users like ExxonMobil, OxyChemical and Valero, but from small towns and rural utilities in the hinterlands of San Antonio, 150 miles from the coast, that could theoretically be connected by pipeline to the desalination plant, according to records obtained by Inside Climate News.

The agency collected $6.4 million from 18 cities, towns and utilities since March of last year, records show, while it doled out lobbying and engineering contracts for the Harbor Island desalination project near Corpus Christi.

Executives collected money from as far away as the city of Kyle, south of Austin, where NRA’s chief operating officer at the time presented the City Council in October with plans to build the enormous pipeline from the coast by 2032, and an opportunity to reserve some of its water.

“We’re actually 90 percent sold out now,” Travis Pruski, the official, told the City Council. “You would buy the last 10 percent of the water.”

However, records show, Kyle bought the water, but Pruski didn’t stop selling. The agency continued to sell reservations for five months after Kyle paid its $500,000 deposit. In fact, the water was never sold out, records show.

Pruski resigned from the NRA in May, after alleging that Byrum misrepresented financial figures to Corpus Christi’s City Council and the agency’s board members. Byrum denies that and continues his work to build the desalination plant.

Pruski, a career fundraising professional and former mayor of the small town of Poth, declined to comment on the specifics of his time with the NRA or the allegations in his resignation letter.

“I’m not really wanting to talk about that right now,” he said. “I’ve kind of moved on with my life.”

In May, Byrum’s NRA announced a partnership with Israeli desalination giant IDE Technologies, which described the Harbor Island plant as the largest seawater desalination project in the Western Hemisphere.

First outlined in 2017 by the Port of Corpus Christi, plans for Harbor Island stalled amid feuding with the city government and its competing desalination project.

Later, the little NRA faced steep skepticism over its wherewithal to take on such an enormous endeavor.

Now, the partnership with IDE, a global leader in seawater desalination, marks the strongest sign yet that the landmark project could become a reality. It also means future Texans might pay a foreign company for water.

Everything about this is insane. I can’t do it justice, you have to keep reading. I’m rooting for them to somehow pull this off, just to see how it would work.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged climate change, Corpus Christi, desalinization, drought, Election 2026, IDS Technologies, Nueces River Authority, Texas, Texas State Climatologist, Texas Water Development Board, water | Leave a comment

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not ICE’s target

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Unbelievable.

Photo by Ronaldo Salgado

The 52-year-old Houston man fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent earlier this week was not the target of the agency’s operation, said U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, who has called for release of any video footage capturing the deadly episode.

Garcia told The Texas Tribune that acting ICE Director David Venturella informed her in a call Thursday afternoon that ICE agents didn’t have any body-worn cameras or dashboard cameras during the shooting.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Thursday that it had received a tip from an unspecified law enforcement agency that led ICE agents to surveil a Houston residence and subsequently Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s van.

“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address,” the DHS statement said. “Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property. On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.”

Agents had an administrative warrant for someone other than Salgado Araujo or his brother, who was also in the van, Garcia said Venturella told her.

According to the New York Times, ICE agents had administrative warrants for two Guatemalan immigrants. According to Salgado Araujo’s sons, their father, uncle and two other men in the vehicle are from Mexico. An administrative warrant does not have the same legal power as a criminal warrant, which must be reviewed and signed by a judge.

According to ICE intake information, two of the three men are from Mexico and were being held at the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Conroe as of Thursday afternoon.

Garcia said she got a commitment from Venturella that all officers in the field would have a body cam by the end of the month.

A DHS spokesperson confirmed that the officers involved in the shooting didn’t wear body-worn cameras, saying that they had not been issued that equipment and blamed Democrats for holding them up. After Congress recently provided “historic funding,” the spokesperson said they would be provided.

“Body cameras have been deployed to more than half the field offices with the remaining half to receive them in the next 60 days,” the department’s statement said.

[…]

Garcia added that ICE said it would respond to a demand letter the congresswoman issued Thursday with other Democratic lawmakers after DHS’s Office of Inspector General completed its investigation, but didn’t provide a timeline for that investigation.

See here and here for some background. Untold billions of dollars appropriated for ICE, and this is what we get, a bunch of undertrained trigger-happy yahoos who couldn’t find their own asses with a flashlight and printed instructions. And the reason these tragedies keep happening is because an entire political party decided they don’t need to take responsibility for anything they do, the concept of taking responsibility is anathema to them. These are the stakes for the election this November and beyond. The Chron, the Times, and Talking Points Memo have more.

Two other items of interest: The silence from the Republicans continues to be deafening.

Three days after federal immigration agents fatally shot a man during a traffic stop in Houston, most of Texas’ Republican leaders had yet to weigh in on the incident or respond to calls from Democrats and civil rights advocates for an independent investigation.

As public outcry has rippled across the internet and the streets of Houston, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and most of the state’s GOP congressional delegation have kept mum about the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in the country for decades. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him to death earlier this week when authorities tried to stop his van during an operation.

[…]

At a press conference Friday, [Rep. Sylvia] Garcia and other Houston Democrats renewed their criticisms of ICE and their demands for an investigation conducted outside the agency. They also called for ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to release evidence supporting their claims.

Garcia, who represents the neighborhood where the shooting occurred, said she had not heard from Abbott nor any of her congressional Republican colleagues.

The governor’s office declined to respond Friday when asked about Garcia’s comments. A spokesperson referred the Tribune to the Texas Department of Public Safety for “information on how Rangers investigations start.”

Garcia said the differing accounts between ICE and witnesses, as well as DHS’ original reference to the incident as a targeted enforcement operation without mentioning Salgado Araujo was not the target, underscores the need for an outside probe.

“That’s why we need a complete, thorough investigation, and a fact-finding from top to bottom — and we have to make sure that it does include our local partners,” Garcia said, alluding to calls for Houston police and DPS to step in. “ICE cannot be doing this [investigation] alone, because otherwise, we’ll end up just like in the [Renee] Good case — nothing.”

[…]

The shooting occurred in Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood, a heavily Hispanic area near the Houston Ship Channel in the city’s East End. But the area was moved out of Garcia’s district when Republicans redrew Texas’ congressional map last summer, putting it in the 9th Congressional District. GOP nominee Alex Mealer is the favorite to win the Republican-leaning seat in November.

Responding Tuesday night to DHS’ post on X detailing the agency’s claim that the ICE officer acted in self-defense, Mealer expressed her belief that the feds would get to the bottom of the matter.

“Today is yet another reminder of the dangers law enforcement face everyday as they protect our safety,” Mealer wrote on X. “I have full confidence in law enforcement’s ability to conduct a thorough investigation and ensure justice is served.”

Mealer has not made any public statements about the shooting since Tuesday, and her campaign did not immediately respond Friday to questions about whether she supported an independent investigation or believes ICE should release evidence.

Yeah, that’s about what I’d expect from a lightweight like Mealer. I’m sure she’ll have something to say once she’s been told what to say by other Republicans.

And finally, this was a surprise.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire vowed Friday to “pursue an independent and transparent” local investigation into Tuesday’s deadly ICE shooting but said federal control over evidence is proving difficult to overcome.

Whitmire said he directed Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz to be “proactive” in pursuing an investigation amid witness statements that contradict ICE’s account of the fatal shooting of 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Diaz has a meeting with Houston’s FBI bureau chief next week, Whitmire said, adding that the chief asked the federal agency to “start sharing information.”

“Our hands have been tied, but I’ve instructed the chief [and] city attorney to untie those hands,” Whitmire said in an afternoon news conference.

[…]

Whitmire also expressed frustration about ICE’s handling of the shooting and offered condolences to Salgado Araujo’s family, who have lived in Houston for decades.

“Mr. Salgado was chased by unmarked vehicles, [and] before he could identify himself and speak as a Houstonian, he was shot and killed,” Whitmire said. “I’ve met with his family today and expressed the entire city’s condolences and anger, and assured them that I and the levels of government represented here today, and the DA’s office, would do everything, use all of our resources and our waking hours, to pursue an independent and transparent investigation.”

The Harris County district attorney’s office launched its own investigation into the shooting on Thursday, but District Attorney Sean Teare said his office has had limited access to evidence in part because of the federal agencies’ involvement.

Whitmire said he had spoken with Teare about the difficulty of conducting their own investigations, as the FBI is “tightly controlling” all of the evidence related to the shooting.

“They control the scene, the deceased, the van, the witnesses. So yes, they control the investigation,” Whitmire said.

Friday’s announcement was a shift from Whitmire’s statements a day after the shooting, when he indicated that the city and its police department were incapable of investigating Salgado Araujo’s death because “there cannot be two ongoing investigations.” HPD said none of its officers were involved in the shooting, which Whitmire also said meant they lacked jurisdiction to investigate.

Not sure what caused the change of direction, but I’m glad to see it. The more eyes on this, the better.

Posted in La Migra | Tagged Alexandra Mealer, CD09, Congress, Dan Patrick, District Attorney, Donald Trump, DPS, Election 2026, Greg Abbott, Homeland Security, Houston, HPD, ICE, immigration, John Whitmire, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Minnesota, Noe Diaz, Sean Teare, Sylvia Garcia, Texas | 4 Comments

Fifth Circuit rejects DREAM Act intervention effort

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Dammit.

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected an effort to defend the Texas Dream Act, leaving in place a ruling that ended a longstanding state law that allowed some undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court said advocacy groups, Austin Community College and a student could not step into the case to defend the Texas Dream Act because federal law bars states from giving undocumented students a tuition benefit based on residency unless the same benefit is available to all U.S. citizens, regardless of where they live.

The law allowed students who attended and graduated from high school in Texas to pay in-state tuition, even if they did not have legal immigration status.

[…]

Marco Julian Gonzalez, a University of Texas at Austin business student whose fraternity and sister sorority filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the students working to preserve the Texas Dream Act, said he was disheartened by the ruling and wondering what steps they could take next.

“We know who these people are and we know who they are not, and when you have politicians go on the airwaves and call our friends criminal illegal aliens we take offense and that kept us motivated to keep going,” Gonzalez said.

Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote the majority opinion for the 5th Circuit Court that Judge Don Willett joined. Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez dissented.

Smith was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Willett by President Donald Trump, and Ramirez by President Joe Biden.

See here, here, and here for the background. I’m sorry, but this is a total screw job, and a big pile of cowardice from the Fifth Circuit. This was a corrupt Justice Department, a corrupt Attorney General, and a disgraceful judge conspiring to do by fiat what the Legislature failed to do. This law was on the books for over 20 years, having been passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, and only just now did these forces decide it was actually illegal all along. Again I say, court reform has to be a lot bigger than just SCOTUS, because as long as unscrupulous plaintiffs can hand-pick a friendly judge and then get full backup from a lawless Fifth Circuit, it doesn’t even matter what’s happening in Washington DC. Texas Public Radio has more.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged ACLU of Texas, Austin Community College, Democracy Forward, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, DREAM.us, FIEL Houston, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, immigration, Justice Department, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, LUPE Votes, MALDEF, National Immigration Law Center, Oscar Silva, Students for Affordable Tuition, Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, The Lege | 1 Comment

Replanting the trees lost in the Kerrville flood

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Good work.

Plateau Live Oak acorn seeds with their first leaves. Credit: Courtesy / Michael Eason

As Michael Eason drove along the banks of the Guadalupe River late last summer, amid places he had worked and photographed over the years, he couldn’t help but be moved by the devastation.

“Depending on where you were standing and where you’re counting, it was just gone,” he said.

Along with homes and businesses, iconic century-old bald cypress and American sycamore had been washed away and severely battered by the catastrophic flooding on July 4, 2025, and the ensuing cleanup.

A once bucolic river was left lined with mangled debris in a community also reeling from the loss of 119 lives. Thousands of homes and businesses washed away or were damaged.

“It was so devastating,” with deadwood extending from Hunt to Pasadena Point, and over half the tree canopy destroyed, said Eason, vice president of conservation and collection at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

“When you drive down the highway, you look out and you see our oak trees, and you see our junipers, and there along the river, the bald cypress, and you think that they can never go away,” he said. “But they can.”

In fact, between 52% of the vegetation and tree canopy was lost within the floodway along 30 river miles from Hunt to Comfort, according to the Bandera County River Authority and Groundwater District. Some parcels lost as much as 99%.

“Some of the most impacted areas are below large impoundments, such as Ingram Dam and Nimitz Dam,” said Clinton Carter, watershed ecologist and field operations manager.

Before-and-after images from Carter’s vegetation loss analysis are published to a dashboard, and Carter said the River and Environmental Working Group and the City of Kerrville are now trying to acquire new aerial imagery and data to monitor changes over time.

The loss from the flooding is significant considering only about 1% of the land in Texas is considered riparian or along natural waterways, according to some estimates, said Katherine Romans, executive director of the nonprofit Hill Country Alliance.

”It’s a very small band of land alongside these water bodies, and at the same time it has an outsized impact on biodiversity on water resources, on our quality of life,” she said.

“When you think about where you want to be in the hottest months of the summer, it’s alongside the river.”

[…]

For Eason, replanting trees seemed like the best way he could help.

Along with grasses and other plantings, the trees are critical to creating systems that are functional, he said, even helping to slow the water to prevent flooding, to clean the water and stabilize the riverbank.

They set a goal of planting 50,000 trees, and not just any trees — “native trees where the seed was collected locally there in the watershed … trees that in the long run will have the best chance of survival,” he said.

But they needed to move quickly to collect the seed when it became available at varying intervals last fall. A group began monitoring the trees for seed production.

Then for several weeks last fall, Eason led volunteers on a harvesting mission in the Texas Hill Country, plucking hardy native plant seeds from the riverbanks and the remaining trees on public and private land.

“Camp Stewart [for Boys] was one of the first properties we were able to access, and they were a great partner in this and have allowed us to collect quite a bit of seed from their property,” he said.

In all, the team collected more than 850,000 seeds from a variety of species, including cypress, sycamore, pecan, oak, walnut, red buckeye, and several herbaceous plants and grasses, including some that are not commercially available.

Prepared and then shipped to growers throughout the region, now those seeds have sprouted and made their way back to the botanical garden as saplings.

At least 30,000 plants are resting in cone-shaped containers under a makeshift shade structure waiting for the fall season when it’s optimal to plant.

Volunteers will be trained in the coming weeks and planting events are scheduled over several weekends, with 1,500 to 2,000 saplings sowed each time. Thirty sites along the river have been identified so far on both private property and public park space.

“Some of them will probably go through some sort of transplant shock [and] we will replace those, and so the goal isn’t just to plant 50,000 trees, the goal is to have 50,000 trees survive,” Eason said.

Consider this story to be a followup to this one from January that documented the damage to the area around the river. Michael Eason of the San Antonio Botanical Garden wrote about the vision and plan to remediate it around the same time. If you’re reading this and want to help I’d suggest contacting the San Antonio Botanical Garden or the Hill Country Alliance for more information. Kudos to all for making this happen.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Bandera County River Authority and Groundwater District, flooding, Guadalupe River, Hill Country Alliance, Kerr County, Kerrville, Michael Eason, San Antonio Botanical Garden, Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, trees, Upper Guadalupe River Authority | Leave a comment

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo roundup

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

For 35 years, a Mexican father built homes in Houston. Then a morning drive ended in tragedy.

Photo by Ronaldo Salgado

For the last 35 years, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s day began the same way: He woke up at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his work van and drove off to pick up his construction crew for work in Houston, his family said.

But on Tuesday, Salgado Araujo’s day would not end as it always did. He would not come home to eat a hearty dinner prepared by his wife, then spend the rest of the evening on the porch listening to music in the house he had built for his family.

Around 7 a.m., as the 52-year-old father of three picked up the last of his crew in Houston’s East End area before heading north to finish construction on several houses, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in an unmarked car fatally shot the Mexican man inside his van, Salgado Araujo’s oldest son recounted Wednesday.

ICE said Salgado Araujo attempted to evade arrest as agents tried to conduct a traffic stop as part of a “targeted operation.” He rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and refused to follow several verbal commands before an ICE agent fired his weapon in self-defense, the agency told CNN in a statement Tuesday.

Salgado Araujo had been living in the US without legal authorization, ICE said, without specifying whether the agents had been looking for him. He did not appear to have a criminal record, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Disputing the government’s account, Salgado Araujo’s family says they believe the man who’d been seeking a work permit would have stopped and complied with federal agents if he had known the car following him belonged to ICE or other law enforcement.

CNN has asked the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, whether immigration enforcement agents identified themselves to Salgado Araujo.

[…]

Ronaldo Salgado wants the world to remember his father not for how he died but for his life as a family man who believed in the American dream.

“He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE,’” he said. “He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream.”

Salgado Araujo and his wife met when they were teenagers in Mexico, according to their son. He raised his three sons “on the idea of education taking us so far in life,” Ronaldo Salgado said. The eldest son became a teacher, while his brothers went into engineering.

Salgado Araujo ran his own construction business and “was known for his work ethic, his fairness, and his willingness to help anyone who needed it,” a GoFundMe page says. When people knocked on his door asking Salgado Araujo for opportunities, he would hire them to work with him, his son recounted.

Ronaldo Salgado said his father “only wanted to get back to work and back to us.”

“I am deeply heartbroken to see that the man who taught me the value of hard work, family values and education will no longer spend an evening on that porch,” he said.

I’ve been fortunate to know lots of people like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in my life. The thought that something like this could happen to any of them makes me sick.

Harris County DA investigators return to east Houston scene of ICE agent shooting that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is urging anyone who witnessed Tuesday’s fatal ICE shooting in east Houston to come forward as his office conducts a parallel review into the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

In a statement posted Wednesday on X, Teare said Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed during an attempted arrest in Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood, “was a husband, a father, and a longtime member of our community.”

“When anyone in Harris County loses their life during an interaction with law enforcement, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office conducts an investigation parallel to the agency leading the investigation,” Teare wrote. “Unfortunately at this time, federal authorities continue exclusively handling all aspects in this case.”

On Wednesday, five investigators from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office were seen at the scene of the shooting, taking photographs and documenting evidence.

When asked about their presence, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said investigators are pursuing all available avenues despite federal authorities maintaining control over key evidence.

“Although access to key evidence remains under Federal control, we are pursuing investigative avenues available to us and will conduct a review of any information we collect within our reach,” the spokesperson said.

[…]

On Wednesday, 13 lawmakers sent a letter to the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety requesting a parallel investigation be opened into Araujo’s death.

“The Texas Rangers possess statewide jurisdiction to investigate officer-involved shootings, including those involving federal officers, and to determine whether any state law was violated. As members of the Legislature representing Harris County, we respectfully request that the Department of Public Safety open a parallel investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident. This authority is inherent in Texas’s status as a dual sovereign and under its police powers,” the letter states.

The letter was signed by State Senators Carol Alvarado, Borris Miles, and Molly Cook, as well as State Representatives Christina Morales, Senfronia Thompson, Ana Hernandez, Gene Wu, Jon Rosenthal, Penny Morales Shaw, Jolanda Jones, Charlene Ward Johnson, Mary Ann Perez, and Armando Walle.

You can see a copy of the letter in the story. That was then followed by this.

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said Thursday his office is committed to investigating the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a federal immigration agent but cautioned that local prosecutors face challenges accessing evidence.

His comment came amid mounting calls for independent investigations of the Tuesday shooting in Houston, particularly from 52-year-old Salgado Araujo’s family and community advocates who said they didn’t trust the federal government to fairly scrutinize the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the case.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is leading the investigation, and Teare said it remains to be seen whether the agency would share anything with his office.

“My office is running an investigation,” he said in a radio interview with Houston Public Media. “But we do not have the same level of access that we do in almost any other officer-involved shooting.”

[…]

Teare also said he has been in contact with the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which launched inquiries into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents earlier this year. The Minnesota officials sued the federal government to gain access to evidence.

“No one is more familiar with these kinds of situations than them,” he said.

See here for more. I’m very glad to see DA Sean Teare do what he and his office can to try to investigate this. It won’t be easy, but they have to try.

Can Houston officials investigate Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death? Yes, but it would be complicated.

The calls for action and murky responses from local officials raised the question: Do local governments have the authority to investigate a federal official on their own? And if they do, what happens?

Legal experts, former police chiefs and former prosecutors all agree that Houston police and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office unquestionably have the authority to conduct their own investigation into Salgado’s death. In past fatal shootings caused by federal officials, like one involving an FBI agent in 2018, Houston police conducted a parallel investigation and Harris County prosecutors made their own charging decisions.

These experts also said that it is exceedingly difficult to gather any productive information if federal authorities do not cooperate. That’s because local officials have no ability to compel federal officials to appear in court, and they have no right to force them to hand over evidence collected at the scene.

“The state court doesn’t have the power to drag those people in the court — make them do anything — because they’re acting in their capacity as the federal government,” said Jules Johnson, a former Harris County civil rights prosecutor who worked on the case involving the FBI official. “You can issue a subpoena, and they never even have to respond to it — they just ball it up and throw it away.”

Officials in Minnesota, where high-profile ICE killings earlier this year led to nationwide protests, are encountering that obstacle right now. The state of Minnesota and Hennepin County are conducting their own investigations into the shootings of Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Sosa-Celis, but federal authorities for months have refused to turn over evidence. The state and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty have filed a lawsuit to force them to comply, and that suit is still being heard in court.

Still, the uphill battles have not dissuaded Houston police investigations in the past. Former Chief Charles McLelland, who led the department from 2010 to 2016 and spent his entire career with the Houston Police Department, said it was standard protocol during his time for local officials to conduct their own investigations.

“This shooting and death occurred in Houston proper, in Harris County,” said McLelland. “Whenever the medical examiner classifies this shooting, it’s going on HPD’s books. It has to be accounted for in the crime stats. How are you not going to have anything to do with the investigation?”

[…]

Ken Magidson, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas and Harris County district attorney, said ICE is playing a very different role now than it has in the past.

During his four-decade-long prosecutorial career, Magidson said ICE focused on immigrants who had lengthy criminal records and posed a threat to the community. As the agency increasingly focuses on longtime residents without a criminal past, federal agents are collaborating with local law enforcement less and encountering more people who are not expecting to be targeted.

He estimated that in 90% of the use-of-force cases during his career, federal and local authorities collaborated on the investigation. When they don’t, he said, the feds have the upper hand.

“The question is, can you prove it in court beyond a reasonable doubt? And that’s where the rubber meets the road,” Magidson said.

No question, ICE and the rest of the federal government will obstruct and delay every step of the way. With a bit of luck, some help should be coming after November, and again in 2029. The point is to not give up in the meantime.

Democrats are calling for an investigation into Houston ICE shooting. Republicans have been mostly silent.

As of Wednesday afternoon, few Republicans had weighed in on the Tuesday morning shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Houston’s East End. By contrast, Democrats have almost singularly criticized the shooting and called for an independent investigation of it.

“If this is a routine traffic stop, then everybody in Houston has to kind of fear for driving on our roads, and we’re going to be stopped by ICE, and this is going to be the end result,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose district includes the predominantly Latino area where the shooting took place, said on Hello Houston on Wednesday.

Garcia also noted that her office has had difficulty speaking with representatives from ICE, even at one point being told that “they didn’t have enough staff to deal with all our inquiries,” she said. Houston Public Media also reached out to ICE’s media contact for more information on other arrests on Tuesday and was directed to ICE’s Office of Partnership and Engagement, which asked for “2-3 days for follow-up.”

[…]

Among the other Democrats to call for an investigation are Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia; Houston City Council member Joaquin Martinez; Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo; Houston Mayor John Whitmire; state Sen. Carol Alvarado; and state Rep. Ana Hernandez, all of whom are Democrats representing the area where the shooting took place. Other officials calling for an investigation include Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico and Texas House Democratic Caucus leader Gene Wu, among others.

In the race for Harris County judge, Republican nominee Orlando Sanchez, one of few Republicans to go on the record on the matter, told Houston Public Media in a statement, “It is far too early in the investigation for me to have a comment on this incident. Let’s wait and allow those tasked with investigating to do their jobs.”

Letitia Plummer, the Democratic nominee, by contrast called for an independent investigation into the shooting and called for limits on interactions between local police and ICE.

Whitmire said the Houston Police Department was not involved in Tuesday’s shooting, his office stated that the city “lacks access to the evidence, witnesses, or investigative authorities necessary to conduct a complete review of federal actions.”

Interim Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin, whose office handles civil cases involving the county government, stated “there needs to be serious questions as to why the city is taking the position that it’s taking” in not conducting its own investigation.

“In any investigation involving a death of a person within city limits, HPD can be involved in that investigation,” Kamin said on Hello Houston on Wednesday. “There are different avenues — again, I’m not saying leading investigations, or anything like that — but when something happens in our city, in our county, it is also our responsibility to ensure that evidence is preserved and that justice reigns at the end of the day.”

That’s the goal, however long it takes. The four Dems who represent Houston in Congress are also demanding answers from the feds. The more the merrier there. It’s hardly a surprise that Republicans don’t want to talk about this. But don’t worry, at some point they’ll figure out what their party line is.

ICE lies. And now they’ve killed a Houstonian.

Lorenzo may not have been an American on paper, but he was damned well a Houstonian.

He lived in Houston for 35 of his 52 years, his family said.

When he moved here from Mexico, the Oilers still played in the Astrodome. Beltway 8 hadn’t been completed. The population of the Houston metro was a little over half what it is today. As a construction worker, Lorenzo helped build that booming metropolis — and rebuild a proud city that has endured more hurricanes and 500-year storms than we can keep track of.

“This is about a Houston family led by a father who has been here for 35 years with absolutely no criminal history,” said U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who sat with Ronaldo at the hospital.

According to the Salgado family, Lorenzo was trying to fix his immigration status, a narrow and expensive process that usually takes decades. He had recently begun applying for proper authorization, Ronaldo said: “We dotted every i, crossed every t, filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close to obtaining his legal status.”

But Lorenzo would never get that chance.

ICE says that their officers only shot in self-defense. That the victim was attempting to run them down.

We’ve heard that before: the flat-out lies told by federal agents and amplified by government leaders.

We heard it in Minneapolis after the killings of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Administration nurse, and Renée Good, a poet and mother. We heard it in Texas after the killing of Ruben Ray Martinez on South Padre Island. All three were U.S. citizens.

Now ICE has killed one of our own. Blood stains Canal Street.

Every fellow Houstonian should demand a thorough investigation, and also the release of video footage, including from dash and body cameras. Citizens should also share whatever information they have, video, eyewitness accounts. The city should review and share its own municipal camera footage, including from license plate readers. Businesses should share any security video they have.

Video has been key in proving previous ICE lies. I hope there’s video evidence in this case as well.

‘I recognized him immediately’: Son recounts frantic search for father killed in Houston ICE shooting.

The son of a Mexican immigrant killed Tuesday by federal immigration agents in East Houston learned his father had been shot when he found a video on social media of his dad crying out in pain on the sidewalk.

“I saw video posted on Facebook that he had been shot,” Ronaldo Salgado said, holding back tears at a news conference Wednesday morning. “I recognized him immediately. Not from his appearance but from his voice crying for help as he laid on the street bleeding out.”

[…]

Salgado praised his father’s work ethic, saying his goal was to provide for his wife and their three sons. He did that quietly and without fanfare for 35 years. He was a man of routine who was in the process of obtaining a work permit.

Tuesday morning began like most days, Salgado said — his dad rose early, stocked up on breakfast and coffee, then headed out in his work van to pick up his crew and head to a job site.

“Around 7 a.m., I was notified by my mom that something bad had happened to my dad,” he said. “At 7:05, five minutes after, I left the house, drove all the way up to his work site an hour away to find any evidence of his van.”

He couldn’t find his dad at the work site. At around 8 a.m., he saw a Facebook post describing ICE activity on Canal Street near his home. He wasn’t sure if his dad was involved, but he headed that way and found the street blocked off by police.

“I saw my dad’s van, but no sign of him. I frantically called family, friends, loved ones to see if they can find any information,” he said.

At 10 a.m., he watched a video on Facebook and heard his father crying for help.

“I went to Ben Taub Hospital and demanded answers, but no one could give them to me. I learned of my father’s passing from a news report on social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement,” he said.

“Through a collective effort from local organizations and elected officials, we got answers,” he added. “My father’s death was confirmed. I had to call my mom right away to give her the terrible news of my dad’s passing before she had to find out the same way.”

Araujo had no criminal record, his son said, and woke up at 5 a.m. every weekday to work construction.

“My father was a simple man, a family man,” he said. “He dedicated his life in the United States to giving his family the American dream. He raised my brothers and I on the idea of education taking us so far in life.”

My heart goes out to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s family and friends. May they find peace, comfort, and justice.

Posted in La Migra | Tagged Abbie Kamin, District Attorney, Donald Trump, DPS, Homeland Security, Houston, HPD, ICE, immigration, John Whitmire, Ken Magidson, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, LULAC, Minnesota, Sean Teare, Sylvia Garcia, Texas | 5 Comments

Texas Tech sued over censoring professors

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I wish them luck.

Faculty groups sued Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton and the university system’s regents Wednesday, asking a federal judge in El Paso to block classroom restrictions they say have censored professors who teach about race, gender identity and sexual orientation and intentionally discriminated against Black faculty.

The lawsuit, brought by the Texas American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers and the national American Association of University Professors, challenges two memos Creighton issued after becoming chancellor last year.

The groups argue the restrictions outlined in the memos violate the First Amendment by allowing Texas Tech officials to suppress viewpoints they dislike, violate the Fourteenth Amendment by leaving professors unsure what they can teach without being disciplined and discriminate against Black faculty by singling out instruction about Black history, racial inequality and efforts to remedy it.

Creighton’s first memo, issued Dec. 1, told faculty they could face discipline if they did not comply with new limits on course content involving race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. It required faculty to submit course material related to those topics for regents to review and approve.

A second memo, issued April 9, went further, ordering the phase-out of academic programs centered on sexual orientation and gender identity and requiring professors in core and lower-level undergraduate courses to use alternate materials if readings, assignments or lectures included those topics.

The memo said some material could still be taught if needed for patient care, professional credentials or advanced coursework, but the lawsuit argues those exceptions were applied inconsistently.

The policies apply across the five-institution system, which includes Texas Tech University, two health sciences centers, Angelo State University and Midwestern State University.

The complaint includes new accounts of how the restrictions have been applied. It alleges a Texas Tech Health Sciences Center professor in Lubbock was told medical students could not participate in or observe care for transgender patients, even when those patients sought treatment for unrelated conditions such as hypertension, migraines or cancer. It also says a professor was told a Holocaust course would have to leave the core curriculum if it included instruction on gay and bisexual victims of the Nazis, and that regents barred professors from teaching Plato’s Republic and Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award-winning book about racism in America.

The medical-training allegation underscores the lawsuit’s claim that Texas Tech’s stated exceptions were confusing and inconsistently applied. Creighton’s memos said some material could still be taught when needed for patient care or professional credentials. But the complaint says the Lubbock professor was initially required to remove material about transgender and intersex patients from a medical school course, even though the professor considered it vital to the course and necessary for medical certification exams. The professor was later told medical students could treat transgender patients during third- and fourth-year clinical rotations, according to the complaint, but only after some students’ rotations had already passed.

The groups are asking a judge to declare Creighton’s memos unconstitutional and block the system from enforcing them or any similar policy. The lawsuit, saying faculty members have already had to certify compliance for summer and fall courses, argues the restrictions will continue to harm them as well as deprive students of instruction they would otherwise receive.

I didn’t blog about this at the time, because sometimes it’s all just too much. The “best” part of all this was Brandon Creighton claiming that his little censorship spree was needed to foster “diversity of viewpoint” at the school. You know, diversity spanning the full range from A to B. While I applaud and agree with this action, I also feel depressingly confident about how it will play out: The plaintiffs will win a significant ruling from the district court, and then the Fifth Circuit will trip over itself to issue a stay on the ruling, which they will eventually overturn because that’s what they do. Court reform: It isn’t just for SCOTUS anymore. Anyway, as I said, I wish them all the best. But I fear it will take a lot more than just a righteous lawsuit to overturn this.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Brandon Creighton, censorship, diversity, lawsuit, Texas, Texas Tech, The Lege | 1 Comment

A brief reminder about Ken Paxton

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Let’s not forget that the main thing about Ken Paxton is that he will always wield the power he has to hurt people he doesn’t like.

Still a crook any way you look

In March 2023, we became two of the first women to sue Texas over its abortion bans. While pregnant with twins, we’d each learned that one of our twins had severe complications that were threatening the lives of the other — and our own. Yet, we were denied potentially live-saving abortions. So we asked the state a simple question: How dead did we have to be to receive healthcare that could save our viable babies and our own lives?

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called us “woke” for daring to ask such a question.

After Paxton defeated U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary this week, we felt compelled to share the grisly reality behind that question.

Ashley’s daughter, Isla, was diagnosed with acrania, an always-fatal condition in which the skull never forms. On the ultrasound, Ashley and her husband, Marcus, could see their daughter’s brain matter flowing out of her skull. Every day Isla kept growing, the amniotic fluid broke down more of her brain tissue — and put her twin sister, Marley, in greater danger. Ashley’s risk of miscarriage and premature labor was high, which meant she stood to lose both babies. Marley might survive if born early, but only after months in intensive care, if she lived at all.

Lauren’s son, Thomas, was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a genetic disorder that ravages every organ in the body. Half of where his brain should have been was nothing but fluid, swelling his skull outward. From 12 weeks to the end of pregnancy, Trisomy 18 results in miscarriage in nearly three of every four pregnancies. The doctors, specialists, and genetic counselors all agreed: Every day Thomas kept growing, he put his healthy twin brother, Henry, and Lauren herself at greater risk. And Lauren was already gravely sick, vomiting as many as 20 times an hour. On another emergency room visit, she learned she was heading toward organ failure — but still not near death enough for an abortion that would save her health and Henry’s life.

All her doctors could say was, “I’m so sorry.”

We were the lucky ones. We had the money, the time, and the childcare to make the trip to Colorado for the care Texas denied us. There, we each had a single fetal reduction, a procedure that terminates one pregnancy in the case of multiple pregnancies, which has been found to reduce preterm birth and pregnancy complications without increasing pregnancy loss.

Two of our co-plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski and Kristen Anaya, were not so lucky: they went septic waiting to find out whether they were dead enough for an abortion, after their water broke far too early for their daughters to survive.

Texas lawmakers pioneered the “vigilante” civil enforcement mechanism that first got around legal protections for abortion while Roe v. Wade was precedent. The passage of Senate Bill 8 in 2021, which bans physicians from performing abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected, made Texas the most restrictive state on abortion in the country — and the state to watch. Last year, Texas passed House Bill 7, essentially replicating the bounty hunter law, this time for abortion medication like mifepristone and misoprostol.

These are the laws that Paxton promotes.

There are exceptions for certain anomalies, which passed in May 2025 after a bipartisan effort to help clean up the mess of Texas’ abortion and was signed into law as Senate Bill 31, or the Life of the Mother Act. The bill aligns language among the state’s myriad abortion laws and codifies court rulings, as well as requiring education for both doctors and lawyers on the law’s nuances. However, it doesn’t expand abortion access or make any exceptions for rape, incest, teen pregnancies and fatal fetal abnormalities.

In plain language, Paxton said we weren’t dead enough for an abortion — that our doctors were right to deny us care. Then he turned around and said we should sue those same doctors for denying us care. Never mind that in Lauren’s case, her doctor was Dr. Austin Denard, a co-plaintiff asking the same question: How dead do we need to be?

Paxton never answered that question. Everything he has done since tells us his answer: He wants Texas women closer to dead.

A lot of people have had fun over the past week or so, riffing off the ludicrous and desperate attacks being made against James Talarico, by joking about how Paxton puts beans in chili and prefers In ‘n’ Out to Whataburger, that sort of thing. It’s funny and deserved and keeps the energy going, all of which is to the good. But let’s not lose focus on the big picture. Ken Paxton is here to make life worse for the people he doesn’t like. He’s hardly alone in that, but he’s got the brightest spotlight on him right now. This is what we’re fighting against.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged abortion, Amanda Zurawski, Ashley Brandt, Election 2026, James Talarico, Kate Cox, Ken Paxton, Lauren Miller, lawsuit, SCOTUS, Senate, Texas, The Lege | Leave a comment

ICE kills Houston man

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Bad. Very bad.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a Houston man after he tried to run over a federal officer conducting a vehicle stop Tuesday morning, according to an agency statement issued hours after the incident.

Federal agents were attempting to stop the vehicle as part of an unspecified “targeted enforcement operation” in a predominantly Latino neighborhood when Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — whom ICE identified as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — attempted to evade arrest, according to the ICE statement.

Salgado Araujo allegedly attempted to ram an ICE vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands and tried to run over the ICE agent before the federal officer fired his weapon in self-defense, the statement said.

The shooting comes after federal immigration agents have faced scrutiny for a series of fatal shootings of American citizens in the past year and a half, some of which roiled the nation and led to fierce criticism of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration enforcement.

Trump and his administration have routinely said they are targeting immigrants who have a criminal history, but the federal government’s data shows that a majority of the people ICE has arrested under the second Trump administration don’t have criminal convictions.

ICE’s description of the Houston shooting is similar to claims in other cases which were later contradicted by video evidence or eyewitness statements. In Texas last year, an agent shot and killed a man on South Padre Island. The agent said the man’s car slightly struck him and he feared for his life. Lawyers for the man’s family and a witness disputed the official account.

By late Tuesday, no law enforcement or bystander videos had been released or emerged to corroborate or contradict ICE’s description of the Houston incident.

The Houston Police Department said Tuesday its officers were not part of the ICE operation and they only showed up afterward to help with directing traffic.

[…]

U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said the man’s family and her constituents “deserve a complete and transparent accounting” of the fatal shooting.

“ICE has released an initial account, but the facts must be independently and thoroughly investigated, including the circumstances that led to the use of deadly force,” Garcia said in a post on X. “All available footage, communications, and other evidence should be preserved and reviewed as part of a full and impartial investigation.”

Alejandra Salinas, a progressive Houston City Council member, echoed that call along with [Rep. Christian] Menefee, the Houston Democrat.

LULAC, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization, started a petition demanding an independent investigation and requesting that “every piece of evidence” be released to the public.

The petition cites an unrelated case in Chicago in which a Border Patrol agent’s statements of firing in self-defense was disputed by video footage and his own text messages.

The Harris County District Attorney’s office said in a statement that the case was an “active federal investigation” but did not answer questions about whether its office was investigating the shooting or planned on presenting the case to a grand jury. It also did not answer a question about whether its civil rights division, which typically reviews police shootings in the county, has any staff assigned to investigate it.

“Our office will collaborate with federal authorities to ensure a thorough local review of the evidence,” the district attorney’s spokesperson Courtney Fischer said in a statement.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which investigates police shootings around the state, did not immediately respond to questions about whether it is doing its own probe into Tuesday’s shooting.

ICE and its lawless marauding never went away after LA and Chicago and Minnesota. They just got quieter about the bad things they were doing, in the hope that we’d lose focus on them. As for their claims about what happened here, we cannot take anything ICE says at face value, their track record of blatant dishonesty is far too long for that. I don’t know who else may be tasked with investigating what happened, but at this point it won’t be HPD.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire declined to seek a city-led investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, saying there cannot be a city investigation while a federal investigation is ongoing.

“We’re monitoring it very carefully,” Whitmire said. “It’s truly a tragedy… But there’s no involvement with HPD.”

Whitmire said it was a tragic, complex issue and his prayers go out to the family and the community that “feels the pain.”

[…]

A handful of city council members called for the city to conduct an independent investigation, despite the mayor’s decision.

“This is the City of Houston. What happens here is our responsibility as well,” said council member Edward Pollard. “We have all the right to ask for video footage in the area from any business owner, from any camera that is accessible to us, to be able to get witness statements, to talk to the community, to try and figure out what happened.

“We can’t just leave everything up to the federal government and sit back and hope that they will be transparent regarding their own agency and their own actions,” Pollard said.

Council Member Alejandra Salinas also called for a city-led investigation in an Op-ed in the Houston Chronicle.

“We owe Salgado Araujo and his family nothing less than truth, transparency and action,” Salinas wrote. “We must not allow ICE’s violence to become normal in the streets of Houston.”

Council Member Joaquin Martinez, who represents the Magnolia Park area, didn’t call for a city-led investigation, but said his office is in communication with U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s office, whose district also represents the area and is calling for an independent investigation.

“I want to reassure the community HPD was not there,” Martinez said. “It’s important to ensure we’re not conflating the two.”

Interim Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin echoed similar concerns, saying late Tuesday that her office,” stands ready to support our community and any local investigation into how this tragedy unfolded.”

The League of United Latin American Citizens launched a fundraiser for Araujo’s family Wednesday morning. LULAC has also called on HPD to lead an investigation into the shooting.

See here for ongoing updates from the Chron, here for CM Salinas’ op-ed, and here for what we know so far. If I were Mayor, I’d want my own people doing an investigation, so that I could feel confident I knew what was what. Perhaps Mayor Whitmire will change his mind on this.

I’m going to quote from the TPM Wednesday morning memo to remind us all why we need a real investigation.

ICE, which has been notoriously unreliable in providing accurate details of shooting incidents, issued a statement from its acting director with an interesting caveat that seems like a nod to its troubling track record (emphasis mine): “From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

The shooting is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.

In an unrelated case in Nebraska last week, a Venezulean man pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury as part of a plea agreement after the case against him for attempted murder of a federal officer fell apart. While DHS and federal prosecutors originally claimed that he had “violently attacked an ICE agent,” including choking her and slamming her head into the ground, video evidence of his arrest later contradicted those claims, Nebraska Public Radio reported.

The allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence,” U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said during sentencing, adding that he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”

The truth will eventually come out, and there will be justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and his family, and for so many others like them. I’d prefer that to be sooner, and the best way to make that happen is to be as proactive as possible about it. The Trib, Texas Public Radio, and Slate have more.

Posted in La Migra | Tagged Abbie Kamin, Alejandra Salinas, Christian Menefee, District Attorney, Donald Trump, DPS, Edward Pollard, Homeland Security, Houston, HPD, ICE, immigration, John Whitmire, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, LULAC, Sylvia Garcia, Texas | 3 Comments

Vouchers aren’t all that for special ed students

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Not at all surprising.

One of the biggest selling points of Texas’ new private school voucher program was that it would support students with disabilities, offering up to $30,000 in state-funded accounts for tuition and other services.

The possibility drew thousands of applications from across Texas, and hundreds of families flooded public school districts with requests for special education evaluations to qualify for higher amounts.

However, fewer than 30 students with disabilities actually received the $30,000 maximum, according to data from the Comptroller’s Office. That’s less than 1% of applicants who indicated that they had a disability.

It’s something the Texas Education Freedom Account directors tried to warn parents about earlier this year. “Most students will receive less than the maximum,” a handout about special education vouchers read.

But many families still hoped that they would get closer to $30,000 to pay for private schools dedicated to students with disabilities, which can easily cost between $25,000 to $60,000 a year, according to a Chronicle analysis.

One in four of the over 100,000 students awarded vouchers had a documented disability, and their average funding award was about $16,000, or roughly half the maximum amount, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Office. While nearly 13,000 families received more than the base amount, only around 220 families received over $20,000, records shared with the Chronicle from June 23 show.

“The headline in everything we communicated was: ‘Homeschoolers get $2,000, private school students get $10,474 and students in special education get up to $30,000,’” said Travis Pillow, communications director for the education accounts. “It might be natural to see that round number and say, ‘My student is getting $30,000.’ When in reality, the ‘up to’ was very important, and the vast majority are getting less than that.”

Dee Carney, director of the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, said families told her group through its online comment form they were “surprised and disappointed” by the amount of funding they received. Carney said some families were also struggling to find a private school that would enroll some of those students with disabilities.

“That disconnect raises important questions about whether the program can deliver on its supporters’ promises or whether vouchers will offer more options on paper than in practice,” Carney said.

The answer to those questions are No. There are some complicated technical reasons for this that are stated in the story (gift link), and there will be some changes made to the funding formula over time, so what is true today may not be true tomorrow. I certainly don’t want to make light of the challenges that parents of special needs kids face – they are significant and hard to overcome, often because of obscure and byzantine rules and programs on offer for them. But the primary purpose of these vouchers has always been to funnel money to families whose children have never attended and would never attend public schools. On that score, it’s working as intended. If what we really want to do is improve education access and outcomes for special ed students, the way to do that is to appropriate sufficient funding for all of those students in every public school. There’s nothing complicated or luck-of-the-draw about that. I’ll leave it to you to ponder why we don’t do that.

Posted in School days | Tagged Comptroller, Greg Abbott, school finance, schools, special education, Texas, Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, The Lege, vouchers | 1 Comment

SCOTUS lets Texas app age verification law be enforced for now

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Welp.

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for Texas to enforce a new state law that requires Apple and Google to verify the age of app store users as part of an effort to give parents more control over the content their children download.

The court’s brief order came in response to an emergency request from the tech companies and a group of students, who had told the justices that the law violated their free speech rights and asked that it be blocked.

The order is a temporary place holder that sets the rules while litigation continues in the lower courts over the constitutionality of the Texas law. The justices did not include their reasons, which is typical when they issue emergency orders, and there were no noted dissents.

Texas is one of 20 states that have passed or considered similar age-verification laws for electronic devices, placing new burdens on tech giants to restrict children’s access to apps amid a rising backlash against social media and its impact on young people.

[…]

The Texas requirement was challenged by the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include Google and Apple, as well as Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, which advocates for student involvement in education-related policymaking.

They argue that the law unconstitutionally “deputizes app stores to police both minors’ and adults’ threshold access to vast amounts of online speech.”

The companies said in a court filing that they already provided parental controls that allow parents to lock their children’s screens for bedtime, block unwanted apps, filter content by age and set up an approval process for purchases and downloads.

In response to the court’s order on Monday, Matt Schruers, the C.C.I.A. president, said in a statement that the organization would continue to press its case in the lower courts, where “we will demonstrate how the Texas App Store Accountability Act violates the First Amendment.”

“Accessing the internet should not require surrendering personal data, just as entering a bookstore should not require showing government identification,” he wrote.

See here for the previous update. I said at the time that the plaintiffs petitioned SCOTUS for relief that we’d probably get a quick ruling, and indeed we did, in about three weeks’ time. Not much to add now, the lawsuit will presumably proceed on the merits case, and in a few years we’ll be done. SCOTUSBlog and the Current have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged age verification, Apple, Computer & Communications Industry Association, data privacy, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Google, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, SCOTUS, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, Texas, The Lege | Leave a comment

Ken Paxton, voting scofflaw

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Absolutely brilliant.

Still a crook any way you look

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.

[…]

State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.

Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.

“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”

Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.

“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.

Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.

“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.

[…]

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.

“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”

Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.

“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”

There’s more, so read the rest. I’d say the first order of business is for all interested parties to send in a tip about this to that “vote fraud” hotline, and for criminal complaints to be filed in Denton and Collin counties. None of that will go anywhere, of course, but it’s important to have a paper trail. After that, bring this up at every opportunity, both to throw some mud on the extremely tired “vote fraud” narrative and to remind everyone that this is yet another example of Paxton being a lawbreaker in general. Most importantly, have fun with this. Let a million memes bloom. Ken Paxton is a gift that keeps on giving. Let’s not waste it.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Angela Paxton, Collin County, Denton County, Election 2026, James Talarico, Ken Paxton, Senate, Texas, voter registration | 4 Comments

Countersuit filed in Fort Bend County Judge dispute

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Let’s go.

Just hours after interim County Judge Daniel Wong sued County Attorney Bridgette Smith-Lawson on Monday, Smith-Lawson responded with a legal action seeking to remove Wong from office.

The fight has played out in news conferences, contentious Commissioners Court meetings and now competing lawsuits.

In her filing, Smith-Lawson asks a judge to rule that Wong has no legal right to remain county judge. She’s also asking the court to stop him from acting as county judge while the case moves forward and to fast-track the dispute.

The latest legal clash stems from Wong’s appointment in April after visiting Judge Jeth Jones temporarily suspended then-County Judge KP George during a civil removal lawsuit filed by Fort Bend County resident Sarah Roberts.

Jones appointed Wong to perform the duties of county judge while that case was pending.

[…]

Smith-Lawson in the lawsuit contends that Wong should never have been appointed in the first place because the lawsuit that put him in office was prosecuted by a private citizen instead of the State of Texas. Because of that, she argues, the judge who appointed Wong didn’t have the legal authority to do so.

Even if the appointment was valid, Smith-Lawson adds, Wong’s authority ended when Roberts dismissed the lawsuit that led to his appointment.

Smith-Lawson is also asking the court to issue emergency orders preventing Wong from acting as county judge while the legal fight plays out.

“As Fort Bend County Attorney, I am acting squarely within my statutory duty to represent the State in District Court and to bring quo warranto proceedings when someone is alleged to be unlawfully holding a public office,” Smith-Lawson said in a statement.

See here, here, and here for some background. According to Houston Public Media, the two lawsuits were filed in different courts, so I’m not sure how that will play out logistically. Normally, I expect multiple filings like these to get consolidated, but I don’t know how that might work here. Seems to me if they proceed separately there might be some incentive to be the first to get a ruling, and it feels like it might get messy from there. I will note that in the comments to the previous post there is a note about a quo warranto filing; I will leave it to the people who have access to the Fort Bend County District Clerk’s filing system whether the Smith-Lawson suit uses that statute. I can hardly wait to see what comes next.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters | Tagged Bridgette Smith-Lawson, Commissioners Court, County Judge, Daniel Wong, Dexter McCoy, Election 2026, Fort Bend County, KP George, lawsuit, Texas | 1 Comment

When will the Collier lawsuit be heard?

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

This was the most recent update I found, about a week after the stories about the lawsuit being filed.

Mike Collier

Collier filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s ballot access laws. He argues they violate the constitutional rights of independent candidates and voters.

No date has been set yet, though. While Collier’s lawyers are confident the issue will be dealt with in a timely manner, if the court does not rule in his favor, Collier will not be on the ballot.

And the due date for the signatures is Thursday, June 25.

“I can tell you that the Constitution doesn’t say anything about signatures to get on the ballot, neither the U.S. Constitution nor the state Constitution. This requirement, which is too hard to meet, is a construct of the legislature,” Collier said. “I have a constitutional right to run for office. Jason, you have a constitutional right to have choices and to vote as you see fit.”

Collier is also challenging a provision that prohibits Texans who vote in a primary from signing an independent candidate’s ballot petition.

See here for the background. The main lesson here is that the federal courts do not move quickly. We’re six weeks or so from federal and state deadlines about when ballots must be printed and sent to overseas voters, so who knows whether there will even be the opportunity for there to be a ruling in time for this election. If there is, then the possible remedy of giving Collier more time to collect signatures is going to be moot soon. Maybe that makes putting him on the ballot as a remedy if he succeeds on one or more of his complaints more likely, and maybe it makes a remedy of “this law is invalidated for the 2028 filing period” more likely, who knows. And that presumes he does prevail – which I do think he should on the “less time to collect signatures for races where there was a runoff” question – on at least one issue. All I can say right now is that the clock is ticking.

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, Collier filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on June 26. Still no word about this being on a court calendar. (Correction made, I originally said June 25 for the filing date.)

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters | Tagged Dan Patrick, Election 2026, filing deadline, lawsuit, Lite Gov, Mike Collier, petitions, primaries, runoff, Texas, The Lege, Vikki Goodwin | 2 Comments

Interim County Judge Wong sues to stay in office

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

One way or another, this needs to be decided by a judge.

Fort Bend’s battle over who is legally running county government is now headed to court.

Fort Bend interim County Judge Daniel Wong filed suit Monday against County Attorney Bridgette Smith-Lawson, asking a district court to declare that he remains the county’s lawful judge despite Smith-Lawson’s conclusion that his appointment ended last month.

The lawsuit asks the court to declare that Wong’s appointment remains valid, that the Texas Constitution requires him to continue serving until a successor is qualified and that Smith-Lawson exceeded her legal authority by directing county employees to treat his appointment as terminated.

It also seeks temporary and permanent injunctions preventing further actions that interfere with his appointment.

Smith-Lawson said Monday she stands by her legal opinion that Wong’s appointment ended when the civil removal lawsuit was dismissed and called the lawsuit “a professional bullying tactic disguised in a lawsuit.” She said her office has a duty to advise county officials when it believes legal exposure exists and said a formal response to the lawsuit is forthcoming.

[…]

The lawsuit alleges Smith-Lawson refused to provide legal advice to Commissioners Court during a closed executive session because she disputed Wong’s authority to preside.

Wong asks the court to declare that his appointment remains in effect, that the Texas Constitution requires him to continue serving until a successor is qualified and that Smith-Lawson acted outside her legal authority by directing county employees to terminate his access to county resources. He also asks the court to order Smith-Lawson to rescind those directives.

Chris Hilton, one of Wong’s attorneys, said the lawsuit seeks to confirm that Wong’s appointment remains valid.

“Bridgette Smith-Lawson is wasting valuable Fort Bend County resources in pursuit of her own partisan, political agenda,” Hilton said in a statement. “Rather than serve her constituents, she is abusing her office by pushing ridiculous opinions that have no basis in law and bullying County employees into helping her block Judge Wong from doing his job.”

In her response Monday, Smith-Lawson said she was carrying out the responsibilities of her office by advising county officials of what she believes is the legal status of Wong’s appointment.

“I am exercising the duties of this office which is to inform the members of the court and employees of information that would create legal exposure which includes someone occupying an office without clear legal authority to do so,” she said.

Smith-Lawson also said the dispute reflects what she described as a broader conflict between her office and the Republican majority on Commissioners Court following the court’s partisan shift last year. She said the county has spent taxpayer dollars on outside legal counsel instead of relying on the county attorney’s office.

“I am not surprised at this lawsuit, but I am disappointed,” Smith-Lawson said. “Only the people of Fort Bend County and their tax dollars will suffer.”

See here and here for some background. I don’t think either Wong or Smith-Lawson are making ridiculous arguments, which is why I think it’s best to let a judge settle it. It doesn’t sound like there’s been any application of this law, at least not anytime recently, so who knows what a closer look might find. I do think the argument that the appointment was meant to be temporary and comes with an expiration date is sound and is what the law ought to be – let the elected Commissioners Court make the longer-lasting decision, it’s more democratic. I also think this is a solid argument for why a caretaker should be the default choice as a temporary replacement, but that’s outside the scope of the law or this dispute. I hope there’s a quick court date for this, let’s get it settled one way or the other.

More on Mike Miles’ AI obsession

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

There’s so much wrong with this, I’ll limit myself to my three main complaints.

While many school districts across the country are reducing screen time for students, Houston ISD is going in the opposite direction with its educational technology, prompting concerns from some parents.

Districts in California, Pennsylvania and Texas have introduced new guidelines to limit devices in classrooms after parents have protested the screens are harming their children’s development.

Meanwhile, leaders at HISD continue to adopt technology and experiment with AI, such as AI-generated curriculum, ChatGPT for special education, and other learning platforms. All high school students receive a Chromebook, and in August, HISD will debut its new AI-focused model, called Future 2 schools, which have drawn mixed reactions from the community.

State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said during an April virtual town hall that the district does not “overwhelm” students with screen time during the day. In fact, he said the district is “geared to non-screen time” and people are complaining that students are reading too many paper packets.

“We’re not anti-AI. We’re not overwhelmed by AI. There won’t be a lot of screen time (in Future 2) but there will be some screen time, and we’re not going to apologize for that,” Miles said. “Kids need a little bit of that if they’re going to be successful in the future.”

[…]

Experts said increased technology use in schools can have long-term effects on students.

David Kahn, a clinical assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University, said schools need to make sure that they are not exposing students to an excessive amount of screen use, which can cause attention problems for children.

“I recommend that tablets be used at a minimum at the elementary school level,” Kahn said. “And then, of course, once you get into middle school and high school, certainly by high school, it becomes a little bit more age appropriate, for a lot of the instruction to involve tablet-based learning.”

Kahn said he supports more traditional assignments with paper and pencils in Texas schools. However, he said they must expose students to screens to a certain extent because students take state standardized exams online, which measure their performance in critical subjects like reading and math.

“The reality is screens are a big part of our daily lives,” Kahn said. “They’re not going to go away, and they’re going to be a big part of our children’s lives, but we also need to make sure that from a developmental perspective, we are giving children the access to traditional paper-pencil activities, traditional project-based activities that have always been part of learning.”

HISD’s approach to technology has also expanded beyond student devices.

The district has also embraced generative artificial intelligence under Miles, including a partnership with an AI company to produce thousands of reading passages and the use of ChatGPT to help teachers manage special education compliance.

[HISD parent Casey] Williams said there’s not much of a difference in what her son learns online in school versus the paper packets which she says are AI-generated. She said she’s seen her son and his friends become irritated and offended by the use of AI to produce class work, which she said is often riddled with typos and errors.

“There is an entire wealth of curricula out there that’s not AI-generated, that’s not screen-focused, that if they were just to give the teachers enough autonomy to use it, it certainly exists,” Williams said. “I’ve seen quality curriculum. I know what that looks like, so it’s not like, ‘Oh, they either have screen time or they have these paper packets.’ That’s a false dichotomy.”

See here, here, and here for some background. I’ve made these arguments before but I’m going to make them again here because they’re worth repeating.

1. We don’t know what the best practices are for using AI in schools. The technology is well ahead of the research, and it changes rapidly. Someone needs to be the early adopter – or rather, someone will be the early adopter – which will help us better understand the good and the bad of AI in schools, but that doesn’t have to be us. The risk that we’re doing at least some of it wrong is likely to be significant, more than enough to outweigh the possibility that we’re doing enough right to gain a measurable advantage. As with technology overall in the classroom, for which there’s plenty of evidence that we have done harmful things, even things that seemed like common sense and for which there was overwhelming consensus, there is much to be said for hanging back a bit and learning from the experiences of the pioneers.

2. There has been zero opportunity for input and feedback from parents, students, teachers, and principals. None of them have any voice in part because Mike Miles doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks, and in part because he has no oversight from an elected Board that does take their constituents’ concerns into account. Maybe some schools and principals would have wanted to be more aggressive in this approach while others preferred to wait. An approach that catered to both would both provide any available early mover’s advantage while also giving first-hand data on what worked well and what needed refinement. It would also show HISD as a district that took its stakeholders’ needs seriously, a fine quality to have in these times of enrollment decline.

3. As a corollary to #2, did you notice that bit about HISD “partnering” with an AI company to produce all that material? What assurance do we have that Mike Miles isn’t making some money on this deal, or throwing some business at a friend/relative/person of interest he’d like to do some real business with once he’s free of these shackles? The answer is none, because we have a Board that answers to Mike Miles (and Mike Morath), not the other way around. Maybe it’s all on the up-and-up. I have no evidence to suggest otherwise. What I am saying is that the normal process of review and oversight that we depend on is not present.

4. None of this was in the mandate Mike Miles was given to get HISD out of state-takeover hell back in 2023. I guess I’m never sure how much of this complaint is reasonable, in a “he’s stretched the takeover law in a way that is not consistent with its intent, which should be addressed by the Legislature in a way that clarifies things, hopefully in the narrower direction that I would prefer”, and not just in a “I don’t like Mike Miles and so I’m looking for things to complain about” way. But I did believe then and still believe now that his mandate was to improve the performance of the schools that had put or could put HISD in the position to be taken over, while also addressing certain specific problems with HISD’s special education program. He has, to varying degrees, done those things, which I would have hoped would have put us on a firmer timeline for being released from captivity. But he has also meddled with many other aspects of HISD’s operations and the operations of its schools and teachers, which I believe is both outside his scope and a distraction from his mandate that could be slowing down his progress on it.

If you believe that he was appointed as HISD Superintendent and thus gets to operate as any Superintendent would do, I can’t say that’s an unreasonable interpretation of the law or of TEA Commissioner Mike Morath’s power in appointing him and setting the “get out of mandate” terms. What I can say is that my interpretation – that he is to focus on the compliance matters and act as a mostly light-touch caretaker of everything else until a Superintendent appointed by an elected Board of Trustees can be named – is also perfectly reasonable. It bothers the hell out of me that he’s got to do his thing in such an unfettered and unquestioned manner.

OK, list of complaints is over now. Until the next time I feel compelled to reiterate them all again.

Posted in School days | Tagged artificial intelligence, Board of Managers, cellphones, ChatGPT, Future 2, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Mike Miles, Mike Morath, New Education System, special education, Texas Education Agency, The Lege | Leave a comment

Slightly more kindergartners have the measles vaccination

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The overall news is still very mixed, but it’s at least something.

While more than 92% of Texas kindergarteners and 7th graders were fully vaccinated in the 2025-26 school year for each vaccine required to attend school, the coverage rates remained lower than before the COVID-19 pandemic, state data released Wednesday shows.

Of note in the latest report released by the Texas Department of State Health Services, the statewide measles coverage rate of kindergarteners increased from 93.2% to 93.3% after dropping about four percentage points in a decade. Also, the rate of kindergarteners opting out of the measles vaccine via a “conscientious exemption” increased by more than half of a percentage point, the largest single-year increase in more than a decade.

The latest data comes on the heels of the 2025 West Texas measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of two school-age children. Texas lawmakers also approved a bill last year that did away with a requirement that the state must mail vaccine exemptions forms to parents, and instead, made the form downloadable. Parents must still get the form notarized, though.

[…]

Of the 6,176 public and private schools sent the vaccination survey, 87.7% responded to the state. Nearly 3%, or more than 150,000, of the K-12 students in the survey had a conscientious exemption for at least one vaccine on file at their schools, 20,000 more than the previous school year’s survey. In Texas, each grade level has its own vaccination requirement.

The statewide kindergarten exemption rate increased to 4.45%, double the rate from before the pandemic. Exemption rates for each 7th grade vaccine also increased.

“These numbers are concerning but not surprising,” said Becca Harkleroad, the executive director of the Texas School Nurses Organization. “We’ve been watching trust in science erode over the past several years, and the COVID vaccine rollout only accelerated that. Now, five years later, we’re seeing those consequences show up in the data.”

A year ago at this time, the state’s biggest measles outbreak in 30 years — which started in Gaines County and spread rapidly over the winter — was dissipating.

That may have had some impact on why the statewide measles coverage rate for kindergarteners grew, but 7th grade measles coverage stayed nearly the same and those gains in the lower grade did not occur in all counties.

Compared to the previous school year, 18 fewer counties had kindergarten measles vaccination rates at the 95% benchmark for herd immunity. The number of counties where at least 5% of kindergarteners had a conscientious exemption for measles on file increased from 98 to 132, representing 52% of all counties. Ninety six of 252 counties met the kindergarten benchmark of 95% vaccination against measles.

The measles vaccination rate for kindergarteners in Gaines County, the epicenter of the 2025 outbreak, increased by more than two percentage points to 80% but it was still short of the herd immunity benchmark due to conscientious exemptions.

The kindergarten measles coverage rate for Terry County, which reported the second-most measles during last year’s outbreak, increased by more than two percentage points to almost 96%. In the other two counties with more than 50 outbreak cases, El Paso and Lubbock, kindergarten measles vaccination rates changed by less than one percentage point.

“Good on the families in the outbreak affected areas who got their children vaccinated,” Rekha Lakshmanan, executive director of The Immunization Partnership, said. “While the increase in the vaccination rate is small, an increase is an increase, and we need to keep supporting and talking with families about the consequences of these diseases and why vaccinating has its benefits.”

While measles vaccination rates increased for kindergarteners, vaccination rates for Hepatitis B and whooping cough narrowly declined. Lakshmanan was particularly alarmed by the exemption rate for polio — 4.59% of kindergarteners – which doubled since the pandemic. Polio is among the more devastating vaccine-preventable and potentially deadly diseases because of the irreversible paralysis it can cause.

“The data in the immunization report is the tip of the iceberg of the consequences of loosening school vaccine exemptions,” Lakshmanan said. “I hope we don’t see a repeat of the 2025 measles outbreak because of more exemptions, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Harkleroad pointed out that this year’s kindergarteners were born around 2020, right as the pandemic was disrupting health appointments. “Lots of kids skipped well-child visits, which disrupted traditional vaccine schedules,” she said. “It’s plausible we’re just now seeing the consequences of that in our Hep B numbers since that series begins at birth.”

The data isn’t perfect but it’s what we’ve got. There were a few signs that the areas most affected were responding by getting more kids vaccinated – you can see it in Terry County’s numbers, for one – but the overall trend remains bad. And not just measles, but whooping cough, and even polio, for crying out loud. There’s now a lot of people doing a lot of hard work to try to overcome the avalanche of bullshit about vaccines, but that’s going to take years to see results. Either that, or a large enough wave of children dying or facing lifelong health issues for even the most RFK-addled among us to be unable to ignore. In the meantime, even a tiny and mostly ephemeral tick upwards is worth celebrating.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged El Paso, Gaines County, Lubbock, measles, polio, schools, Terry County, Texas, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas School Nurses Organization, The Immunization Partnership, vaccinations, whooping cough | Leave a comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of July 6

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes we are on a much better path for the next 250 years as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Off the Kuff analyzes the NYT poll of the Texas Senate race.

SocraticGadfly offers critical reviews of a pair of books broadly related to the semiquincentennial — an interesting new take on the formation of the Constitution and a “resistance” book.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project attended a new weekly pro-democracy protest in League City, Galveston County. It’s essential people see others willing to stand openly & confidently for democracy no matter the aggression of the right.

===============================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Alison Cook encourages you to plant a fig tree.

Bayou City Sludge introduces you to some of the fat cat Republican donors in our fair city.

The Current showcases the party platform differences on data centers.

The Lone Star Project argues every Texas Republican that supports Ken Paxton is as unfit for office as Paxton is.

The Waco Bridge shows how to swim safely in nature.

Amanda Marcotte suggests Texas Republicans may come to regret mandating Bible studies in the classroom.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Leave a comment

More weasel words on data centers from Abbott

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

He really is trying to find the guy that did this.

Gov. Greg Abbott called for blocking new data center development in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas on Tuesday.

“We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott said at the Bullard event, which primarily discussed his plan to cut property taxes, adding that this issue “dovetails right into fighting for East Texas values.”

Abbott’s push for a prohibition in rural neighborhoods appears to go further than a sweeping regulatory framework he unveiled earlier this month, which called for data centers to add new power generation to the grid, pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their own water and implement measures such as setbacks, among other proposals aimed at limiting their impact on residential communities.

[…]

“I made clear already: Any AI data center even thinking about coming here — they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state,” he said. “We must eliminate the tax break they are getting. They must be responsible for funding their own projects here in Texas. We will get that done.”

In outlining his regulatory recommendations this month, Abbott instructed the Public Utility Commission to “guarantee any data center development does not come at the cost of Texans and our local communities” and to consider how to “minimize adverse impacts on local communities.”

The third-term Republican governor had previously been enthusiastic about the influx of companies seeking to build the facilities, calling Texas “the epicenter of AI development” when he announced in November that Google had made a $40 billion investment in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure in the state.

Abbott has received over $2 million from people and companies linked to the tech and AI industries since last year, E&E News by Politico reported in April.

His call for a ban in rural neighborhoods Tuesday comes as many rural counties and activists have attempted to pass moratoriums and called for the Legislature to grant them greater local control to prevent the construction of the centers. Opponents argue that the oftentimes gigantic operations will put their water availability and air quality at risk and threaten to hike their power bills.

The Data Center Coalition, a trade group for the industry, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it has argued that its members are providing a critical service that the digital world depends upon, bringing immense property tax benefits and helping the U.S. win the AI war over foreign adversaries. The group has also pointed to technological advancements that reduce the facilities’ water needs.

A Texas Tribune analysis earlier this month found that nearly half of planned data centers in the state are set to be built in unincorporated areas not governed by cities or towns, up from 12% now.

See here for some background. I don’t have any particular quibble with the proposed regulations, but the reason we’re here today is because Abbott had not thoughts or cares about the possible consequences of flinging the gates (and the tax breaks) wide open in the first place. We could have had this kind of framework in place much earlier on, when it was easy to foresee what the downstream effects were going to be, and we could have given cities and counties more tools and techniques to at least have a say in how this would play out in their own backyards. But that’s not how weak leaders like Greg Abbott operate. And so, as usual, he’s scrambling to limit the damage that he himself caused.

Posted in Election 2026, The great state of Texas | Tagged Data Center Coalition, data centers, Election 2026, electricity, ERCOT, Gina Hinojosa, Governor, Greg Abbott, local control, Paul Bettencourt, Public Utility Commission, sales taxes, Texas, The Lege, water | Leave a comment

Buzbee lawsuits against Jay-Z dismissed

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Just checking in.

A Houston judge has dismissed several lawsuits filed by prolific attorney Tony Buzbee over allegations that Jay-Z and his company, Roc Nation, recruited Buzbee’s former clients to sue his law firm.

The ruling by Judge Kristen Hawkins this week is the latest development in a legal battle that began in December 2024, when Buzbee amended a lawsuit that was part of a series of legal actions he brought against music mogul Sean Combs to also name Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. Buzbee’s client alleged that Carter and Combs raped her when she was 13 at a party in 2000, allegations Carter and Combs denied. The woman later voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit.

Days later, Buzbee’s law firm sued Carter and Roc Nation’s lawyers, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, accusing them of trying to recruit current and former clients of Buzbee to sue the attorney’s firm in retaliation for the legal action against the musician.

“Buzbee filed with fury; the court ruled with finality,” said Gregg Costa, who represented an attorney from Roc Nation.

Buzbee on Thursday told the Chronicle that he would appeal the decision or “refile in a different form.”

See here, here, here, here, and here for some background. I don’t have anything to add other than to note that the most recent link was about a defamation lawsuit filed by Jay-Z against Buzbee in California. So even if Buzbee does not appeal or refile his lawsuits, we’re not done with this story. I started watching, I may as well keep up with it.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged California, Jay-Z, lawsuit, rape, Sean Combs, sexual harassment, Texas, Tony Buzbee | Leave a comment

Missing the old SWC

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

A little trip down memory lane.

In early June, when former Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s playing status was still up in the air, a group of key Red Raiders released a 21-minute video, explaining the school’s position in Sorsby’s fight to retain his eligibility and why they supported the quarterback in that battle.

The video elicited a wide range of responses, but this post from in-state rival TCU garnered the most attention.

— TCU Football (@TCUFootball) 9:35 PM – 11 June 2026

And the Horned Frogs weren’t the only ones to jab Texas Tech this offseason: Texas seemingly got in the mix in May when coach Steve Sarkisian, at a speaking engagement in Houston, alluded to “a team in our state in another conference with a schedule that I would argue, if I played with our twos and threes, we could go undefeated.”

These mostly harmless quips resemble the type of pettiness that once ran roughshod across the Lone Star State, back when eight Texas programs were members of the Southwest Conference. Many things make college football special, but talking trash with and beating your rivals and/or neighbors ranks near the top. Few leagues manifested that better than the SWC, which was once home to Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Rice, SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU and Texas Tech, before it fractured in the early 1990s and dissolved for good in 1996.

“In Dallas or Houston, graduates from all the schools would have lunch and argue (about each other’s schools),” retired Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds once told me. “It was personal. It wasn’t somebody from Nebraska or Missouri. It was your neighbor, with flags out in their front yard, next door to each other.”

Now 30 years removed from the SWC’s demise, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the league, its death, the legacy it left and how it foreshadowed and informed the changes in the sport we saw in the decades that followed, all the way through the present.

I think about it sometimes too. I don’t want to get all wrapped up in nostalgia, things change and we move on, but I don’t mind saying that in some basic ways, college football isn’t as fun or fan-friendly as it once was. I’ll crib my own comment about this article from the Let’s be honest: we can’t get a million fans for Rice University.

I didn’t grow up in Texas, so I don’t have the real old-time memories of the SWC, but it’s so clear that the demise of the SWC would foretell the ways in which college sports in general and football in particular are vastly different now.

It’s all the small ways that we all related to each other as conference mates and rivals that are just gone, for better and worse. One of my first thoughts in reading this story was how the Brandon Sorsby saga would have been such a golden opportunity for the MOB. And even if Texas Tech wasn’t a home game for us this year, it wouldn’t matter because we could include it in the show we did for UT, because they’d enjoy it as much as we did.

Sure, we can (and really should) do a Brandon Sorsby bit this year, but it will just be for us. And it’s not just that it won’t mean as much to our AAC colleagues, it won’t mean as much to us, because who even are Texas Tech and Brendan Sorsby to us nowadays? It’s losing the loving-but-dysfunctional family vibe of the SWC that diminishes it. I for one miss that, even as a non-native Texan.

It’s okay to miss things. I miss the old SWC. I’m sure I watch more college football now than I ever did then – there’s much more of it available to watch, if nothing else. As far as it matters to anyone who matters, that’s all that matters. We still lost something in the trade, and those of us who were there when it was different ought to remember that while we’re still here.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged Arkansas, Brendan Sorsby, football, NCAA, Rice University, Southwest Conference, TCU, Texas, Texas Tech, The MOB, UT | 1 Comment

Weekend link dump for July 5

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Oh, Peppa, no. Just, no.

“The WNBA’s biggest PR problem isn’t the overly physical play, [Caitlin] Clark’s complaining, poor refereeing, or even the bad-faith actors who look at every moment like it’s the Zapruder film, in search of ways to ignite culture wars. The WNBA’s biggest problem is the gulf between how good it feels to be a WNBA fan and how toxic the league seems from the outside looking in.”

“One annoying thing about the WNBA season is that it coincides with precisely the time of year when college football and NFL commentators have their most free time. If Fever games constitute your only exposure to the WNBA, I can see why it might feel like the player who has the ball in her hand more often than anyone else in those games is subject to outsized defensive attention.”

“If you’ve ever been shocked to discover that the soul behind your favorite track actually belongs to a white artist, then this one’s for you!”

“As opposition mounts, some experts wonder how long AI infrastructure can steer clear of the partisanship that defines U.S. politics.”

“The Dirtbags Won’t Save Us”.

If you are able to read this story about RFK Jr’s sauerkraut diet without hearing the opening stanzas of Weird Al’s masterpiece Albuquerque, you are possibly less damaged than I am.

“What can we do to get away from an algorithm that just wants us to consume more and more?”

“What follows is a short, very incomplete list of people I have invited to our home to help me do things for money, with not-so-great results. You can ask my husband all about it. But, please don’t.”

One more reason to Stop using AI-recreated voices of dead actors, even if they’ve been licensed. It’s creepy, and there are living actors who deserve to be employed instead.

“When you see an alligator that’s 13 feet long, that’s probably older than any person making a decision about whether it gets to live or die. Doesn’t an animal that impressive deserve your respect, instead of having some guy fly down from New York for the day to shoot it?”

“Given that the 2026 midterms are about four months away, it is of course good that the Court declined to issue a decision that could disenfranchise tens of millions of mail voters, who tend to cast ballots for Democratic candidates. But it is deeply unnerving to learn that four of the Court’s nine members are willing to upend the electoral processes in more than half of states in service of their demented party leader’s most demented lie. As it turns out, the line between the Court preserving the status quo and the Court plunging the country into a chaotic, anti-democracy nightmare is a single vote.”

“Spare a moment to think about your safety this season, won’t you? Here’s how to protect yourself against drowning, heat exhaustion, tick bites and more.”

“It really was only a matter of time before the anti-abortion movement pulled down its “we care about women” facade and began demanding that women be prosecuted for ending their pregnancies.”

“But the idea that the U.S. now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.””

“One of the biggest folk heroes of this World Cup, Merlín the duck arrived outside Mexico City’s stadium on Wednesday to great fanfare — but was ultimately told he could not remain for Mexico’s match against the Czech Republic.”

RIP, Victor Willis, lead singer for the Village People.

“In nearly every state and territory across the country, the official humanities nonprofits created by a congressional mandate to help make history and literature accessible to all Americans had to give up their anniversary planning when DOGE pulled their federal funding, according to people involved with the councils at both the federal and state level.”

“So: Meta’s in a coolness crisis, cops and stalkers are tainting the concept worse than Google Glassholes ever did, they had one chance. In comes Kylie. With the Starfire glasses, we have a few decades-long arcs coming full circle.”

“But according to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 64% of Americans do not want to live in a primarily Christian nation. Instead, they prefer an America of many faiths without a Christian majority.”

“The pain will be felt across hospitals and emergency rooms, which already operate under persistent staffing shortfalls, but it’s the long-term care sector, including senior care facilities and home care, that will suffer the greatest disruptions”.

In case you wanted to know more about those two crazy people who climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and then were arrested for same.

RIP, Wilford Lloyd Baumes, who developed The Love Boat and executive produced TV’s Wonder Woman.

What Scalzi said. I was ten years old in 1976 and remember the Bicentennial celebration well. It was cool! It was massive! It made me think about the 250-year celebration at the time, even though my kid brain could not comprehend the fifty-year time span in between. To say the least, the 250th was and has been hugely underwhelming and forgettable, especially in comparison.

“The Onion debuts new parody of Alex Jones’ Infowars, will send $100,000 to Sandy Hook families”.

“Spotify has removed about 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s hit song “Earrings” days after the song topped the platform’s daily U.S. chart for the first time, as its surge has been tied to manipulation based around bets on the prediction market Kalshi.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | 2 Comments

The Kerrville floods, one year later

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

This is a hard read, and it leads off with the story of three of the flood’s victims, so skip on by if that’s not how you want to start your day. But it’s worth your time if you can handle the emotion of it all.

Alicia Baker can’t bring herself to clean her daughter’s bedroom.

Eleven-year-old Madelyn “Emmy” Jeffrey left a pile of craft supplies on the floor in their San Antonio home before heading off to the Guadalupe River with her grandparents, where they drowned in the flood last Fourth of July.

A year later, the pile is still there.

Baker, who wears a diamond made from her daughter’s ashes, said seeing the mess allows her to pretend her daughter is away at camp or traveling.

“If all of her things are gone then I can’t rationalize that anymore,” the 43-year-old said.

When the Guadalupe River swelled into a huge, raging waterway in the early morning hours of July 4 last year, it carved a horrific path of destruction. Baker’s daughter and parents, staying at their one-bedroom vacation house by the water, died along with 116 others in Kerr County.

The raging flood toppled old cypress trees that shaded the emerald water where generations of families swam. It washed away cars and entire houses. As one person there put it, the area looked like a bomb had gone off.

Nearly one year later, after months of cleanup and rebuilding, people are still grappling with how to heal both physically and emotionally. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved only slightly more than a fifth of the several thousand applications from Kerr County for assistance, according to a nonprofit tracking the data. The local community foundation meanwhile doled out millions to groups helping people buy new homes or RVs or rebuild. Others still haven’t decided what to do with their land.

Signs of normalcy have reemerged: Crider’s Rodeo and Dance Hall on the river rebuilt in time for its 101st summer season. The Hunt post office, where even the 1,400-pound safe washed away, is going back up, and the Ingram Little League has new fields to play on. Summer camps welcomed back children, eager to keep the magic alive even after 27 girls at Camp Mystic died in the flood.

People returned to the river, to fish, to kayak, to play.

Reminders of the flood linger. The iconic Hunt Store and River Inn remain closed. Camp Mystic is shuttered and last week filed for bankruptcy. More than 90 new flood warning sirens that the directors of Camp Mystic raised money for stand ready to blare while six sirens expected to be paid for with state funds have been installed.

Many say they feel nervous when it rains or haunted by the sounds of screams they heard that night. “Y’ALL OK?” ask yard signs around town that encourage people to seek help. Others carry overwhelming grief of losing a loved one. “Live Like Jane,” says a banner on a fence in memory of one victim, camp director Jane Ragsdale. Small crosses by the river marked the places some Mystic campers were found.

“We are not recovered,” said Austin Dickson, chief executive officer of the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. “We are in recovery, and there is much more work to be done.”

In the months after the flood, when Baker would go by her family property, she would sit on the ledge by the water and reflect on how calm it was. She felt, in those moments, a familiar peace. This was the river she grew up going to camp by and where she and her husband got engaged.

Her fiercely spirited daughter was spending the July 4 holiday with her adoring grandparents. Grandma Penny Jeffrey taught yoga to other seniors and Grandpa Emlyn Jeffrey regularly golfed, dialing his daughters every time he left the course to say he loved them. They picked up Emmy after every day of fifth grade so she could be in safety patrol, helping other kids get to and from car drop-offs. Soon Emmy would start middle school, where she couldn’t wait to learn debate and play sports.

In the early evening on July 3, before eating brisket her grandpa made, Emmy FaceTimed with her mother, who planned to drive out to the river house with her husband and baby in two days. The house, raised on stilts, seemed better prepared to withstand the flood, but the river, choked with debris that included entire houses, swept it away, too.

Seven months later, Baker said she didn’t let herself think too much about what happened because she didn’t want to get stuck in those negative feelings. She still had her baby and husband to get out of bed for. She celebrated her mom’s 70th birthday as they’d planned, going to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York without her. She made Emmy’s 12th birthday pancakes in December without her.

Looking at the river, Baker felt betrayed. How could she still love a place that violently took three people she cherished?

“There are two truths,” Baker said. “This bad thing happened, but it is not a bad place.”

There’s more, so read the rest. And then when you’re ready, read this Chron story.

The post popped up on Alicia Baker’s Facebook newsfeed when she was scrolling on her phone. By the time she looked, it already had dozens of comments, some from people she recognized.

“It’s been nearly a year since a devastating flood along the Guadalupe River killed more than 100 people in Kerr County,” read the post from a local Fox affiliate in early June. “Over the next 27 days, FOX 4 will share 27 updates on the children who died and how their legacy lives on.”

Baker read through the responses.

“There were 119 tragic losses!!!!!!!” one person wrote.

“I’ll remind you of their names,” someone else said, “since you can’t seem to remember.”

“You should fix your headline and stop acting like the politicians that have forgotten about the rest of our community.”

Baker typed her own comment.

“Other children died, including my daughter who was 11,” she said. “This sentiment is wonderful but you’ve left out a whole group of people whose families are also grieving and ensuring their legacies live on.”

The 27 campers and counselors whom the television station promised to commemorate all died at Camp Mystic, the storied girls’ camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Their deaths became the focal point of national attention after the July 4 flood that killed 119 people in Kerr County and at least 135 across Texas.

Nearly a year later, many people in Kerr County say that the focus has come at an unintended cost. They don’t begrudge the attention paid to Camp Mystic or the girls who died there; many have their own history at the camp, or loved one of the lost. But they worry that a disaster that unfolded for miles along the river has come to be remembered as the tragedy of one place.

The flood left almost no one in Kerr County untouched. People either knew someone who died or narrowly escaped the floodwaters. Or they themselves barely survived. Or they searched the riverbanks for survivors and, as the hot days wore on, recovered bodies. Or they organized volunteers, cooked breakfast tacos for families shivering in fire departments or pulled belongings, thick with mud, from the river to return home.

Many survivors say they have come to feel like footnotes in their own trauma. They’ve responded by pushing for further investigations to prevent future heartbreak and with everyday acts of intentional remembrance, carrying the people they lost into the rituals of everyday life so that they can keep on living.

That’s the same Alicia Baker in each story. To put this in a bit of perspective (I think I’ve done this before, but I’ll do it again), 119 deaths in a city of about 24K people means one out of every 200 people died. That would be the equivalent of a disaster in Houston that killed more than ten thousand people. To put it bluntly, that will leave a big and long-lasting scar.

For that first story, I have nothing but love and empathy for the survivors, and I understand why they don’t want to leave. There will almost certainly come a time when that decision won’t be theirs to make, thanks to climate change, but that day is not today. It will take this community a long time to recover, and they will never be the same. I wish them the best as they work towards that. The Chron, which looked at the legislative response after the flood, has more.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Camp Mystic, Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, flooding, Guadalupe River, Kerr County, Kerrville, Texas, The Lege, Upper Guadalupe River Authority | Leave a comment

Brackenridge Park religious liberties plaintiffs petition SCOTUS

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I’ll keep an eye on this.

The legal fight over the future of a sacred Native American religious site at San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

First Liberty Institute and the University of Texas School of Law’s Law and Religion Clinic have filed a petition asking the nation’s highest court to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld a lower court ruling allowing the City of San Antonio to proceed with a portion of its Brackenridge Park redevelopment project.

The case centers on an area near the San Antonio River that members of the Lipan Native American Church say has been a place of worship for centuries. Church leaders argue the city’s plans to remove heritage trees and use bird-deterrent measures that would drive away nesting cormorants would permanently alter the site’s “spiritual ecology” and make it impossible to practice their religion there. The Fifth Circuit acknowledged the sincerity of the church’s religious beliefs but determined the project does not substantially burden the church’s religious exercise.

Stephanie Taub is special counsel with First Liberty Institute and said the city failed to consider alternatives that would have protected the sacred site while still allowing the redevelopment project to proceed.

“The government allowing the city to bulldoze a sacred Native American site is an imposition on religious beliefs that can only be done if there aren’t any other alternatives, and here there were other ways to make it work, and the city just didn’t address them,” said Taub.

Attorneys for the church argue the city could complete the project using less destructive alternatives that would preserve the sacred site while still addressing infrastructure needs. Their petition also contends that courts cannot substitute their own judgment for sincerely held religious beliefs by concluding worship could simply take place somewhere else.

San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park is among the oldest in the city. For the 2022 voter approved bond program, it received $7.5 million of upgrades.

The dispute stems from San Antonio’s long-planned Brackenridge Park bond project, first approved by voters in 2017. The city says the work is needed to stabilize historic river walls, rehabilitate infrastructure, improve public access and restore portions of the park. Earlier this year, city officials said phase one of the project remained delayed while awaiting federal permits, while phase two continued through the city’s historic review process. Previous rulings by both the Texas Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit cleared legal obstacles to the project, although litigation continued through the federal appeals process.

Construction at the park has begun on a separate, nearly $10 million, two-acre nature-based playscape near the Witte Museum and Lambert Beach area, which is expected to open in summer 2027.

See here and here for some background. The Fifth Circuit issued its ruling in March, following the ruling on state law that it had sought from SCOTx. I’ve not expressed any opinion about this case, as it is a complicated and unusual dispute and I’m far too ignorant of the law to offer anything substantive, but seeing that the First Liberty Institute is involved made me sit up and take a closer look. First Liberty is a super malevolent force behind all kinds of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ litigation. It’s generally a safe bet that whatever side of a case they’re on is the wrong side. But I don’t think that UT Law’s Law and Religion Clinic would get in bed with them on something that didn’t have merit. So I will for now at least stay neutral on this one, with an eyebrow raised for the duration. We’ll see if SCOTUS takes this up – if it doesn’t serve their agenda, they may not bother. The Current has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Constitution, coronavirus, Election 2021, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Gary Perez, lawsuit, Lipan-Apache Native American Church, Matilde Torres, quarantine, Ron Nirenberg, San Antonio, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Texas, trees | Leave a comment

Abbott names Schatzline as senior adviser on election policy

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Whatever the hell that means.

Nate Schatzline

State Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, resigned from the Texas House Thursday to take a new position as Gov. Greg Abbott’s senior adviser on election policy.

Schatzline, who was among the most hardline conservative members of the Texas House, is set to lead “policy development and legislative strategy efforts related to election integrity,” according to a Thursday announcement by Abbott’s office.

The two-term lawmaker had been floated in recent weeks as the governor’s potential choice for secretary of state, Texas’ top elections officer, according to unconfirmed media reports that The Texas Tribune could not independently verify. On June 2, Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced she would step down from the office in mid-July, just months before a blockbuster midterm.

[…]

Schatzline’s portfolio for the next legislative session is expected to include closing Texas’ primary elections, or requiring voters to register with a party in order to cast a ballot in the nominating contests. It is set to be a major priority of the Legislature next session, with Abbott announcing his support for doing so at the Texas GOP’s convention last month and the party’s rank-and-file delegates putting it on their policy wishlist.

Republican activists have long pushed to close the primaries, arguing that Democrats and voters who are not truly conservative were casting ballots in GOP primaries and elevating more moderate candidates. Other Republicans, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, have opposed closing the primaries, arguing the move would stifle participation.

The Texas GOP sued Nelson, a former Republican state senator, last year in a bid to close the 2026 primaries. She opposed the idea on the grounds it would “confuse voters, unduly burden election administrators, or otherwise sow chaos or distrust in the electoral process,” she wrote in a court filing, arguing lawmakers could instead take up the issue during their 2027 session.

In Schatzline, the proponents of closing the state’s primaries will have a strong ally.

The hard-right lawmaker authored a bill during the 2025 legislative session that would have done just that. House Bill 4059 was referred to the chamber’s elections committee but never received a hearing.

See here and here for more on the closed primaries stuff. I was concerned that Abbott was going to name Schatzline as the new SOS. I’m not sure how this compares, but it kind of sounds like maybe he’s mostly there for the next session? I can’t tell, and it seems unlikely that he wouldn’t have anything to do during the election. I suppose the best that can be said is that Schatzline – who, let’s be honest, really looks like a guy trying to sell you on some kind of super dodgy crypto scheme – basically accomplished nothing in the Lege, despite being in a comfortable majority the whole time. Whatever quality it is about him that enabled him to do so little, I hope that carries forward for as long as he’s in this role. Which, you know, we could try to bring to an end at the end of this year. I’m just saying.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Donald Trump, Election 2026, Greg Abbott, Jane Nelson, lawsuit, Nate Schatzline, Republican Party, Secretary of State, Senate, Texas, The Lege, voter registration, voter suppression | Leave a comment

The rainbow crosswalk replacements

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

It’s something.

Forced to remove rainbow crosswalks under a state edict to erase “political” messages from their streets, some Texas cities are finding new and colorful ways to celebrate Pride and their LGBTQ+ communities.

In El Paso, street lamps have been wrapped in Pride flags. Dallas recently unveiled public library steps adorned in multicolor fashion. In Austin, residents last week painted hearts of all shades onto a downtown mural. All of the permanent displays channeled support for LGBTQ+ residents in the same spaces the crosswalks once memorialized.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said the mural is meant to help Austin residents show solidarity with their LGBTQ+ neighbors while pushing back against the crosswalk removal.

“We’re going to do more to show our love and our respect and our appreciation for all of our people, and we’re going to do it in a way that’s clearly Austin,” Watson said. “A beauty of the mural was also that we could encourage others to come down and be part of it.”

Many of Texas’ major municipalities have used rainbow crosswalks to mark areas steeped in LGBTQ+ history. But after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Transportation to withhold federal and state road money unless local officials eliminated colorful road displays, cities are being more intentional as they find new ways to uplift LGBTQ+ residents.

Abbott’s October order sought to promote safety by eliminating roadway art that might “advance political agendas” and followed a directive from the Federal Highway Administration that established similar requirements.

Many LGBTQ+ advocates believed the order targeted Pride-inspired rainbow crosswalks, but it also caused other designs to be removed, including painted yellow letters spelling “Black Artists Matter” in Texas’ first Black cultural heritage district in Austin, crosswalks honoring the Guadalupe River in Kerrville and others that are scheduled to be removed or are already gone.

Local officials could apply for exemptions to the removal order, but it’s unclear whether any were granted by the state, and the transportation department denied all of the applications to keep rainbow crosswalks. The agency did not answer questions about whether any roadway art was granted an exemption.

[…]

Fresh paint and new flags are far from the end of the cities’ and organizers’ commitment to memorialize support for LGBTQ+ residents. Austin plans to install a historical marker in August to enshrine the area’s importance as a longtime hub for the city’s LGBTQ+ community.

In Dallas, 18 rainbow-wrapped bike racks were installed by the Cedar Springs Merchants Association, with a “fun, campy ribbon cutting” set for June 29. In El Paso, Perez said community organizers hope to install similar rainbow bike racks.

Austin plans to scrape its rainbow crosswalk off the downtown intersection by the end of July, according to a city memo sent to TxDOT. The new murals at Colorado and Fourth streets are intended to keep the area colorful, but Watson said it has also instilled a new vigilance in the community’s support for its residents.

“This has created a focus that we can’t be complacent, and so we will continue to keep that focus,” Watson said.

See here for all the previous blogging on this topic. I note that there was zero mention of anything in Houston. Make of that what you will. In the meantime, it is my fond wish that someday, when Greg Abbott is consigned to the dustbin of history, every intersection within a five-mile radius of his home has a rainbow crosswalk painted on it.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Austin, crosswalks, Dallas, Donald Trump, El Paso, gay rights, Greg Abbott, Houston, San Antonio, TxDOT, US Department of Transportation | 1 Comment

Abbott appoints Huffines as acting Comptroller

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s your periodic reminder that it could always be worse.

Don Huffines

Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday appointed Don Huffines, a former Republican state senator, to be comptroller of public accounts for the rest of the year, after the agency’s acting head, Kelly Hancock, steps down at the end of the month.

Hancock submitted his resignation letter to the governor on Wednesday. Huffines is currently running to serve a full term and defeated Hancock for the GOP nomination in March. He faces state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, in the November general election.

“Don Huffines brings the right mix of business experience and conservative principles to this vital office,” Abbott said in a statement announcing the appointment. “His private-sector experience and dedication to limited government make him exceptionally qualified to lead the state’s finances and protect every taxpayer dollar with integrity and accountability.

”Huffines, a 68-year-old businessman from the Dallas area, said he was honored to be tapped by the governor and intended to keep campaigning ahead of the fall election, “listening to Texans and working for every vote.”

The appointment returns Huffines, a GOP firebrand, to public office after being unseated in 2018 from the Texas Senate and failing to beat Abbott when he challenged the governor in the 2022 GOP primary, running to the right of the state’s top elected official.

The relationship between the two has since been smoothed over. After Huffines won the primary earlier this year against a field that included Hancock, who had Abbott’s support, Huffines told the Tribune that he and the governor had a “very nice conversation” and were aligned in working to defeat Democrats in the midterms.

[…]

Huffines has long supported vouchers and said he is excited about the prospect of running the initiative, championed by Abbott and formally known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts.

A self-branded “MAGA warrior,” Huffines won his primary with promises to DOGE Texas, ensure no state funds are being received by undocumented people and end what he sees as “woke” ideology.

See here for the background. As someone who remembers State Sen. Don Huffines (*), I cannot stress this enough: Huffines is a complete moron who firmly believes he’s right about everything, and he’s going to make you believe it too even if it kills you both. There’s a chance he might be entertaining as Comptroller, in a Molly-Ivins-on-acid kind of way, but there’s zero chance he’ll be good. Buckle up.

(*) Ousted after one term in 2018 by now-Sen. Nathan Johnson, who is also the Democratic nominee for Attorney General.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Comptroller, Don Huffines, Election 2018, Election 2026, Greg Abbott, Kelly Hancock, Nathan Johnson, Sarah Eckhardt, SD16, Senate, Texas, vouchers | 1 Comment

Driver in that fatal Tesla crash arrested

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest.

The driver of a Tesla Model 3 that crashed into a Katy home last month, killing an elderly woman, has been charged with manslaughter, records show.

Michael Butler, 44, was booked into the Harris County Jail Wednesday and charged with manslaughter, records show. His first appearance in court is set for Monday.

Martha Avila, 76, died after a Tesla Model 3 carrying Butler crashed into the family’s home on June 19. Avila’s family, Jennifer and Justin Barbour, filed a civil lawsuit against Tesla and Butler on June 24. That same week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a special investigation into the crash.

See here, here, and here for the background. This is all the new information in the Chronicle story, but Click2Houston has a bit more detail.

Investigators have been working to determine whether Tesla’s driver assistance technology played any role in the deadly crash while also examining Butler’s actions leading up to the collision.

According to investigators, Butler initially told deputies the Tesla was operating on Autopilot at the time of the crash. However, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office later said Tesla provided vehicle data indicating Butler had overridden the system before the collision.

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez also said investigators have not found any evidence of a mechanical malfunction with the Tesla so far.

I don’t feel like I have enough information to draw any conclusions yet, so let’s just leave this as is and see what else we find out in the coming days. Perhaps the court hearing on Monday will tell us something. ABC13 and Houston Public Media have more.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged accidents, driverless cars, Ed Gonzalez, Elon Musk, Harris County, Harris County Sheriff, Katy, lawsuit, Martha Avila, Michael Butler, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla, Texas | Leave a comment

Comptroller Hancock to resign

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Bye bye.

Kelly Hancock

Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock will step down from his post as Texas’ chief financial officer at the end of July, according to a resignation letter he submitted to Gov. Greg Abbott Wednesday.

Hancock’s departure notice, first reported by Texas Bullpen and confirmed by Abbott, comes one year to the day after he took over the agency. He was chosen by the governor after the previous comptroller, Glenn Hegar, stepped down to become the chancellor of the Texas A&M University System.

Hancock oversaw the beginning of the state’s $1 billion program to offer parents vouchers to send their kids to private schools, one of the agency’s biggest and newest responsibilities.

[…]

Hancock, a Republican from North Richland Hills, ran to serve a full term as comptroller but lost his primary to Don Huffines, a former Senate colleague and ultraconservative businessman from Dallas. Hancock said he was confident the agency “will continue serving Texans effectively and maintain continuity for the work already underway,” and that Huffines “will build on the work.”

Huffines will face Democratic state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt of Austin in the general election.

The resignation will mark a departure from public office for Hancock, who began his political career as a school board member and served nearly two decades in the Legislature, first in the state House and later as senator representing a North Texas district covering parts of Tarrant County.

Hancock’s exit from the Texas Senate created a vacancy that led to a special election won by a Democrat to represent his ruby red district, which President Donald Trump had won by more than 17 points. The stunning upset generated national buzz, as Democrats saw it as early evidence that voters who supported the president in 2024 would swing back to them in this fall’s midterm elections.

A mostly forgettable term for an undistinguished man. But he did set the table for Sen. Taylor Rehmet to happen, so thanks for that.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Comptroller, Don Huffines, Election 2026, Greg Abbott, Kelly Hancock, Sarah Eckhardt, SD09, Senate, Taylor Rehmet, Texas, vouchers | 1 Comment

San Marcos bans data center construction

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Bring on the fight that will surely follow.

San Marcos has become the first Texas city to ban data centers within city limits, banking on its local authority to stop the data center boom and setting a precedent for other municipalities to follow.

San Marcos City Council voted 4-3 on June 16 to define data centers and make them ineligible for any part of the city in its zoning laws, citing concerns that these developments would funnel water and energy resources from the local community.

The city has no data center projects proposed within its limits, although the threat has reached its borders where at least two data centers have been proposed in surrounding unincorporated parts of Hays County, according to Data Center Map, an industry research tool. Powerless to leverage any of their laws to outright ban data centers, Hays County commissioners recently passed a mostly symbolic resolution to pause data center development over severe water scarcity but the resolution isn’t legally binding.

San Marcos is testing a novel approach to outright ban data centers by exerting its home rule powers, which gives certain bigger cities — 352 of them across the state — the right to create their own zoning codes and control development, land law experts say. Compared to counties and cities without home rule powers or zoning authority, municipalities like San Marcos have a better chance at surviving legal challenges to their data center bans because of their expanded powers, experts say.

Some counties have tried testing their authority to restrict data centers but have failed. Early June, Hill County rescinded its data center moratorium after a developer sued the county for $100 million. Hood County commissioners also tried to pass a moratorium, but pulled it after state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who leads the Senate Committee on Local Government, asked for an attorney general opinion on whether counties have the right to enact such restrictions.

Similar to what he did with Hood County, Bettencourt told The Texas Tribune he plans to challenge San Marcos’ ban, arguing that it violates 2025’s House Bill 2559, which restricts the ability of municipalities to issue indefinite moratoriums on certain types of property developments and the state’s 2023 Death Star Law, which restricts municipalities from enacting local law that contradicts state law.

“They should not use zoning to ban anything everywhere in the city, because that’s not lawful under the state of Texas guidelines,” Bettencourt said. “[A ban] doesn’t work here, and this will get challenged.”

[…]

Multiple cities interested in passing their own bans have reached out to San Marcos to see how the city will survive legal challenges from state lawmakers and private citizens who can also sue the city over its ban.

“All cities are watching what happens to San Marcos,” said Taylor Burge, a council member for Lockhart.

[…]

Although land use bans are uncommon, “theoretically, I think the courts could uphold it,” said Robert Paterson, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in land use and environmental planning. As long as the ban aligns with a city’s comprehensive plan — a long-range policy document which governs the protection of public health, safety, and general welfare — it falls within the city’s power.

But the 2023 Death Star law complicates city authority. The Death Star law “theoretically pulled back home rule authority,” said Paterson, adding that it bars cities from exercising powers more stringent than those the state itself uses. Republicans and business groups argued that the Death Star was needed to undo a “patchwork” of progressive local policies that made it difficult to do business in cities and it remains unclear what local regulations are out-of-bounds under the law.

Paterson said the law has “a chilling effect on our ability to do our police power, protect the public health and safety,” which is one reason cities are being cautious now.

Bettencourt said a ban on any development has never been upheld in court and he is confident that the state will make San Marcos reverse its ban if a developer doesn’t file a private lawsuit first.

“If you overuse existing legal principles, eventually they get challenged, and/or … laws are changed to make it clear that this can’t happen,” Bettencourt said.

He also says San Marcos is violating HB 2559 that states that property development moratoriums can last no longer than 180 days, and according to Bettencourt, this would apply to San Marcos’ “de facto ban.” However, land experts said that this law would not apply to San Marcos because the city changed its zoning laws to ban data centers, and did not issue a moratorium.

While Bettencourt is among the Republican camp that support data centers, San Marcos’ state senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat, says the city’s decision reflects concerns that many communities across Texas share and that the City Council acted “decisively and appropriately” to ensure the safety of the community.

The story notes that cities do have other ways to restrict data centers, in ways that would be less contentious and likely to draw this kind of response from the anti-local control zealots. Those tools include zoning laws, special use permits, and incentive programs that include additional development standards. Whatever you think of San Marcos’ aggressive and provocative approach, there were other options that might have better odds of success, and certainly a lower level of risk.

I for one am glad that at least one city is taking the maximal route, because I want to see the Bettencourt zombies swarm in and make it as clear as possible to everyone out there that no matter what weasel words Greg Abbott may utter, it’s the Republicans that are on the wrong and unpopular side of this debate. Get Bettencourt and his whiny voice on every local news broadcast, and dare Abbott to rein him in (spoiler: he won’t). I love this as the backdrop for the 2026 campaign.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged data centers, Election 2026, Greg Abbott, Hays County, Hill County, Hood County, Kerrville, local control, Lockhart, Paul Bettencourt, San Marcos, Texas, The Lege, zoning | Leave a comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of June 29

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes you the July 4 celebration that you actually want as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Off the Kuff notes Greg Abbott’s pseudo-evolution on data centers, in which even Sid Miller is making him look bad.

SocraticGadfly talked about self-hating Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims attending the GOP state convention.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project posted on Abbott’s likely far-right pick for Texas Secretary of State. With Harris County having a Black Muslim progressive woman as Democratic nominee for County Judge & Texas Republicans being anti-democratic and bigoted, we must be prepared for anything.

=============================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Mustafa Tameez compares AI data centers to cell towers.

The Texas Signal celebrates Pride in Caldwell County.

The Current noted several San Antonio artists whose music may be getting used to train AI models.

Your Local Epidemiologist highlights the great success of the HPV vaccine.

In the Pink Texas is worried about the ducks.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Leave a comment

Siena/NYT: Talarico 47, Paxton 47

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Another pollster heard from.

Rep. James Talarico

The Democratic Party has a serious chance to win a Senate seat in Texas for the first time in a generation, as James Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, begins the summer locked in a tied race with Ken Paxton, the Republican state attorney general weighed down by past scandals, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.

Frustrations over President Trump’s handling of the economy and concerns about Mr. Paxton’s character have put the Senate seat in play in one of the nation’s Republican strongholds.

Mr. Paxton, 63, swept past indictment, impeachment and allegations of infidelity to thump an incumbent Republican senator who vastly outspent him in a primary this year. Now, as he faces Mr. Talarico, a 37-year-old who is training to be a minister, Mr. Paxton finds himself in a tight race that is marked by striking demographic divides.

Overall, Mr. Talarico and Mr. Paxton each garnered 47 percent of the vote in the poll.

There were several signs of weakness for Mr. Paxton in the poll.

A majority of likely Texas voters see Mr. Talarico as having good character and the right moral values, but not Mr. Paxton. Mr. Paxton, a MAGA firebrand who spearheaded the legal efforts to reject the 2020 presidential election results and celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 by declaring the date an annual holiday for his office, was also more likely to be viewed as “too extreme” than Mr. Talarico.

Mr. Paxton has failed to attract some voters who otherwise said they would like to see a Republican-controlled Senate. On the question of which party they preferred to be in power in the Senate, 50 percent of likely voters in Texas favored Republicans, while 44 percent favored Democrats.

Mr. Talarico is winning 61 percent of Hispanic voters — less than two years after Mr. Trump carried that community in Texas in the 2024 election.

Still, the poll shows the extent of the challenge ahead of Mr. Talarico.

His enormous lead among independent voters — 27 percentage points — was only good enough to force the race into a virtual tie in heavily Republican Texas. While Mr. Talarico is ahead in Texas’s big urban centers, Mr. Paxton is crushing him two-to-one everywhere else.

The crosstabs are here, and there’s more to the story. A couple of notes from the crosstabs:

– Talarico garnered 80 percent of the Black vote in this sample. That would be an inadequate amount in November, but it’s a significant step up from some other recent polls that had his level of support in the 60s. It’s one data point and a small sample size so I won’t make more of it than that, I’m just noting it because of the discourse and to see if this is an outlier or the start of something new.

– Similarly, Talarico’s level of Latino voters is back up to near-historic levels after a couple of possibly outlier results.

– The poll also had Gina Hinojosa trailing Greg Abbott 51-44, the first poll I’ve seen that had Abbott at or over 50 percent. She was basically a few points behind Talarico in every subsample, but more so with independents – 58-31 for Talarico, 48-41 for Hinojosa. She has been much closer to Talarico’s numbers with indies in some other polls. Again, one result, small subsample size, just noting this for future reference.

– Trump’s approval numbers overall in the state were 44-53. He’s definitely lost some Republicans, as this was a reasonably Republican sample (generic Congressional ballot was 51-45 for Republicans, Republican control of the Senate was preferred 50-44).

The crosstabs has data on a lot of questions about values and morals and the like, so browse through it if you’re interested. I hope this won’t be the only poll from this outfit here this year.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Donald Trump, Election 2026, Gina Hinojosa, Governor, Greg Abbott, James Talarico, Ken Paxton, polls, Senate, Texas | Comments Off

An update on Hotze and Aguirre

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

When I looked up the SCOTx order on the Harris County Immigrant Legal Defense Fund matter, I came across two rulings on another matter of great interest. That would be the matter of the criminal trial of former HPD Captain Mark Aguirre, for attacking and harassing an AC repairman in 2020 on the bizarre belief that the poor guy was toting around a pile of illegal ballots, and the civil trial against Aguirre and the guy behind that plot, Steven Hotze. I’ll quote from the second SCOTx opinion to bring you up to speed.

Relator Steven Hotze and Movant Mark Aguirre were indicted and charged with various crimes in Harris County in connection with an automobile collision. The State later dismissed the charges against Hotze, but the criminal proceedings against Aguirre remain pending. Separately, one of the individuals involved in the collision brought a civil suit against Hotze and Aguirre seeking recovery in connection with various tort claims. That civil suit remains pending in Harris County.

Hotze and Aguirre argue that they are entitled to a stay of the civil suit pending the resolution of the criminal dispute. They note that the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment provides that “[n]o person . . .shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” U.S. CONST. amend. V. In their view, they face a Hobson’s choice: if they testify in the civil suit, their testimony might be used against Aguirre in
his criminal proceeding. But if they decline to testify in the civil suit in order to avoid collateral consequences in the criminal proceeding, the civil jury may make an adverse inference. See TEX. R. EVID. 513(c). They
propose that we solve this dilemma by ordering the civil trial to be stayed until the criminal proceedings are resolved.

[…]

Hotze’s position has changed since filing his mandamus petition in our Court. At the time he filed, he was a criminal defendant. That is no longer true: the indictment against him has been dismissed. Aguirre, by contrast, remains a criminal defendant, but he is not the relator. He has filed what he calls a “motion to join” Hotze’s petition. However, the record does not show that Aguirre made a predicate request for action by the respondent—here, the district court—which the right to mandamus relief generally requires. In re Coppola, 535 S.W.3d 506, 510 (Tex. 2017) (“Due to the extraordinary nature of the remedy, the right to mandamus relief generally requires a predicate request for action by the respondent, and the respondent’s erroneous refusal to act.”). Moreover, Aguirre cites no rule or case authorizing this motion. At a minimum, this unusual dynamic would complicate our review.

Second, it appears that Aguirre’s criminal proceeding will soon be underway. The parallel civil proceeding, by contrast, does not have a current trial setting, and it may continue to lag behind its criminal counterpart. As a result, it is far from clear that the dilemma that Hotze and Aguirre identify will come to pass. “Texas courts have no jurisdiction to render advisory opinions,” Bienati v. Cloister Holdings, LLC, 691 S.W.3d 493, 497 (Tex. 2024), which is why we demand a concrete injury of reasonable certainty, not a hypothetical concern, before we exercise our jurisdiction.

So the main thing we learn is that the criminal trial against Mark Aguirre – for a crime he is alleged to have committed in 2020, remember – is finally about ready to begin. You bet your behind I’ll be paying attention to that. We also learn that the civil trial is not as close to coming to a courtroom, but at least for now there ought not to be any further legal matters standing in its way. Once we get a verdict, or perhaps a late plea agreement, in the Aguirre case, it ought to be clear sailing for the civil case. And I can hardly wait.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Legal matters | Tagged David Lopez, Election 2020, Gary Polland, grand jury, Harris County, Houston, Jared Woodfill, Kim Ogg, lawsuit, Liberty Center for God and Country, Mark Aguirre, Sean Teare, Steven Hotze, Supreme Court | Comments Off

The victims of the measles outbreak

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Noted for the record.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that more than 90% of the people hospitalized during the first two months of the 2025 measles outbreak in West Texas were children. More than half were under the age of four. Of the five adults who required hospital care for measles during that period, four of them were pregnant. Two of them delivered their babies while they were in the hospital for measles, and both babies tested positive for measles within two days of birth.

The CDC gathered this information from the available medical records of 54 of the 60 people who were hospitalized between January 20 and March 18, 2025. More than 70% of those hospitalized during these two months had pneumonia. Nearly 70% had hypoxia. 70% required supplemental oxygen. Four children were admitted to the intensive care unit; two required intubation and mechanical ventilation, and one child died.

All of the people included in this report were either unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown.

You remember that Texas measles outbreak, with its 762 known cases. Other outbreaks have followed, and 2026 looks like it will be a worse year than 2025 was thanks in part to Trump administration malfeasance. And the biggest victims were children, all of which could have been avoided by a simple vaccination. I’ve been hospitalized for pneumonia, it’s a terrible experience. Certainly one I wouldn’t have wanted my kids to have had. But plenty more of them are going to.

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged Centers for Disease Control, Donald Trump, El Paso, hospitals, measles, pneumonia, South Carolina, Texas, vaccinations | Comments Off

Benjamin Flores update

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Some good news.

Benjamin Flores

Benjamin Flores, the Democratic nominee for Texas land commissioner, said Friday that he is in remission, two weeks after his campaign revealed he had been diagnosed with leukemia.

Flores provided the update on his health while addressing Texas Democratic Convention attendees in Corpus Christi. He has said he intends to remain in the race while he receives treatment at MD Anderson in Houston.

In a statement announcing his diagnosis earlier this month, Flores said his mother “taught me to never bow down.”

“I did not bow down to challenges of winning my March primary, and I will not bow down to leukemia,” Flores said. “I will win back my health as well as my election to Land Commissioner in November.”

[…]

While his cancer diagnosis will keep him off the campaign trail for the next few months, he said in a statement that he remains dedicated to the race.

“I am still an active candidate working regularly with my staff and getting closer to victory every day,” Flores said. “And with that victory, I will become the first Latino Land Commissioner in Texas history.”

See here for the background. I’m very glad to hear this and I hope the news continues to be good for Benjamin Flores.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Benjamin Flores, Dawn Buckingham, Election 2026, Land Commissioner, Texas | Comments Off

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