Lead Stories

Texas floods leave at least 51 dead, 27 girls missing as rescuers search devastated landscape

Rescuers scoured a devastated central Texas landscape of mangled trees, overturned cars and muck-filled debris Saturday in an increasingly bleak mission to locate survivors, including 27 girls who have not been seen since their camp was slammed with a wall of water in a historic flash flood. The flooding in Kerr County killed at least 43 people, including 15 children, and at least eight people died in nearby counties. Authorities still have not said how many people were missing beyond the children from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along a river in Kerr County where most of the dead were recovered. The destructive, fast-moving waters rose 26 feet (8 meters) on the Guadalupe River in just 45 minutes before daybreak Friday, washing away homes and vehicles. The danger was not over as rains continued pounding communities outside San Antonio on Saturday and flash flood warnings and watches remained in effect.

Searchers used helicopters, boats and drones to look for victims and to rescue people stranded in trees and from camps isolated by washed-out roads. Gov. Greg Abbott vowed that authorities will work around the clock and said new areas were being searched as the water receded. He declared Sunday a day of prayer for the state. “I urge every Texan to join me in prayer this Sunday — for the lives lost, for those still missing, for the recovery of our communities, and for the safety of those on the front lines,” he said in a statement. Authorities were coming under scrutiny over whether the camps and residents in places long vulnerable to flooding received proper warning and whether enough preparations were made. The hills along the Guadalupe River in central Texas are dotted with century-old youth camps and campgrounds where generations of families have come to swim and enjoy the outdoors. The area is especially popular around the July Fourth holiday, making it more difficult to know how many are missing. “We don’t even want to begin to estimate at this time,” Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice said earlier.

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As floods hit, key roles were vacant at National Weather Service offices in Texas

Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose. Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation. The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight. The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods.

Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred. In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.” The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers. The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

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Texas lawmakers launch bipartisan campaign for flood relief effort, as death toll climbs

State representatives are launching a bipartisan campaign to support relief efforts, as flooding killed dozens of people in Central Texas and the Hill Country over Independence Day weekend. More challenges, however, could be on the horizon for these areas, as the National Weather Service extended its flood watch until 1 p.m. Sunday. In Saturday posts on X, Frisco Republican Jared Patterson and El Paso Democrat Joe Moody said they are asking every Texas House member to help raise funds for communities affected by the floods. In particular, they highlighted the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, which says on its website that it will “direct funds to vetted organizations providing rescue, relief, and recovery efforts as well as flood assistance.”

“There are hurts that money can’t fix, but this is one part of easing what burdens we can,” Moody said in his post. With 150 members in the chamber, Patterson said the goal is to raise $150,000. “When tragedy strikes our state, that’s an opportunity for us to come together and really show Texans what leadership is about,” he told The Dallas Morning News Saturday evening. “And it’s not about quibbling over small things. It’s about standing up for our communities and helping Texans, and that’s what we’ve tried to do today.” Related:How to help victims, first responders in Texas Hill Country floods The campaign was launched Saturday evening — shortly after local officials raised the confirmed death toll to 43 people in Kerr County, roughly 60 miles northwest of San Antonio. They included 15 children and 28 adults who died after flash floods swept through the Guadalupe River on the Fourth of July. Over 70 miles northeast away, at least six people were killed in Travis and Burnet Counties due to flooding Saturday. Search and rescue efforts also continued Sunday, as many people were still missing.

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The Supreme Court and Congress cede powers to Trump and the presidency

The Supreme Court last week sharply curtailed the ability of federal judges to block a presidential action nationwide, even if they find it unconstitutional. That followed its decision last year granting the president broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the course of his core duties. The Senate several days ago rejected a resolution that would have let Congress decide, under its war powers, if President Donald Trump can strike Iran again. And Congress in recent months has repeatedly declined to assert its constitutional authority over spending or tariffs. In a striking dynamic of the Trump era, analysts say, the judicial and legislative branches have been steadily transferring many of their powers to the executive — or at least acquiescing in the transfers. That has shaken up a system that depends on the three branches of government jostling sharply as each jealously guards its own prerogatives, many critics contend.

“When the constitutional framers designed a system of checks and balances, they didn’t mean a system where Congress and the Supreme Court give the president a blank check,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland). “That’s not the kind of check they had in mind. … It was intended to create friction among the three branches to produce balance.” But the country has become so divided, some scholars say, that leaders of the three branches are often more loyal to their parties than to their institutions. “I think the framers envisioned a structure where it would take two branches to do anything major — go to war, pass a law, enforce a law,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley. “We have gone away from that. The executive can do so much without the other two.” Some conservatives respond that Trump is only doing what other presidents have done — asserting his powers and leaving it to the courts to decide whether he has exceeded his authority. Many lower courts have done just that, blocking his executive orders, only to see the Supreme Court scale back or lift many of those rulings. “I think everyone is getting all Sturm und Drang and go-to-your-bomb-shelters-quick about it,” said Paul Kamenar, lead counsel at the conservative National Legal and Policy Center. “But overall, I don’t see that Congress or the courts are ceding too much power to the president, because at the end of the day, the Supreme Court will decide that.”

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How healthcare cuts in the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ will affect Americans

The passage of President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” has left some hospitals, doctors and patient-advocacy groups reeling. Millions of people will lose health-insurance coverage, and struggling hospitals across the country may have to close, lay off staff or shut down some services, they say. States will also face difficult budget choices as federal funds are reduced. “The magnitude of these reductions—and the number of individuals who will lose health coverage—cannot be simply dismissed as waste, fraud, and abuse,” Rick Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, said after the House narrowly passed the bill. Trump signed the bill into law on Friday, Independence Day. The act slashes over $1 trillion in healthcare spending over the next decade, mostly from Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that provides health insurance to poor Americans. It is the biggest cut to federal healthcare spending—and to Medicaid—in history.

The legislation’s health provisions, including work requirements for Medicaid recipients, represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s approach to healthcare for its poorest citizens, both Republicans and Democrats have said. “This is a much more conservative approach to healthcare,” said David Mansdoerfer, a former health official in the first Trump administration. “The big beautiful bill would represent a significant mindset change for federal safety-net programs.” There will be nearly 8.7 million fewer people covered by Medicaid over the next decade because of the bill, according to an analysis by Manatt Health, a consulting firm that advises states and healthcare providers on Medicaid policy. Other provisions in the bill, including more-stringent requirements for people to enroll and retain health-insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are projected to drive up the number of uninsured, healthcare experts said. Many who study healthcare policy say that people who lose insurance, or people who live in rural areas where doctors and hospitals are closing up shop, often delay preventive care, sometimes costing the system more later. Many of the Medicaid policy changes target the 40 states that expanded eligibility for Medicaid to low-income able-bodied adults. Those enrollees will now have to prove their incomes are below a certain threshold every six months to remain on Medicaid, instead of annually, as well as show that they have spent 80 hours a month working, volunteering or attending school.

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State Stories

Kerrville didn’t have weather sirens used by other cities

At a Friday news conference, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said he “can’t answer” why camps weren’t evacuated but acknowledged: “We do not have a warning system.” “We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kelly told reporters. “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.” Nicole Wilson, 42, watched the news conference from her home in San Antonio and was “blown away.” Wilson told KXAN two of her friends have daughters that were at Camp Mystic and one had a son at Camp La Junta. All three children are accounted for. One of the girl’s cousins, however, is still missing, she said.

“Just not having those plans in place is crazy to think about,” she said. “That they wouldn’t have risk mitigation in place when you’re surrounded by water.” While the National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings and the city of Kerrville’s Facebook paged warned to “move to higher ground immediately,” campers at Camp Mystic likely wouldn’t have seen that since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions. Wilson was born and raised in Kentucky, where she said outdoor weather sirens – primarily used for tornadoes – were common. On July 5, she started a Change.org online petition “urgently” calling for Kerrville and Kerr County to implement an outdoor early warning siren system for life-threatening emergencies, like flooding. So far, she said she’s received “a lot of positive feedback on that.” “The tragic events at Camp Mystic and the devastating flooding along the Guadalupe River that happened in July are stark reminders that severe weather can strike with little notice,” Wilson wrote. “A well-placed siren system will provide critical extra minutes for families, schools, camps, businesses, and visitors to seek shelter and evacuate when needed. This is not just a wish – it is a necessary investment in public safety.”

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Federal appeals court upholds block of Texas immigration law

A federal appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling on Thursday continuing to block Texas from enforcing a 2023 law that would allow local police to arrest people they believe crossed the Texas-Mexico border illegally. A 2-1 decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law is at odds with federal law that says that immigration is an issue for the federal government and not state governments.

What they're saying: "For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has recognized that the power to control immigration—the entry, admission, and removal of aliens— is exclusively a federal power," Judge Priscilla Richman wrote. The other side: Judge Andrew Oldham, in dissent, said the majority ruling "usurps the State of Texas's sovereign right to police its border and battle illegal immigration." "Today is a sad day for Texas and for our court," Oldham wrote. "It is a sad day for the millions of Americans who are concerned about illegal immigration and who voiced those concerns at ballot boxes across Texas and the Nation—only to have their voices muted by federal judges."

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How long can Beto O'Rourke and Joaquin Castro wait on Senate race?

Democrats Colin Allred and Terry Virts are already running for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2026. But what about other potential Democratic candidates? U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, state Rep. James Talarico and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are among those who have said they are also looking at the race, as well as other statewide contests. After a rally in San Antonio last week, I caught up with all three and pushed them on what their timetables look like for declaring. O’Rourke, 52, couldn’t say for sure when he or any of the others, whom he has been in contact with, would make decisions on the Senate race. “I think it will probably get worked through by the end of this summer if not sooner,” said O’Rourke, who ran for the Senate in 2018 and for governor in 2022.

Candidates have until the first week of December to get into the race. Castro acknowledged that other Democrats might be interested in running for the 20th Congressional District seat he holds now, if he runs for another seat. He said he knows people will be looking to see what he decides because it also affects their political futures. “I’ll make a decision soon,” said Castro, a 50-year-old attorney who has been in Congress since 2013. Talarico, Castro and O’Rourke could technically all end up in the same Senate primary against each other, but Talarico said that doesn’t mean he considers the other two rivals. “We are not rivals,” he said. “We are on the same team. We are all trying to change the state for the better and bring power back to the people. We’re going to coordinate and work together and see what that looks like over the next few months.” While Talarico has talked about running for the Senate, he said he is looking at other races too, like for governor.

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Arlington mayor on payment plan with IRS for $174K in back taxes, council peers say work unaffected

Arlington Mayor Jim Ross owes $174,945.93 to the IRS in back taxes, according to public records obtained by KERA News. Ross told KERA he is already on a payment plan with the IRS after the agency began garnishing the $250 monthly stipend he receives from Arlington as mayor. The unpaid taxes are from 2015 and 2019. A Notice of Federal Tax Lien from the IRS lists the amounts owed at $79,418.73 in 2015 and $95,527.20 in 2019. The notice was included in documents filed as part of a lawsuit for the unpaid property taxes. Ross' back taxes were mentioned in a post by The Dallas Express, a conservative publication focusing on North Texas.

"It's not anything that I'm proud of," Ross told KERA News in a phone call Wednesday. "It's not that I hang a sign on me saying, 'Look at this. I'm having financial troubles.' But it comes when you are a full-time volunteer, and you get paid $250 a month to do what I do. ... I knew I was only gonna get $250 a month when I took it. And I took anyway." Ross said he is also late on paying property tax for his home in Arlington, but the bill will be paid this month. "It's just been overlooked, to be honest, because I'm focused on this other thing and I used to have a team that does this for me and I no longer do," Ross said. "I just realized that the property taxes hadn't been taken care of. I'm expecting the money to come in this month so that I can take care of those and I'll take care them as soon as that money comes in." It’s not the first time Ross has faced trouble over taxes. When he was running for reelection in 2023, Ross said he was late paying his property taxes but was caught up. "My office staff typically pays it but the person in charge is no longer with me, so it slipped through the cracks," Ross wrote in a 2023 text message to KERA News. Ross told KERA the IRS originally began garnishing his wages from the city — the $250 a month he gets paid as mayor. Despite owning a restaurant and law firm, Ross said his only paychecks come from the city. Ross left his business ventures in the hands of trusted employees when he was elected to council, he said. That allowed him to dedicate around 70 hours a week to his job as Arlington's mayor but meant no longer cutting himself a paycheck and even some downsizing.

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Jessica Gonzalez announces re-election bid

State Rep. Jessica Gonzalez announced she will run for a fifth term in office. She represents District 104, which includes parts of Oak Cliff, Cockrell Hill and Grand Prairie. Gonzalez is a founding member of the Texas Legislature’s LGBTQ Caucus and is vice chair of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators’ Human and Civil Rights Task Force. Before running for a seat in the Texas Legislature, she served as Nevada voter protection director for the Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign and was a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep Karen Bass. In an emailed statement, Gonzalez wrote:

“I’m running for re-election to the Texas House of Representatives because the voters of District 104, my neighbors, want a bold, progressive leader representing their interests, fighting for them in the legislature. I’ve proven since I was first sworn in that when out-of-touch bullies in Austin try to push Oak Cliff and Grand Prairie around, I never back down. “Throughout the legislative session, Texas House Republicans made their priorities crystal clear to people across Texas. In just 140 days, they gave handouts to Texas’ most wealthy families via private school vouchers, proposed constitutional bans on tax increases for our state’s richest individuals, and gave Elon Musk his own beach city, all while doing nothing to stop the rise of food prices, healthcare costs, or rent for working families. Billionaires have bought the Republican Party, but they can’t buy me — I’m running for re-election because I will always fight for you, regardless of political consequences.

Read this article at Dallas Voice - Subscribers Only

Welcome to Dallas, North: The region that just can’t stop expanding

The growth north of Dallas has been so dizzying that people talk about it as if it were a storm, or some other force of nature. That’s how Heather Cowan describes it. She came to the area in 1995 to raise a family after graduating from college in South Dakota. Six months ago, she and her husband moved farther north to the quiet of Gunter, 50 miles from Dallas, “to get ahead of the curve,” as she put it. Even in rural Gunter, though, Cowan said she was starting to “feel” the growth. She was right: The next day, Centurion American Development Group announced it had closed on a thousand-acre parcel in Gunter that would form part of a new development, Platinum Ranch, with 4,200 homes. The corridor north of Dallas is capping a decade as one of America’s fastest-growing regions, pulling in droves of newcomers from California to India and turning them into newly minted Texans. The companies are coming, too. Among them are Toyota, Amazon Web Services, State Farm and others.

Where cattle once outnumbered people, new shopping malls, housing developments and office towers now reign, and a region that was once overwhelmingly white and country is now increasingly South Asian and techie. It is also brimming with a kind of morning-in-America confidence. While the struggle to build housing has become a seemingly insoluble crisis in other parts of the country, locals talk about when—not if—Dallas’s northward march will reach Oklahoma. If that sounds implausible, it may seem less so since Texas Instruments announced a few weeks ago it would invest up to $40 billion to build a mammoth semiconductor campus in Sherman, just 12 miles from the state line but still within commuting distance of Dallas’s northern satellites. A first laboratory is set to begin production later this year. To drive along Preston Road, which extends 70 miles from Dallas, weaving through the towns that form its expanding frontier, is to encounter a patchwork of new chain stores and restaurants, building sites laden with steel pipes and concrete tubes, and rumbling earth movers. Signs dot the roadside advertising land for sale and communities that exist only on billboards and brochures.

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'A huge pain': Critics say this quirk of the San Antonio court system is unjust, inefficient and costs millions

A power struggle between the city of San Antonio and Bexar County has resulted in a glaring redundancy in the criminal justice system that's costing taxpayers millions every year. The standoff is over the magistration system, one of the first formal steps a person has to take after being arrested. A person picked up by San Antonio police goes before a magistrate judge who reviews the evidence in their case and decides whether to dismiss the charges or let them stand. If they're left standing, the judge explains the charges to the defendant, reads the person their rights and then sends them back to a holding cell. That happens at San Antonio Municipal Court.

Then the defendants are bussed to the Bexar County jail complex on the near West Side, less than a mile from the municipal court building. There they will eventually stand before another magistrate judge — who often rewinds defendants' cases to the beginning, covering a lot of the same ground as the first judge. The only difference between the two magistrates is that the one in municipal court doesn't set bond amounts — that's up to the county judge. Critics of the double magistration system, which took root nearly five and a half years ago, say it can substantially increase the time arrestees must wait to post bail — in addition to creating an unnecessary expense. It also disrupts San Antonio police officers' street patrols when a county judge calls them in to answer questions about arrests they made hours before. The two-court system affects only people arrested by San Antonio police, not those picked up by suburban police departments or the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, or those taken in on arrest warrants.

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Mayor Jones' chief of staff quits after less than a month on the job

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones' chief of staff, Jordan Abelson, resigned Saturday after less than a month on the job. The reason for Abelson's departure was unclear. Jones has only made one other known hire since winning the mayoral runoff on June 7. She tapped Cynthia De La Cruz as her executive secretary, a position De La Cruz previously held in the City Council District 6 office. Abelson, a Pennsylvania native, moved to San Antonio in January to work on Jones' mayoral campaign. She handled communications before being named campaign manager. Former Mayor Ron Nirenberg had already hired a chief of staff, a communications director and two senior policy advisors by this same point after he won the June 2017 mayoral runoff. Jones and Abelson have not responded to requests for comment.

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‘My favorite place in the entire world’: Camp Mystic inspired generations of Texas women

Camp Mystic, the 99-year-old Christian summer camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River, has for years given girls a place to be themselves, former campers say. Now, the popular all-girls camp set among limestone hills 80 miles northwest of San Antonio is the site of an unfolding tragedy. After rapidly rising flood waters swept through the area over the holiday weekend, 27 girls were missing from the camp as desperate parents posted pleas for help online. More than two dozen people have died in the area, including Richard “Dick” Eastland, an owner of Camp Mystic. During the past two days, camp alumnae have rapidly shared information through group chats, struggling to understand how this could have happened at a place they thought of as a refuge.

“It's my favorite place in the entire world,” said Lauren Garcia, a former camper who is now a physician assistant in New York City. “It really is like just a safe haven. I've never experienced anything like it.” Garcia described foggy morning horseback rides, competitive canoe races and riverside lessons on fishing, as hundreds of girls disconnected from the outside world. The camp has for nearly 100 years offered 30-day programs to improve the spirituality and self-confidence of girls. Generations of families have passed through Camp Mystic’s valleys. Garcia’s mother, aunts and sister all stayed in the numerous camp housing facilities with names like Twins, Bubble Inn, Gigglebox and Chatterbox. Campers spent Sundays doing religious readings near the river before holding a small service on Chapel Hill, a nearby ridge with a cross overlooking the valley. “We don’t know what will happen to it,” said Shelby Patterson, a University of Virginia fundraiser who attended the camp for eight years. “There is a mourning for what happened, a mourning for what we still don’t know and all the girls they still haven’t found, but also an extreme mourning for the special place that you know may not exist past this.”

Read this article at Texas Public Radio - Subscribers Only

Glenn Rogers: Influential legislator scorecards don’t add up

The activist group Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, founded by Michael Quinn Sullivan and primarily funded by GOP megadonors Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, will soon release its 2025 index scores ranking Texas lawmakers on a scale from most to least conservative. While some legislative careers may live and die based on those scores, they have nothing to do with conservatism. The scores are based in part on data compiled by Mark P. Jones, a political science fellow at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Jones’ methodology is complicated to say the least. For the 89th legislative session, his analysis is limited to 2,666 non-lopsided roll call votes where at least 2.5% of legislators who cast a vote were on the losing side. Clear as mud.

For the 2023 ratings, TFR used only 95 out of the 2,769 votes used by Jones. In this analysis, questions abound: How was the sample size derived? Who decided which votes would be included? Were specific votes chosen to ensure a predetermined outcome? Frankly, these rankings do not reveal who is the most or least conservative. The content and the text of the bills used in the analysis are largely irrelevant to the scores. Instead, these “findings” show which legislators voted in the minority the most times. In other words, these rankings reveal which legislators are the most unwilling to work with their colleagues. Collaboration remains an inconvenient necessity for effective conservative governance. In the 2025 Jones analysis, the top eight most conservative members collectively passed a total of two bills that they authored. Granted, the number of bills passed is not the only, or even most important, method to determine a legislator’s effectiveness, and too many bills are filed each year. However, most districts in Texas have specific needs that can only be addressed through legislation. In a list of the 10 House members passing the most bills this session, none scored near the top of the Jones analysis. No committee chairs scored near the top. It appears that high TFR index scores are inversely related to legislative productivity. In reality, the TFR index score is a measure of megadonor compliance and is the antithesis of district representation. The speaker’s race from the last session illustrates this dynamic. Much ado was made in the 89th legislative session about the importance of voting only for the candidate endorsed by the House Republican Caucus. In the 88th session, Dade Phelan received an overwhelming majority of votes by the caucus and was the endorsed candidate. Yet a vote for Phelan lowered the TFR index score. Phelan is undeniably conservative and a vote for him was a vote for conservative values. But Phelan fell out of favor with the party’s puppet masters so his supporters had to be punished. Another example: In the 88th session, House Bill 12 by Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, sought to continue Medicaid coverage for 12 months to women who were enrolled during a pregnancy. This pro-life bill received only nine votes against the conference committee report and was signed into law by the governor. Yet a vote for this bill lowered a legislator’s TFR score.

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Dallas agrees to block enforcement of weed decriminalization after appeals court ruling

Dallas will not enforce a voter-approved charter amendment that aimed to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, for now. Last week, the city of Dallas filed a joint motion with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office asking a judge to issue a temporary injunction blocking the new amendment. It comes after an appeals court said in April that cities cannot prevent police from enforcing marijuana-related offenses. Proposition R, which 66% of voters approved last November, decriminalizes marijuana under 4 ounces. It prohibits the police department from using smell as probable cause for search or seizure, as well as arresting or citing individuals for possessing 4 ounces or less of marijuana if a felony isn’t involved. Weeks after voters approved the measure, Paxton sued Dallas.

“Cities cannot pick and choose which State laws they follow,” Paxton said in a Nov. 21 news release. “The City of Dallas has no authority to override Texas drug laws or prohibit the police from enforcing them. This is a backdoor attempt to violate the Texas Constitution, and any city that tries to constrain police in this fashion will be met swiftly with a lawsuit by my office.” As part of the joint agreement, the city and its leaders are not allowed to enforce any part of Proposition R. They also cannot punish city employees who do not enforce the proposition. Early last year, Paxton sued five other municipalities, including Austin and Denton, which passed similar measures. This April, a state appeals court sided with Paxton and struck down Austin’s marijuana decriminalization ordinance. Supporters said the charter amendment was necessary to address the disproportionate number of Black people arrested for the low-level offense and help direct police resources to more serious crimes. The proposition was backed by Austin-based nonprofit Ground Game Texas, which gained enough signatures to get it onto the election ballot last November. Having less than 2 ounces of marijuana is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. Carrying between 2 and 4 ounces of marijuana is a Class A misdemeanor that could lead to up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

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‘With what water?’: Texas, Mexico, and the disappearing Rio Conchos

Alonso Montañez killed the outboard, and the boat swung against the scum and trash that had accumulated in the stagnant water on the high side of the dam. “Escucha,” he said, gesturing at the surface of the lake. In the quiet, we heard water slapping the hull, a life jacket buckle pinging on a metal pole. “Listen,” he said again. “You can hear the force of it, no?” The sound was imperceptible at first. But soon enough it emerged, swelling upward from the murky emerald depths beneath our little boat. The sound was like an enormous rainstick held underwater. Montañez, muscle-bound in a tight blue t-shirt, explained we were hearing the sediment-infused water of La Boquilla Reservoir sluicing into the dam’s gigantic outlets. “That’s not something you want to hear,” he said.

Montañez is a tour boat operator and fisherman on La Boquilla Reservoir, the largest reservoir in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua and a body of water whose drastically dwindling supply portends ever-more hardship for the drought-stricken Rio Grande. Never in the history of Mexican National Water Commission records has La Boquilla plunged to its present levels. The day we motored up to the dam—September 21, 2024—the reservoir had sunk to 16.1 percent of its capacity. This May, the reservoir sat at 14.7 percent. La Boquilla impounds the water of the Rio Conchos, the largest tributary of the Rio Grande. With a capacity of more than 2.35 million acre-feet—enough, in other words, to submerge 2.35 million acres of land in a foot of water—La Boquilla can be thought of as a gigantic storage tank perched at a high point in a complex binational river system. If the lake lacks water, the river below it dries. And a dried-up Rio Conchos signals distress and political tensions extending throughout northern Chihuahua and all along Mexico’s border with Texas. Historically, the Rio Conchos served as Mexico’s most reliable workhorse for delivering water to Texas in accordance with a treaty negotiated by the United States and Mexico in 1944. But it’s become increasingly apparent that decades of megadrought and overexploitation have ridden the old river nearly to death.

Read this article at Texas Observer - Subscribers Only

National Stories

Musk announces arrival of new ‘America Party’ after Trump split

Elon Musk declared the launch of his new political party on Saturday, a project he has repeatedly floated in the weeks since his explosive breakup with President Donald Trump — but provided no details as to how he planned to jump through the hoops necessary to establish a viable alternative. The billionaire entrepreneur and onetime Republican megadonor — who mere months ago appeared as the president’s right-hand man in the Oval Office after pouring millions into his campaign — has for weeks publicly contemplated starting a new third party to disrupt the current system. Musk on Saturday appeared to confirm his intention to launch his “America Party,” after posting a poll to his X account the prior day asking followers whether or not he should create the new party. “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” he wrote. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

Musk’s third-party musings began in earnest after last month’s massive meltdown between the president and his former adviser over the “big beautiful bill,” which the former DOGE head has decried as wasteful. As Trump on Thursday flaunted his successful push to muscle the Republican megabill through Congress this week, Musk sought to drum up support for his potential third party launch, positing that his new party would target a handful of vulnerable swing seats to leverage political power. “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people,” he wrote. While Musk may have the millions to pour into backing certain candidates — which he has already promised to do, pledging to support Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) reelection campaign amid targeting from Trump — establishing a third party involves a series of thorny obstacles including navigating complex state laws, ballot access regulations and other legal hoops. So far, the billionaire would-be party founder has yet to outline a concrete plan forward. Just two months ago, Musk had vowed to cut back on political spending, saying he had “done enough.”

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‘We’re the frontline of defense’: Food banks grapple with megabill’s impact

Food banks say they are wholly unprepared to feed millions of Americans when Republicans’ cuts to traditional federal safety net programs take effect. The GOP’s megabill slashes more than $1 trillion from the nation’s largest food aid program and Medicaid, with some of the cuts taking effect as early as this year. Low-income people grappling with higher costs of living could be forced to turn to emergency food assistance. In preparation, food bank leaders are trying to convince private foundations and state leaders to give them more money. Some states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania have already been weighing shifting additional resources to emergency food programs or standing up new initiatives to counter the loss of federal dollars. That still won’t be enough.

According to Feeding America, the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program alone would eliminate 6 billion to 9 billion meals annually — roughly the same number of meals the food bank network provided last year. Those food banks would need to double their operations to close the gap SNAP leaves behind. “There is no world in which I can imagine we double ourselves, into perpetuity,” Joree Novotny, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks wrote in a text message. Food bank leaders like Novotny said cuts to SNAP, which provides food aid to over 40 million low-income Americans, will exacerbate their already strained operations. They’ve been piecing together state and federal money to meet increased hunger needs post-Covid, when food prices soared by over 30 percent. Now, much of that money has dried up, and the Trump administration earlier this year canceled more than $1 billion in federal funds for food banks, including money to buy from local farms.

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Trump promised ‘no tax on tips.’ Then came the fine print.

Many service workers are eagerly awaiting no longer paying taxes on their tips. Yet the fine print in Republicans’ new law could limit savings for some waiters, bartenders and others. Among the particulars restricting the reach of the measure: Only the first $25,000 in tips are free from income taxes. Tipped workers will still face the 7.65% combined payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. And workers won’t be able to benefit if federal officials say their type of service job doesn’t qualify. “No tax on tips” started as a campaign promise by President Trump during a 2024 stop in Nevada, the state with the highest concentration of service workers who rely on tips. It is now a key element of the tax-and-spending megabill that Trump signed into law Friday. Even though it is one of the smaller pieces of the law in terms of dollars—accounting for $32 billion out of $4.5 trillion in tax cuts—it is one of Republicans’ top talking points.

The cut could save some service workers thousands of dollars a year in federal taxes. “It would be extra money,” said Yolanda Garcia, a barista at Resorts World Las Vegas. “It would help me buy more groceries, even a gallon of gas.” She estimates she usually gets $200 to $300 every two-week pay period from tips. If she makes less, taxes cut into her wages because she is taxed on an estimate of her wages and tips, she said. Some four million people in the U.S., or 2.5% of all workers, earn tips, according to the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan research center founded by former Biden administration officials. Some workers can make tens of thousands of dollars—or even more—in tips each year. To hold on to their gratuities, some workers already illegally skip reporting the income to avoid paying taxes on it. Workers are currently taxed on their tips as part of their overall income, which many complain forces them to skimp on such basics as food and gas as well as vacations. More than a third of tipped workers don’t make enough to pay federal income taxes, including many low-income workers with children and students who work in part-time tipped jobs. They wouldn’t benefit from the no-tax-on-tips deduction. Under Republicans’ policy, workers who do pay federal income taxes will be able to deduct up to $25,000 for tips. For someone in the 12% tax bracket making that much in tips, the change would deliver up to $3,000 in savings. The deduction would start phasing out once an individual’s income reaches $150,000, or $300,000 on a joint return for people who are married.

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Democrats might be ‘overthinking’ strategy to recapture voters

Democrats are rethinking ways to recapture voters they’ve lost to President Trump in recent election cycles, and they may have been offered an important lesson in the New York mayoral primary. In various post-mortems and focus groups done on the heels of their devastating 2024 election loss, Democrats have thoroughly examined exit polls and voter demographics in search of the gaps in their party’s appeal. But Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who served as a senior adviser on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign in 2020, said Democrats are “overthinking” the solution by analyzing the voters who flipped sides or skipped voting during the last election. “It’s more simple than that,” Rocha said. “Just concentrate on people who are frustrated as hell and get both of them.”

Rocha pointed to the New York mayoral race as proof. He says progressive upstart-turned-party nominee Zohran Mamdani (D) was able to capture voters — including those who did not vote a few months ago in the presidential election — by talking about affordability and other tangible economic issues that appealed to them. Rocha said voters “want anything that’s different” from the status quo when it comes to the cost of living. “It shows how desperate people are,” he said. While many Democrats disagree with Mamdani’s politics, they say the campaign he ran shows the unwavering preeminence of economic issues. And Trump taught the same lesson in 2024, political observers say, by telling voters what they wanted to hear on the economy and his message on “draining the swamp.” “Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani just showed, in very different elections, that economic issues are still king — and that you can appeal to a wide, bipartisan swath of voters by saying you’ll bring down the cost of living,” said Democratic strategist Christy Setzer. “Working-class voters have been drifting away from the Democratic Party on so-called ‘cultural’ issues for a long time, but they’re still very gettable through a clear message and from a compelling messenger.” According to exit polls, Democrats in 2024 lost significant ground with middle-class voters, a cornerstone of their traditional base, down 10 percentage points from 2020. At the same time, there is a decreasing sense of strong party leadership and little optimism about the party’s future, respective CNN/SSRS and AP/NORC polling out in May revealed. But Mamdani, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, took aim at the Democratic establishment, calling for draining the swamp to make room for change. It was an echo of Trump’s messaging in his 2024 campaign.

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Trump says US will start talks with China on TikTok deal this week

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he will start talking to China on Monday or Tuesday about a possible TikTok deal. He said the United States "pretty much" has a deal on the sale of the TikTok short-video app. "I think we're gonna start Monday or Tuesday...talking to China, perhaps President Xi or one of his representatives, but we would we pretty much have a deal," Trump told reporters on Air Force One. Last month, Trump extended to September 17 a deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of TikTok.

A deal had been in the works this spring to spin off TikTok's U.S. operations into a new U.S.-based firm, majority-owned and operated by U.S. investors, but it was put on hold after China indicated it would not approve it following Trump's announcements of steep tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump said the United States will probably have to get a deal approved by China. When asked how confident he was that China would agree to a deal, he said, "I'm not confident, but I think so. President Xi and I have a great relationship, and I think it's good for them. I think the deal is good for China and it's good for us."

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One of the Supreme Court’s sharpest critics sits on it

Dissenting — again — on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in its most high-profile case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not mince words. She had for months plainly criticized the opinions of her conservative colleagues, trading the staid legalese typical of justices’ decisions for impassioned arguments against what she has described as their acquiescence to President Donald Trump. She returned to that theme again in the final case, ripping the court for limiting nationwide injunctions. “The majority’s ruling … is … profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate,” Jackson wrote. Justice Amy Coney Barrett leveled an unusually personal retort in her majority opinion. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

The extraordinary clash reflected deepening divisions on the court and the place Jackson has increasingly staked out as a leading voice of dissent, challenging the 6-3 conservative supermajority. She wrote more dissents this term than any other justice. Overall, she penned 24 opinions, second only to the prolific Clarence Thomas. Jackson also far exceeded her colleagues in the number of words she spoke during oral arguments. She uttered more than 79,000; Sonia Sotomayor, her liberal colleague, came in a distant second, at 53,000. In her third term, one legal expert said, she has carved out a space on the left similar to what Thomas has held on the right. Writing frequently, often dissenting, and sometimes willing to depart from her liberal colleagues. Tempers and disagreements often flared in the Trump-related cases that have filled the docket, with the majority repeatedly green-lighting some of his most controversial policies. The ruling on nationwide injunctions, which stemmed from a challenge of Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, drew seven separate opinions. Clashes erupted during culture-war cases in which the court allowed states to ban gender transition care for trans minors and gave parents permission to opt their children out of classroom lessons that clash with their religious beliefs. Even a technical case on disability rights yielded five separate opinions — surprising given it was not the type of hot-button issue that would normally draw reams of writing from the justices. “We are seeing longer separate opinions, but also more diverse views than we have in the past,” said Adam Feldman of Empirical SCOTUS, who has compiled data showing the number of opinions the justices are filing is rising even when they agree.

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Lead Stories

House Republicans are pushing Trump's big bill to the brink of passage

House Republicans are preparing to vote on President Donald Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax breaks and spending cuts bill early Thursday, up all night as GOP leaders and the president himself worked to persuade skeptical holdouts to drop their opposition and deliver by their Fourth of July deadline. Final debates began in the predawn hours after another chaotic day, and night, at the Capitol. House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted the House would meet the holiday deadline, with just days to go after the Senate approved the package on the narrowest of margins and Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie vote. “Our way is to plow through and get it done,” Johnson said, emerging in the middle of the night from a series of closed-door meetings. “We will meet our July 4th deadline.” The outcome would be milestone for the president and his party, a longshot effort to compile a long list of GOP priorities into what they call his “one big beautiful bill,” an 800-plus page package. With Democrats unified in opposition, the bill will become a defining measure of Trump’s return to the White House, with the sweep of Republican control of Congress.

At it core, the package’s priority is $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in Trump’s first term, in 2017, that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. This includes allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year. There’s also a hefty investment, $350 billion, in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.. To help offset the costs of lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a massive rollback of green energy investments. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage. “This was a generational opportunity to deliver the most comprehensive and consequential set of conservative reforms in modern history, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the House Budget Committee chairman.

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The private sector lost 33,000 jobs in June, badly missing expectations for a 100,000 increase, ADP says

Private sector hiring unexpectedly contracted in June, payrolls processing firm ADP said Wednesday, in a possible sign that the economy may not be as sturdy as investors believe as they bid the S&P 500 back up to record territory to end the month. Private payrolls lost 33,000 jobs in June, the ADP report showed, the first decrease since March 2023. Economists polled by Dow Jones forecast an increase of 100,000 for the month. The May job growth figure was revised even lower to just 29,000 jobs added from 37,000. “Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month,” Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said in a press release published Wednesday morning. To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily. May’s soft ADP data ended up differing significantly from the monthly jobs report figures that came later in the week.

This week, the government’s nonfarm payrolls report will be out on Thursday with economists expecting a healthy 110,000 increase for June, per Dow Jones estimates. Economists are expecting the unemployment rate to tick higher to 4.3% from 4.2%. Some economists could revise down their jobs reports estimates following ADP’s data. Weekly jobless claims data is also due Thursday, with economists penciling in 240,000. This string of labor stats comes during a shortened trading week, with the market closing early on Thursday and remaining dark on Friday in honor of the July Fourth holiday. The bulk of job losses came in service roles tied to professional and business services and health and education, according to ADP. Professional/business services notched a decline of 56,000, while health/education saw a net loss of 52,000. Financial activity roles also contributed to the month’s decline with a drop of 14,000 on balance. But the contraction was capped by payroll expansions in goods-producing roles across industries such as manufacturing and mining. All together, goods-producing positions grew by 32,000 in the month, while payrolls for service roles overall fell by 66,000.

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Justice Dept. explores using criminal charges against election officials

Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions. The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said. Such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before.

Federal voting laws place some mandates on how elections are conducted and ballots counted. But that work has historically been managed by state and local officials, with limited involvement or oversight from Washington. In recent days, senior officials have directed Justice Department lawyers to examine the ways in which a hypothetical failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime, appearing to assume a kind of criminally negligent mismanagement of election systems. Already, the department has started to contact election officials across the country, asking for information on voting in the state. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Gates McGavick, said the agency “will leave no option off the table when it comes to promoting free, fair and secure elections.” Voting experts say the push by the Trump administration is alarming, particularly given that it has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election that President Trump lost was affected by mass voter fraud. “The tactics we’re seeing out of D.O.J. right now are building on what we’ve seen from anti-democracy groups for years,” said Dax Goldstein, the program director of election protection at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit organization. “They’re rooted in the same lies about elections, and they’re all meant to create noise and fear and concerns about issues with our elections that just don’t exist. Our elections are safe and secure, and election officials are working to keep them that way.”

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One key to Houston ISD’s rising STAAR Scores? Holding students back.

Texas Monthly; Miles: Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via AP; Score sheet: Getty Mike Miles is taking a victory lap. Last month, the Houston Independent School District’s state-appointed superintendent unveiled the district’s latest standardized-test results at a packed school board meeting. Since 2023, when the Texas Education Agency replaced HISD’s elected board and installed Miles, citing poor student performance, the percentage of Houston elementary and middle school students meeting state reading standards has increased by between three and twelve points per grade. Miles announced that the students raised their math proficiency by between three and fifteen points over the same period. The district showed the most dramatic success in two required high school courses, with the percentage of students meeting state standards rising by 17 points in biology and 23 points in Algebra I over the past two years. (In the other three high school exams—English I, English II, and U.S. History—HISD had modest gains.) For Miles, the STAAR scores vindicate what he calls the New Education System—a heavily scripted curriculum, with components written by AI, that he implemented at 85 “historically underperforming” schools for the 2023–24 school year. After the addition of 45 more schools to the program in 2024–25, around half of the district now follows the NES model. Miles pioneered the system at his Third Future charter school network in Colorado before importing it into the state’s largest school district. “This sort of growth has never been done in Houston, or in the state of Texas,” the 68-year-old Miles told the board with a triumphant grin. “This intervention is working. The transformation is working.” He singled out the meteoric rise in algebra and biology scores, calling the gains “incredible.”

In his enthusiasm, though, Miles glossed over a crucial fact: The two-year jump in algebra and biology scores was, at least in part, a result of systematically pushing students at NES schools into less rigorous math and science classes. These moves, some of which were previously reported by the Houston Chronicle, inflated test scores by forcing thousands of students at struggling schools to take STAAR exams a year later than their peers at higher-performing campuses. In interviews, district representatives acknowledged these changes but told me they were intended to benefit students rather than inflate STAAR scores. Chief academic officer Kristen Hole explained that NES students need extra preparation before taking algebra and biology classes. “We have a lot of English-language learners in the district,” she said. “One additional year of English acquisition for students can always be particularly helpful, especially in a topic like biology, where you have a lot of heavy vocabulary.” (Miles declined an interview request.) Until the state takeover, most students took both Algebra I and biology in ninth grade, while higher-performing students could take algebra in eighth or even seventh grade. That’s still true at non-NES schools, such as Lanier Middle School and Bellaire High School, which tend to have wealthier, whiter populations. But at NES schools, the course sequence has become much more rigid. Since the state takeover, access to eighth-grade algebra has declined at many NES schools. Two middle schools that joined NES in 2023 (Cullen and Fondren) did not offer an algebra course that year; three schools that joined in 2024 (Deady, Fonville, and Gregory-Lincoln) also did not offer algebra their first year in the program. At many other schools, eighth-grade enrollment in Algebra I dropped by more than half from its pre-NES figure. Hole wouldn’t answer a question about why the course is no longer offered but said the district is in the process of implementing an accelerated math curriculum for lower grades so that future students will be prepared for eighth-grade algebra. (Cullen resumed offering Algebra I in 2024–25; seven students took the exam this spring.)

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State Stories

Bud Kennedy: Ban Texans from running as Republicans — or voting? Behind the French fracas

The Texas Republican Wrestling League has returned for another season, with castoffs and outsiders grabbing at the seasoned old pros while everybody imitates America’s Bruiser-In-Chief. That is the best way to explain the events of recent days. A tag team of elected officials is retaliating against showoff Tarrant County party chairman Bo French, all for landing low blows against the senior faction. Texas is a two-party state. But now, it’s the MAGA Republican Party against the Even More MAGA Party. Texas’ MAGA Republicans passed school vouchers, strengthened the border, DOGEed the budget and did whatever President Donald Trump and estranged ally Elon Musk wanted. But that wasn’t enough. The Even More MAGA Party had to find something else to gripe about.

So now, eight months before a telltale party primary, the Even More MAGA Party is churning up opposition to incumbents over (1) property taxes, (2) LGBTQ whatever and (3) Muslim Americans, foreigners, Californians or anybody who looks New Around Here. French and his West Texas multimillionaire backers dominate the local organized party structure. They want to trap Republican elected officials in a leglock hold. Then they can declare some not MAGA enough and bar them from the March ballot. You think I’m kidding? The state party organization is about to file a lawsuit to bar some Republicans from even running for office. The same lawsuit would also let the party prevent Texans who don’t pre-register as Republicans from even casting a primary vote at all. See? This spiteful little club is at odds with elected officials, including many who have already been promised Trump’s endorsement. They even want to overturn current Texas election law. Is it any wonder that elected officials want to get rid of a showboating county chairman trolling America with viral shock posts on X.com? At @bofrenchtx, the Westover Hills Republican speaks Even More MAGA Party language. He says 100 million people in America are “third world” invaders and “savages” who should be deported. He calls his critics “retards.” He writes that “there are just some things where you can’t trust women” and that men “do the hard work” in society. French himself has conceded that it’s all for show. In October, he told a Dallas political website: “I tweet 50 to 100 times a day. Sometimes my tweets are absurd to demonstrate absurdity.” Sometimes they’re just absurd.

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Texas AG defends shutdown of midwife Maria Rojas' health clinics amid abortion prosecution

Accused abortionist Maria Rojas' refusal to answer questions during a civil court hearing in March should be enough reason to for a court to keep her health clinics closed, the Texas Attorney General’s Office said this week. In a filing in a Texas appeals court on Monday, lawyers for Attorney General Ken Paxton said a Waller County judge’s civil injunction closing Rojas’ clinics amid her separate criminal case should be upheld. Rojas’ lawyers in May appealed Judge Gary Chaney’s injunction, arguing that the attorney general’s office can’t prove that an abortion took place and that only one entity, the Texas Medical Board, has the power to seek an injunction.

The attorney general’s office stood by its evidence and argued that the appeal, if granted, would gut the office’s powers to enforce the law. “[Rojas’] theory would leave the attorney general powerless to prevent the loss of unborn life, limiting him only to after-the-fact remedies,” the agency wrote. The case is the first test of the criminal and civil powers granted to the attorney general’s office under the Texas Human Life Protection Act, the 2023 law that mostly banned abortions in Texas. Along with criminalizing abortions, the law made it possible for the attorney general’s office to seek civil penalties against medical providers. Rojas, a licensed midwife, is accused of providing abortions out of four clinics she owned in northwest Harris and Waller counties. She and two other men are also accused of conspiring to provide medical treatment without a license. Rojas and another man, Cedan Ley, are not licensed physicians and were alleged to have paid the second man, Rubbildo Labanino Matos, to have access to the ability to write prescriptions and perform other tasks.

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New regulations are coming for driverless cars in Texas. Here's what to know

Self-driving cars and trucks deployed on Texas roads will soon face stricter scrutiny and state oversight. That’s thanks to a new law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott that requires autonomous vehicle companies to get state approval before operating without a driver — and gives the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles authority to revoke that approval if companies don’t follow safety standards. The move comes as Texas has become a “global leader” in autonomous vehicle deployment, according to Jeff Farrah, the CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, a trade group. “Texas really stands out nationally when it comes to the level of interest from policymakers and regulatory agencies,” he said.

And it’s not just the Waymo cars that have become commonplace in Austin. In April, a company called Aurora started running driverless semitrucks on I-45 between Houston and Dallas. Another company, Kodiak, announced in May that it had deployed four driverless trucks in the Permian Basin. Several others have said they would pull their safety drivers from trucks by the end of this year. Although the law goes into effect Sept. 1, the new rules are not expected to be operational until “sometime in 2026,” said Adam Shaivitz, a spokesperson for TxDMV, in an email. Until then, the state has little authority to stop AVs from driving on public roads. In mid-June, a group of Central Texas lawmakers wrote to Tesla asking the company to delay its robotaxi launch in Austin until after Sept. 1 because of widespread concern over the safety of the company’s self-driving technology. Tesla’s self-driving system uses a camera-based technology, which differs from Waymo and other companies and that critics have warned is less safe. Tesla deployed its cars anyway and responded to the lawmakers via email that the company was “actively engaged in efforts by the Texas Legislature to update AV policy and will ensure that our vehicles and operational plans meet the planned statutory updates.” Nichols said the legislation passed with broad industry support. Companies were concerned that “if somebody else is a bad actor, it can hurt them all,” he said. “If someone’s out there harming the public, then the legislature will just shut the whole thing down.”

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North Texas newlywed released from ICE detention after more than 140 days

Ward Sakeik, a North Texas woman detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in February as she was returning home from her honeymoon, has been released from detention. The decision comes after she spent more than 140 days in ICE custody. The 22-year-old woman of Palestinian descent is also “stateless,” creating a situation that a lawyer previously described to The Dallas Morning News as a “procedural black hole.” On Tuesday night, Sakeik walked out of the Prairieland Detention Center — an ICE facility located less than an hour’s drive south from her Arlington home — and into the embrace of her husband, 28-year-old Taahir Shaikh. It’s not immediately clear why she was released. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a comment request from The News on Wednesday morning.

Eric Lee, one of her attorneys, said he can’t speculate on the reasons why and declined to disclose for now the terms of Sakeik’s release. But he said she doesn’t have an ankle monitor. Sakeik’s attorneys also called her release “sudden” in a Wednesday press statement. They said ICE had just attempted to deport Sakeik early Monday, despite a federal court order prohibiting her removal. They added that they were not informed about which country she would have been sent to. “There is no country to which she can be removed where she would not face extreme hardship because she doesn’t have citizenship anywhere,” said Chris Godshall-Bennett, another attorney for Sakeik. “I just think it really underscores the cruelty and the complete lack of regard for human dignity and the approach to immigration that this administration is taking.” Monday’s described deportation attempt would be the second time the federal government has allegedly attempted to remove Sakeik from the U.S. in June. Sakeik and her husband previously told The News that she was driven to a Fort Worth-area airport and was almost deported on June 12 to the Israeli border. But she said she was later told that the plan was canceled for several reasons, including the Israel-Iran conflict.

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Texas families sue to block Ten Commandments law

A group of multifaith and nonreligious Texas families filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to block a new state law requiring classroom displays of the Ten Commandments from taking effect in September. The suit is the latest legal challenge to the law that is set to take effect Sept. 1 as opponents call the requirement unconstitutional. The 16 families who are part of the new federal lawsuit allege that students will be “forcibly subjected” to state-sponsored scriptural principles such as “I AM the LORD thy God” and “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “This simply cannot be reconciled with the fundamental religious freedom principles that animated the founding of our nation,” they argue in court documents.

They want the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to declare Senate Bill 10 a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses — which protect the separation of church and state and religious freedom, respectively — and preliminarily bar it from taking effect. The families — who are Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, Hindu or nonreligious — said such displays “will substantially interfere with and burden” parents’ right to direct their children’s religious education and upbringing. Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 10 into law last month aware that it would be challenged in court. “Bring it,” Abbott wrote in a social media post in May, when civil rights groups threatened to sue after lawmakers passed the measure. If left in place, Texas public schools must conspicuously display a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments that is at least 16 inches by 20 inches. The law specifies the exact wording that must be used and requires the text size and typeface be readable for a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.

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A voice for the 'marginalized:' Austin Catholics get new bishop

The newly appointed bishop to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Austin promised to lead with unity and to speak up for the “overlooked and the marginalized," including unauthorized immigrants, in his introduction to his new flock. "That's where the church needs to be to make sure that people do not forget those who are often forgotten," said Daniel E. Garcia, whose appointment by Pope Leo XIV as the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Austin was announced Wednesday morning. Garcia, 64, a native of Central Texas, will lead the diocese where he was first ordained in 1988 and where he rose to be an auxiliary bishop. He left in 2019 to become the bishop of Monterey in Central California. But the bishop’s eventual homecoming was so anticipated, the seminarians joked to themselves after his speech, that Garcia’s portrait already hangs front and center in the diocese offices from his first Austin stint.

Garcia said he was grateful to return home. His role, he said, would allow him to encourage people in their spiritual journey and to stand up for the church’s teachings, including the benevolent treatment of the vulnerable, like immigrants who lack authorization to be in the country. “There’s got to be a better way,” Garcia said of recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on immigrants. ”I think those are the kind of things that we as a church should elevate and to say there's something wrong with this picture.” He said that fostering change would require building relationships with political leaders — a tricky question of balancing church teachings and peoples’ political opinions. “You can disagree on policy,” Garcia said. “But the church’s role is to let people know that we are all created in the likeness of God.” Shelley Metcalf, a diocese employee who worked with Garcia during his original stint in Austin, said she believes Garcia’s “great character” and humility will help him build bridges with political and community leaders to advocate for the marginalized.

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Texas State prepared to ramp up resources to stay competitive in Pac-12 Conference

Texas State president Kelly Damphousse woke up Tuesday morning feeling like a dog who had finally caught up to the car. The university’s pursuit of a spot in the Pac-12 Conference had been underway for nearly a year, starting with outreach to the league’s commissioner and two remaining schools last summer. As the conference rebuilt and new members joined, Texas State continued to network. Damphousse shared the school’s story with the other presidents, and Bobcats athletic director Don Coryell relayed Texas State’s history and vision to his counterparts around the league. After the Pac-12 announced a media rights partnership with CBS Sports on June 23, Texas State’s courtship kicked into high gear. Damphousse said the university confirmed the Pac-12's interest in a more formal way for the first time that evening, and a few days of negotiations yielded an official offer Thursday. Texas State accepted on Friday, and the system's board of regents finalized the move Monday.

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Why this Texas farmer thinks he can stop Greg Abbott's reelection bid

While better-known Democrats are jockeying to see who might run for governor in 2026 against Gov. Greg Abbott, a farmer in Northeast Texas is already jumping into the race, saying the party needs an outsider to win the contest. Bobby Cole, a former firefighter and a farmer from Wood County, has hired campaign staffers and launched a website, and is vowing to take back the government for working people of the state. “Republicans have spent 30 years in office, and working men and women have been having to pay the cost,” Cole, 55, said during an interview. “It has to stop.” He said rising property taxes, underfunded public schools and tariffs hurting farmers and consumers are just some of the reasons he’s taking a shot at running for office.

“We need more people like us — working people — in the government,” Cole said. Cole was a firefighter in Texarkana and later in Plano. He also maintains his family’s farm in Quitman, where they have 300 head of cattle and raise chickens. He retired from firefighting as a lieutenant in 2017. Abbott has been governor since 2014 and already announced his reelection bid for what would be his fourth four-year term. Abbott won his last reelection campaign, in 2022, beating Democrat Beto O’Rourke by 11 percentage points. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, of San Antonio, and state Rep. James Talarico, of Austin, are among the Democrats looking at the race. “I’ll make a decision soon,” Castro said when asked on a gubernatorial run in an interview after a political rally in San Antonio on Friday with Talarico and O’Rourke. Talarico confirmed running for governor is a potential for him as well. He has also floated a possible run for U.S. Senate next year. "Everything is on the table right now," Talarico said. "I am trying to figure out how best I can serve."

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Prestonwood celebrates Trump and Supreme Court in morning worship

“This is a time for us to celebrate America,” Prestonwood Baptist Church Pastor Jack Graham declared in his all-white suit in a scene reminiscent of a Jesse Gemstone sermon in HBO Max’s The Righteous Gemstones. “Just because you love America doesn’t mean you don’t love Jesus more. And we do love Jesus most of all, but we love our country,” he said last Sunday at the suburban Dallas megachurch. As the worship team played the songs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marine Corps to the sounds of explosions and jets flying overhead, those from the congregation who had served in each branch stood when their song was played. With American flags and official branch seals displayed on the screens, commanders from each branch stood on the stage and saluted the congregation. As they marched off stage, a men’s trio came forward to sing “God Bless America” as larger-then-life images of the American flag swirled across the wall-to-wall video screens behind them, as if they were draped in the flag.

It’s nearly the Fourth of July, so “God and country” services are on full display across the land — although few are likely as over the top as at Prestonwood, which also is known for its extravagant Christmas pageant with flying drummers suspended over the congregation. Remember it was in downtown Dallas in December 2021 when then-former President Donald Trump delivered the Christmas message at First Baptist Church of Dallas, using the pulpit to criticize his successor, President Joe Biden and warning, “Our country needs a savior right now.” Trump, of course, sees himself as that savior, as do so many of his followers. Whether at Christmas or the Fourth of July, these Christian nationalist-themed services are nothing new. When I first began leading worship in the 1990s at an independent fundamentalist Baptist church, I sang a song for the Sunday morning service comparing the U.S. military’s sacrifice to Jesus’ sacrifice, and then comparing our commitment to Jesus with our commitment to the United States. The worship of Trump and the United States is so over the top and obvious that it can be easy to condemn it as idolatry without reflecting on how its theology is built. But if we’re going to disarm Christian nationalism and turn authoritarian Christianity’s weapons of warfare into plowshares and garden tools, we’re going to need to be secure enough in our relationship with God and brave enough to question some of the underlying theological threads being used to sacralize harm.

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More accusations fly at Second Baptist

Defendants in the lawsuit brought by disgruntled members of Second Baptist Church in Houston have asked the state district court to move the case to a special court that deals only in business matters. On June 9, defendants of Second Baptist Church — Ben Young, Homer Edwin Young, Lee Maxcy and Dennis Brewer Jr. — petitioned for the case to be moved from the 55th District Court in Harris County, Texas, to the 11th Division of the Business Court of Texas. This court division was created in 2024 by the Texas Legislature to provide a specialized venue for commercial disputes presided over by judges with a smaller docket and judicial or litigation experience in complex commercial matters.

The plaintiffs, organized into a nonprofit called Jeremiah Counsel, contend the church’s longtime pastor, H. Edwin Young, manipulated huge changes in church bylaws without proper notice. Those changes gave Young and his successors as senior pastor nearly total control over the church’s governance, assets and decision-making. Using that power, Young named one of his sons, Ben Young, his successor without a church vote. But the lawsuit is about much more than pastoral succession; it is about who controls the assets of the church, which are said to be at least $1 billion. The lawsuit was filed April 15. No further significant court actions have yet taken place. On April 27, Ben Young addressed the lawsuit in his Sunday morning sermon. “The allegations concerning me and my family are simply not true,” Young said, according to the Houston Chronicle, which reviewed multiple audio and video recordings of the sermon. The Chronicle stated: “Appearing to read from a script on the front stage podium, Young announced that the church has sought legal help from high-profile evangelical attorney Jay Sekulow, who personally represented President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial. (Sekulow now heads the American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, D.C.) Church members told the Chronicle that Sekulow has spoken at Second Baptist in the past,” the newspaper reported.”

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Dr. Phil’s Fort Worth media company files for bankruptcy

TV psychologist and talk-show host Dr. Phil McGraw’s Fort Worth-based Merit Street Media declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday and filed a lawsuit against its partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network. The bankruptcy was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas. A bankruptcy hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Thursday. The lawsuit alleges that its business partner, Trinity Broadcasting of Fort Worth, destroyed its television network and forced the bankruptcy declaration. According to court documents, Trinity Broadcast Network showed an “intentional pattern of choices made with full awareness that the consequence of which was to sabotage and seal the fate of a new but already nationally acclaimed network which has, since its launch in April of 2024, delivered its viewers with cutting edge reports, interviews, and in-depth analysis of national importance.”

The suit alleges that the network is going off the air because Trinity Broadcasting Network refused to honor its commitment and transfer its “must carry rights” and provide national distribution of programming for Merit Street. In June the Dr. Phil Show was placed on an “indefinite hiatus,” according to a LinkedIn post by a former employee. McGraw initially ended the show in 2023, shortly before announcing that he would start a new Fort Worth-based media company, Merit Street Media. The new show, “Dr. Phil Primetime,” launched in April 2024. In August 2024, 40 to 50 employees were let go as part of “ongoing consolidations of departments and roles in efforts to achieve efficiencies at the highest level.” According to the lawsuit, TBN saddled Merit Street Media with “unsustainable debt of over $100 million. In November, the Fort Worth-based Professional Bull Riders parted ways with Merit Street Media over a contract dispute involving payments of rights fees that were owed to the organization.

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National Stories

ICE shut down this Latino market — without even showing up

On a typical weekend, 20,000 people stream through the metal gates at Broadacres Marketplace, thronging the aisles of the outdoor “swap meet” to hunt for the best deals, savor snacks and sip micheladas under the desert sky. Until late June, Broadacres’ familiar bustle had cemented its place as the heart of this city’s Latino community. That has been replaced with an eerie quiet. Hundreds of booths stand barren behind a chain-link fence, mostly stripped to their skeletal remains and covered in fabric or tarp. Save for one security guard at the main gate, there’s no one in sight. Broadacres Marketplace announced that it would temporarily close on June 21 because of the threat of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a statement online, the market’s management said the decision to close was made “out of an abundance of caution and concern for our community.” Broadacres’ owner, Greg Danz, is president and CEO of Newport Diversified Inc., a company that also owns two other swap meets in California.

“We don’t want any of our customers, vendors, or employees to be detained at our business or for us to be a beacon of shopping and entertainment while our federal government is raiding businesses and detaining its people,” the statement read, adding that management does not yet have a planned date to reopen. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has implemented aggressive immigration policies and enforcement, detaining and deporting tens of thousands of people since it took office. The mass deportation efforts have sparked protests nationwide and laid bare how devastating the arrests — and the fear of them — are in cities across the country. After Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to deport swaths of violent criminals, a small fraction of undocumented immigrants in ICE custody are known violent actors. Half of those in detention have neither been convicted nor charged with a crime, according to ICE data. Latinos, in particular, have been a prime target, heightening fears in the community, including among those who have legal status. The only other time in its nearly 50-year history that the swap meet closed for an extended time was for a few months in 2020 during the pandemic, according to two longtime vendors. Rico Ocampo, whose family has been selling goods at Broadacres for more than 20 years, said his parents financially rely on the swap meet. “As a family, we’re facing questions like: What are we going to do about the mortgage payment, with groceries? How are we going to recover from this?” he said. Ocampo, 34, said other vendors are most likely facing the same anxieties, while also managing real fears that they or their loved ones could get swept up in ICE raids. Earlier in June, ICE made arrests at the Santa Fe Spring Swap Meet in Southern California, which is under the same ownership as Broadacres, according to NBC Los Angeles. That has created fears that something similar could play out in Nevada.

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Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority struck down the state’s 176-year-old abortion ban on Wednesday, ruling 4-3 that it was superseded by newer state laws regulating the procedure, including statutes that criminalize abortions only after a fetus can survive outside the womb. The ruling came as no surprise given that liberal justices control the court. One of them went so far as to promise to uphold abortion rights during her campaign two years ago, and they blasted the ban during oral arguments in November. The statute Wisconsin legislators adopted in 1849, widely interpreted as a near-total ban on abortions, made it a felony for anyone other than the mother or a doctor in a medical emergency to destroy “an unborn child.” The ban was in effect until 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide nullified it. Legislators never officially repealed it, however, and conservatives argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe reactivated it.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit that year arguing that abortion restrictions enacted by Republican legislators during the nearly half-century that Roe was in effect trumped the ban. Kaul specifically cited a 1985 law that essentially permits abortions until viability. Some babies can survive with medical help after 21 weeks of gestation. Lawmakers also enacted abortion restrictions under Roe requiring women to undergo ultrasounds, wait 24 hours before having the procedure and provide written consent, and receive abortion-inducing drugs only from doctors during an in-person visit. “That comprehensive legislation so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was clearly meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion,” Justice Rebeca Dallet wrote for the majority. Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski, a Republican, defended the ban in court, arguing that it can coexist with the newer abortion restrictions. Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled in 2023 that the 1849 ban outlaws feticide — which she defined as the killing of a fetus without the mother’s consent — but not consensual abortions. Abortions have been available in the state since that ruling, but the state Supreme Court decision gives providers and patients more certainty that abortions will remain legal in Wisconsin.

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After Trump cuts, what is left of George W. Bush's anti-AIDS program in Africa?

In just six months, the Trump administration has left one of the cornerstones of George W. Bush’s legacy hanging by a thread. Even though Bush’s program to fight the spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa has been credited with saving millions of lives, the Trump administration is making dramatic changes that will limit the reach of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. On Tuesday, what is left of the slashed U.S. Agency for International Development, which administered much of the PEPFAR program through non-profits around the globe, was officially folded into the U.S. State Department. The move finalizes an executive order President Donald Trump issued earlier this year.

The administration is promising a more limited approach to fighting the disease in Africa in the future and has asked Congress to rescind $400 million that had already been budgeted for PEPFAR in 2024 and 2025. “It is something that our budget will be very trim on because we believe that many of these nonprofits are not geared towards the viewpoints of the administration,” White House budget director Russ Vought said of funding AIDS prevention work at a Senate hearing last month. “And we’re $37 trillion in debt. So at some point, the continent of Africa needs to absorb more of the burden of providing this health care.” But that has Bush, who has largely kept quiet during Trump’s second term, speaking out. He issued a recorded video message to USAID supporters on Monday, insisting that helping Africa was always intended to benefit the United States through diplomacy. “Is it in our national interests that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you,” Bush told supporters of the program in a video message viewed by the Associated Press. The program isn’t being totally shuttered. A bipartisan coalition of supporters in Congress has helped save parts of PEPFAR. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the program will continue to treat existing HIV-positive patients and support HIV prevention measures for pregnant and breastfeeding women. But that leaves out millions more who other prevention programs had targeted through PEPFAR. Former President Barack Obama was even more forceful in a message to the same audience Bush was speaking to. He called the dismantling of USAID “a colossal mistake.”

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Harvard is staring at a billion-dollar budget shortfall from clash with Trump

Harvard University would face a budget shortfall of about a billion dollars a year if President Trump follows through on all of his plans and threats spanning research funding, tax policy and student enrollment, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. That grim math helps explain why Harvard has taken steps toward negotiating with the administration after months of defiance. The Journal’s estimate, based on publicly available data, is for a worst-case scenario in which Harvard loses all federal research funding, federal student aid and its ability to enroll international students, and Congress hikes its annual endowment tax to 8%. A sustained shortfall of that magnitude would severely strain Harvard’s ability to manage its $6.4 billion annual operating budget. Though Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, more than 80% of the money is subject to donor restrictions, meaning it can’t be touched to patch budget gaps without inviting lawsuits. “They’ve got enough money to keep going for a while, but eventually they’re going to have to make substantial cuts,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies education finance. “You would change the future of the institution.”

The Trump administration has sought to make Harvard a poster child in its fight against institutions it says haven’t taken concerns about antisemitism and diversity programs seriously. Harvard has said it is working to promote intellectual openness in the classroom and to enroll students willing to engage across perspectives. Talks between the two sides were under way as recently as mid-June, according to a social-media post by the president. The Trump administration on Monday told Harvard the university had violated federal civil-rights law over its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students, risking further funding. Asked about the pressure on Harvard’s finances, a senior White House official said the school will receive no money “until it ends its discriminatory and deeply embarrassing practices. The private sector is welcome to step in and support Harvard.” The university said in a statement: “Harvard has made significant strides to combat bigotry, hate and bias. We are not alone in confronting this challenge and recognize that this work is ongoing.” Harvard has rejected Trump’s demands for change and twice sued the administration, challenging the withdrawal of research funding and the ban on international students. A federal judge has halted the ban, a decision the Trump administration has said it would appeal. Lawmakers were working this week to complete comprehensive tax legislation that included the increase in the endowment levy. Trump has also asked the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, a move that could slow donations and slap the university with a costly property tax bill.

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Bryan Kohberger pleads guilty at hearing in Idaho college student murders

Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and burglary in the November 2022 fatal stabbings of four University of Idaho students — Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin — at an off-campus house. Kohberger, then a doctoral student in criminal justice at nearby Washington State University, was arrested weeks after the killings based on DNA and other digital forensic evidence collected by law enforcement, according to an affidavit. Opening statements were set to begin Aug. 18 after months of delays over what evidence should be admissible. District Court Judge Steven Hippler had also declined to rule out the death penalty as punishment. Hippler accepted a plea of guilty as part of a deal that would drop the death penalty in exchange for a life sentence. Kohberger, 30, avoided a trial and waived his right to appeal. While at least the family of one of the victims is supportive of such an agreement, another says it feels “failed” by state prosecutors.

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The potential sentence faced by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs for his prostitution-related crime

The jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex trafficking trial convicted him of prostitution-related crime but cleared him of sex trafficking and racketeering charges. Here’s what we know about the potential sentence: Will Combs spend years in prison? The three-time Grammy award winner was convicted of flying people around the country, including his girlfriends and paid male sex workers, to engage in sexual encounters, a violation of a 115-year-old federal law called the Mann Act, named for James Mann, an Illinois congressman. The law originally prohibited the interstate transport of a woman or girl for “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” It was later updated to be gender-neutral and for any sexual activity “for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”

In a court filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey estimated that Combs’ sentencing guidelines, which take into account many technical factors, will likely qualify him for a prison term of more than four years. He’ll get credit for his time in custody since his arrest in September. Combs’ defense team believes the guidelines will be much lower, around two years. The maximum possible sentence is 10 years in prison, though U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian will have much discretion. He proposed an Oct. 3 sentencing date. The government said Combs coerced women into abusive sex parties involving hired male sex workers, ensured their compliance with drugs like cocaine and threats to their careers, and silenced victims through blackmail and violence that included kidnapping, arson and beatings. The jury, however, acquitted Combs of the most serious charges — racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking — which could have carried a sentence of up to life in prison. Combs defeated the racketeering charge. Authorities had accused him of running a criminal enterprise that relied on bodyguards, household staff, personal assistants and others in his orbit to facilitate and cover up crimes. It’s commonly used to tackle organized crime, with prosecutors using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO, to take on the Mafia in the 1970s.

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Lead Stories

Senate passes One Big Beautiful Bill with host of Texas Republican priorities

The U.S. Senate passed a sweeping GOP tax policy bill Tuesday that represents the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. Republicans say the bill, which includes a number of specific provisions pushed by Texas’ Republican U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, will drive economic growth, promote domestic energy production and fund Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. Democrats described the measure as a giveaway to the wealthy and highlighted projections it would increase by millions the number of people without health insurance, due in large part to Medicaid changes. The Senate vote sends the bill back to the House where it faces resistance from some conservative deficit hawks, including U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin.

Texas Republicans have focused on using the bill as a vehicle to reimburse the state for border security and immigration enforcement expenses it incurred during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has traveled to Washington multiple times this year to lobby for $11.1 billion to cover the cost of Operation Lone Star. As part of that initiative, Texas sent state troopers and National Guard soldiers to the border. It also placed physical barriers such as razor wire along the Rio Grande. Texas Democrats have criticized the operation as a failure. Republicans say the state should be reimbursed for doing the federal government’s job over the four years of Biden’s term. Cruz fought to preserve and expand the nationwide school choice program approved by the House that would provide a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions to nonprofit organizations granting scholarships for K-12 public and private school students. Cruz pushed successfully to strip out language requiring eligible schools to maintain admissions standards that do not take into account whether students have an individualized education plan or if they require equitable services for a learning disability.

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House Republicans threaten to sink Trump’s megabill

House Republicans are already lining up to oppose President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” with conservatives and centrists blasting the legislation just hours after Vice President JD Vance cast his tiebreaking vote on the Senate version. At the moment, the number of House Republicans vowing to oppose the Senate version is enough to block the bill’s passage, unless there is again a last-minute scramble to negotiate with holdouts along with a successful pressure campaign by the president. Only three House Republicans need to oppose the bill to sink it. Rep. Ralph Norman (R., S.C.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters about an hour after the Senate bill’s passage Tuesday that he wouldn’t vote to move the president’s tax bill out of the House Rules Committee. The panel is debating whether to advance the bill to a vote in the full House. If it does ultimately make it to the floor, Norman would oppose the bill there as well.

“Our bill has been completely changed—from the IRA credits to the deficit,” said Norman, referring to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. “This bill’s a nonstarter. We want to do this, but this bill doesn’t do what the president wants it to do.” Norman later said he believes there are enough “no” votes in the House to sink the bill. If House Speaker Mike Johnson fails to get enough members to back it, they will go to a process in which the House and Senate work to reconcile differences. That would likely blow through Trump’s fast-approaching deadline of July 4 to pass the bill. A crescendo of complaints began building across the disparate wings of the House Republican conference days before the Senate passed the bill, following an exhaustive 27-hour marathon of amendment votes. The legislation would broadly fund Trump’s biggest priorities including the extension of his 2017 tax cuts; no tax on tips and overtime; and a large funding boost to the president’s immigration and border policies.

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How tech’s bold bid to curb AI laws fell apart

Republican leaders had appeared poised to deliver on one of the U.S. tech industry’s wildest policy dreams as the Senate convened Monday morning to begin a marathon voting session on the sprawling tax and immigration bill. Less than 24 hours later, the measure was dead. And Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was holding the knife. The night before, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had hammered out a hard-won compromise with Blackburn to preserve the essence of a moratorium on state laws regulating artificial intelligence. The deal came after 11th-hour lobbying by tech groups giddy at the prospect of rolling back regulations they viewed as obstacles to unfettered innovation. It wasn’t to be. The Senate voted 99-1 in the predawn hours Tuesday to strip the AI-law moratorium from the bill — a resounding defeat for the tech industry and a dramatic reversal of fortune for the provision’s supporters.

Blackburn — who has pushed bills to protect kids online and to protect Nashville’s country music industry from AI imitations — proposed the amendment to strip the provision at the end of a day-long pressure campaign Monday by its opponents. A defeated Cruz ultimately joined her, as did every senator except for Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who had recently announced he won’t run for reelection. The vote on the AI moratorium came as part of a 27-hour “vote-a-rama” on a slew of proposed changes to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which carries much of President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda. The Senate approved the amended bill later Tuesday morning, sending it back to the House with the AI provisions no longer mentioned. Blackburn’s turnaround, insiders told The Washington Post on Tuesday, followed pleas from allies who feared the moratorium would jeopardize child safety regulations despite language in the compromise intended to exempt them. Republican leaders and tech trade groups had pitched a 10-year freeze on state AI regulations as necessary to pave the way for American tech firms to innovate and outcompete their Chinese counterparts. The idea echoed a 2024 proposal by the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, which proposed a “learning period” moratorium on AI laws to prevent a “looming patchwork of inconsistent state and local laws.”

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Powell confirms that the Fed would have cut by now were it not for tariffs

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday that the U.S. central bank would have eased monetary policy by now if not for President Donald Trump’s tariff plan. When asked during a panel if the Fed would have lowered rates again this year had Trump not announced his controversial plan to impose higher levies on imported goods earlier this year, Powell said, “I think that’s right.” “In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs,” Powell said at European Central Bank forum in Sintra, Portugal. Powell’s admission comes as the Fed has entered a holding pattern on interest rates despite mounting pressure from the White House.

The Fed last month held the key borrowing rate steady once again, keeping fed funds at the same range between 4.25% and 4.5% where it’s been since December. The central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee indicated via its so-called dot plot of members’ projections that there could be two cuts by the end of 2025. However, Powell also said at a press conference last month that the Fed was “well positioned” to remain in a wait-and-see mode. On Tuesday, Powell was asked if July would be too soon for markets to expect a rate cut. He answered that that he “really can’t say” and that “it’s going to depend on the data.” Fed funds futures traders are pricing in a more than 76% likelihood that the central bank once again holds rates steady at the July policy gathering, according to the CME FedWatch tool. “We are going meeting by meeting,” Powell said during Tuesday’s panel. “I wouldn’t take any meeting off the table or put it directly on the table. It’s going to depend on how the data evolve.”

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State Stories

3 families say lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons caused their loved ones' deaths

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) is facing more legal action over sweltering conditions in state prisons. The families of three inmates who died in 2023 are suing the department in federal court, claiming their loved ones died due to a lack of air conditioning in prisons. The families of Jon Southards, Elizabeth Hagerty and John Skinner say their loved ones had multiple disabilities, making them more vulnerable to heat-related illnesses. But the families say the TDCJ failed to provide them with cooled housing. The three were housed in different facilities: one in Gatesville and two near Huntsville.

WFAA, KVUE's news partners in North Texas, spoke with Southards' mother just after his death in 2023. She said her son was in prison for burglary, and he told her about the hot conditions just before he died. "I thought my baby would be rehabilitated. I thought he would serve his time, which, deservingly, he needed to," Tona Southards-Maranjo said. "Jon was not just my son. John was my best friend, my baby." KVUE reached out to the TDCJ for a comment about the new lawsuit. We received the following response: "Core to this department’s mission is protecting the public, our employees, and the inmates in our custody. It is a responsibility that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice takes seriously. The agency takes numerous precautions to lessen the effects of hot temperatures for those in our facilities. Over the last several years, the agency has worked to increase the number of cool beds available. TDCJ is dedicated to continuing to add air-conditioned beds in our facilities. During the 88th Texas Legislative session, TDCJ received a historic infusion of funding for major repair and improvement projects at facilities. Specifically, the agency received $85 million to install additional air conditioning. Additionally, TDCJ’s Legislative Appropriations Request for the FY2026-27 biennium includes an exceptional item request for $118 million for the installation of air conditioning. This would provide an additional 18,000 air-conditioned beds to the system. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that extreme heat in TDCJ facilities is unconstitutional, but he stopped short of requiring the TDCJ to add air condition to all its units due to the cost. The supplemental appropriations bill lawmakers passed this past session will include $118 million to help the TDCJ add 11,000 air-conditioned beds to prisons. But a bill that would have required Texas to add A/C to all prisons passed in the House this session, then failed in the Senate.

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Chip Roy is in the hot seat again on Trump's tax cut bill

Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy reluctantly voted for a Republican budget plan, saying while it didn't go far enough in cutting government spending, he had gotten assurances from President Donald Trump the cuts he wanted would be there in the end. Three months later, those cuts have not materialized. The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," which includes expensive tax breaks and increased spending on the border and military in a package the Congressional Budget Office estimates would add $3.3 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. Now, Roy and his allies in the House Freedom Caucus must decide between pleasing Trump or resisting the type of government spending increase they have long railed against.

Roy expressed his frustration in a social media post Monday night. "We’ve got to deliver for the President—but it has to be the right bill," the Austin Republican said, according to a post by his press team on X. "One that actually stops the spending, ends the inflation, and stops subsidizing our own destruction.” Since being elected to Congress in 2018, Roy has repeatedly threatened to block Republican budget packages he believes overspend, only to relent and cut deals with leadership to allow their passage. With Trump back in the White House and Republicans narrowly controlling both the House and Senate, Roy is in his best position yet to wield influence and bring down the deficit. In an interview late last year, he acknowledged the challenges in getting Congress to cut spending that members' states had come to rely on, while describing the national debt crisis in histrionic terms. “I know I can’t get everything I want, but I know I won’t get anything if just get in the boat heading to the iceberg," he said.

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Trump officials want to give TxDOT more power over highway expansions

The Trump administration wants to give Texas more authority – and require less transparency – as the state expands existing highways and builds new ones. In November, the Texas Department of Transportation asked the Federal Highway Administration to extend a special designation that lets it oversee its own compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA requires the state to document community and environmental impacts of road projects. Now, TxDOT has submitted a new application, with changes that would give itself drastically more oversight and authority over its own federal environmental review. The draft rule would allow TxDOT to skip annual self-assessments and monthly reports that document the agency’s compliance with the federal law.

The application was revised after federal leadership “presented an opportunity to address unnecessary administrative requirements in a renegotiated MOU that preserves all of the legal requirements of the NEPA assignment program,” said Adam Hammons, a TxDOT spokesperson, in an email. He said that TxDOT was still subject to monitoring and audits by the Federal Highway Administration. If approved, TxDOT won’t have to inform community members of their right to sue the state agency or file a civil rights complaint with the FHWA, as dozens of people did in 2021 in response to the I-45 expansion in Houston. The new agreement also removes a requirement that TxDOT reevaluate old projects, meaning projects originally approved years ago could begin construction without public notice or input. “The Biden Administration added burdensome NEPA requirements like environmental justice initiatives that delayed progress on vital road and bridge projects,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy when he announced the proposed changes. “If enacted, Texas’ new agreement will allow the state to tackle critical infrastructure bigger, better and faster.”

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The Dallas Morning News picks 28-year veteran journalist as its next newsroom leader

The Dallas Morning News has appointed Colleen McCain Nelson as its next executive editor, following a four-month search. Her tenure will begin on Aug. 11. A veteran with nearly 30 years of experience, Nelson currently serves as executive editor of The Sacramento Bee, and is McClatchy Media’s California regional editor, leading five Golden State newsrooms. She is replacing Katrice Hardy, who departed The News in February to lead The Marshall Project. Nelson is returning to lead a newsroom where she spent 12 of her formative reporting years covering local, state and national politics — winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process. She takes the reins at a time when the newspaper is reimagining its newsroom to be more competitive in the digital era, and to better serve a rapidly evolving North Texas region that’s becoming an epicenter of Texas’ growth.

“We conducted a nationwide search to find the best executive editor in the United States, and I am confident we found that leader in Colleen,” Grant Moise, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, said in a statement. “Colleen is an outstanding journalist, and has been at the forefront of journalism’s digital transformation. We can’t wait to welcome her back to The Dallas Morning News.” In 2010, Nelson and her News colleagues Tod Robberson and William McKenzie were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, recognition for a series of editorials that condemned the stark economic and social disparities separating Dallas’ thriving northern half and struggling southern half. Nelson’s arrival coincides with DallasNews Corporation’s drive to improve its financial health, with The News’ parent company having recently completed a $43.5 million deal to sell its printing and distribution operation in Plano. In an interview, Nelson said she is embracing “the chance to learn from such great journalists here. I have always admired the company’s commitment to the community… and I never stopped rooting for and reading The Dallas Morning News.

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100+ felony bonds reduced by Travis County Justice of the Peace

The release of an Austin man charged with capital murder after a Travis County Justice of the Peace granted him a significant bond reduction prompted a KXAN investigation. It uncovered that same judge has reduced or modified bonds for at least 100 additional defendants facing felony charges since she took office in January. Aden Munoz, 18, was arrested on Feb. 13 and faced a Capital Murder charge. An Austin Municipal Court Judge required him to post a $750,000 bond. Less than four weeks later, court records show another judge reduced his original bond to $5,000, and he was released from custody. Three days after Munoz was released from jail, the Travis County District Attorney‘s Office filed a motion to reinstate the original $750,000 bond, alleging a violation of Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Section 17.091, which requires the attorney representing the state receive reasonable notice of any proposed bail reduction and be given the opportunity to have a hearing on the proposed reduction for all first degree felony offenses as well as any offense listed in Article 42A.054 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.

“No representative of the State was notified of any of these proceedings,” the motion stated. The order modifying and reducing the original bond to $5,000 was issued by Tanisa Jeffers, the newly-elected Travis County Justice of the Peace for Precinct 5, which serves downtown and parts of central and northwest Austin. She formerly served as an associate judge at the Austin Municipal Court before beginning her current term in January 2025. In Travis County, Austin municipal court judges provide criminal magistrate services and are tasked with determining bail amounts and bond conditions as appropriate during preliminary proceedings in felony and misdemeanor cases, according to the Interlocal Agreement between Travis County and the City of Austin. A Texas Justice of the Peace has jurisdiction to perform magistrate duties in Texas, however, the criminal workload for JPs in Travis County typically involves class C criminal misdemeanors and various civil law duties, according to the Travis County website. KXAN asked Judge Jeffers why the State was never notified of the bail reduction and what factors she considered before agreeing to a reduced bond of $5,000 for a defendant facing a capital murder charge.

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Cook Children’s Medicaid coverage remains in legal limbo

After a March brain surgery at Cook Children’s, 15-year-old Preston Benjamin-Sewell had to relearn how to walk, eat and talk. He was in the Fort Worth-based hospital for a little over a month and a half, a place he’s well acquainted with. The first several days were challenging, said Meghan Czarobski, his mother. Preston was bedridden and couldn’t do anything independently. “But once he gets up and going, nothing holds him back,” Czarobski said. “He just starts going. So, he went from, like, not being able to walk to, as soon as he got his footing, he was taking off.” The surgery was to help with seizures.

Preston has autism, an intellectual and developmental disability and a rare form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. He’s triple insured through Cook Children’s Health Plan, Blue Cross Blue Shield and TRICARE to help cover health care costs, Czarobski said. They’re at Cook Children’s frequently, but the family and others in North Texas are concerned about possible disruptions to their health care coverage, after state lawmakers didn’t take action to address the way the state awards Medicaid contracts. Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission announced in March 2024 that it was not awarding its multibillion dollar Medicaid contract to Cook Children’s Health Plan. Texas pays insurance providers, like the Cook Children’s Health Plan, who administer health insurance to children and pregnant patients on the Medicaid STAR and CHIP programs. Instead of going to Cook’s Health Plan and a handful of other similar plans in Texas, the Health and Human Services Commission awarded the contract to Aetna, United Healthcare, Molina, Blue Cross and Blue Shield for Tarrant County and five neighboring counties. Also excluded were health plans associated with Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston and Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi. The contract award for STAR Kids, which provides Medicaid benefits to children and adults 20 and younger with disabilities, including Preston, is on hold by court order.

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Texas mom charged with killing son on FBI’s Most Wanted list

More than two years after a 6-year-old Everman boy went missing, his mother has been added to the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. Authorities have been searching for Cindy Rodriguez-Singh ever since she fled from North Texas to India with her husband and six other children on March 22, 2023, two days after she lied to investigators by saying the missing child was with his biological father in Mexico. Her son Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez is presumed dead, and Rodriguez-Singh has been charged with capital murder. The FBI’s Dallas office, Everman Police Department and Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office held a news conference Tuesday morning to announce that Rodriguez-Singh, 40, is the newest addition to the most wanted fugitives list.

Craig Spencer, former chief of police and current city manager and emergency management coordinator for the City of Everman, said somebody knows what happened to Noel, “and now they have 250,000 reasons to come forward.” “This designation puts the world on notice that Cindy Rodriguez-Singh is now one of the most wanted fugitives in America,” Spencer said. “You don’t end up on the FBI top 10 list by accident. This is as serious as it gets.” A concerned relative from out of town alerted Child Protective Services in March 2023 that Noel hadn’t been seen since the previous fall. On March 20, police went to the family’s home on Wisteria Drive to check on the child, but Rodriguez-Singh lied to them about his whereabouts. Investigators reached Noel’s biological father in Mexico on March 23, and he denied that the 6-year-old was with him. Federal authorities confirmed there was no record of Noel crossing the border into Mexico. Police tried to contact Rodriguez-Singh the following day, but were unsuccessful.

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Smaller nuclear reactors spark renewed interest in a once-shunned energy source

Bolstered by $3.2 million from a former Midland oilman, this West Texas city of 130,000 people is helping the Lone Star State lead a national nuclear energy resurgence. Doug Robison’s 2021 donation to Abilene Christian University helped the institution win federal approval to house an advanced small modular nuclear reactor, which might be finished as soon as next year. Small modular reactors are designed to be built in factories and then moved to a site, and require less upfront capital investment than traditional large reactors. The company Robison founded, Natura Resources, is investing another $30.5 million in the project. Only two small modular reactors are in operation, one in China and another in Russia. Natura Resources is one of two companies with federal permits to build one in the U.S.

“Nuclear is happening,” said Robison, who retired from the oil business and moved to Abilene to launch the company. “It has to happen.” Robison’s words are being echoed across the country with new state laws that aim to accelerate the spread of projects that embrace advanced nuclear technology — decades after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl calamities soured many Americans on nuclear power. In the past two years, half the states have taken action to promote nuclear power, from creating nuclear task forces to integrating nuclear into long-term energy plans, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, which advocates for the industry. “I’ve been tracking legislation for 18 years, and when I first started tracking, there were maybe five or 10 bills that said the word ‘nuclear,’” said Christine Csizmadia, who directs state government affairs at the institute. “This legislative session, we’re tracking over 300 bills all across the country.” The push is bipartisan. In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul last month directed the New York Power Authority to build a zero-emission advanced nuclear power plant somewhere upstate — her state’s first new nuclear plant in a generation. In Colorado, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis in April signed legislation redefining nuclear energy, which doesn’t emit a significant amount of planet-warming greenhouse gases, as a “clean energy resource.” The law will allow future plants to receive state grants reserved for other carbon-free energy sources.

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Judge dismisses lawsuit against doctor in case of woman who gave birth alone in Tarrant County Jail

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against a doctor accused of neglecting a woman who gave birth alone in her Tarrant County Jail cell. Chasity Congious has intellectual disabilities and multiple serious mental health diagnoses, according to court records. She gave birth unattended in the Tarrant County Jail in 2020, and her daughter, Zenorah, died in the hospital 10 days later. Congious' family received $1.2 million in a lawsuit against Tarrant County, the largest settlement in county history. After that settlement, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor allowed Congious’ mother to sue Dr. Aaron Ivy Shaw, the medical director at the Tarrant County Jail at the time Congious was incarcerated.

On Tuesday, O’Connor dismissed the lawsuit. Congious’ legal team failed to prove Shaw was “deliberately indifferent” to her medical needs, he ruled. “There is no doubt that this case is an abject tragedy,” O'Connor wrote. Deliberate indifference is difficult to prove, and requires a lot of evidence, O’Connor wrote. Shaw would have needed to do something like deny Congious care or ignore her complaints, he wrote. The lawsuit hinged on an email to Shaw that noted Congious was experiencing abdominal pain the day she gave birth. Previous medical evaluations determined Congious would not be able to recognize if she was having contractions and recommended induced labor for her, according to court documents. The court had previously dismissed the lawsuit against Shaw, but O’Connor brought it back after Congious’ attorney produced that email. That email was a warning Congious was likely in labor and Shaw did nothing about it, her legal team argued.

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Tarrant County approves $250K contract with law firm to fight racial gerrymandering lawsuit

Tarrant County commissioners approved a quarter million-dollar contract with a conservative law firm Tuesday to defend itself against a lawsuit over redistricting. The vote was 3-2, Republicans versus Democrats. Republican commissioners led an unusual mid-decade redistricting process this spring, redrawing the commissioners court precinct maps to add another Republican-majority precinct. They openly said they wanted to give themselves a larger majority on the commissioners court. Opponents to redistricting say Republicans created that extra conservative precinct by packing Democratic-leaning voters of color into a single district, diluting their voting power. The lawsuit, filed in June, accuses the county of unlawful racial gerrymandering.

The $250,000 legal agreement is with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), the same law firm Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare handpicked to lead the redistricting process. “This is essentially hiring the arsonist to put out the fire,” Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons said. She and her fellow Democratic commissioner, Roderick Miles Jr., voted against the contract. Miles criticized PILF for refusing to speak to the public or answer their questions at a series of public hearings about redistricting. “Residents asked questions and received no answers. Commissioners sought clarity and were met with silence,” he said. Simmons wondered whether hiring PILF could be a conflict of interest, if any of the foundation’s attorneys are called as witnesses in the lawsuit. Republican County Commissioner Manny Ramirez called that a valid concern and asked county attorney Mark Kratovil his opinion. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office — which represents the county in legal matters — doesn't have a problem with the contract at this time, Kratovil said. Whether there’s a conflict of interest or not will come up as the lawsuit progresses, he said.

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New Texas laws target roadside pet sales and puppy mills

Two new Texas laws taking effect later this year will tighten the leash on puppy mills and roadside pet sales by expanding local authority over outdoor animal vendors. With little government oversight, animals sold in parking lots and along roadsides often face poor conditions and neglect, typically at the hands of unlicensed breeders within large-scale breeding operations, colloquially referred to as puppy mills. But starting Sept. 1, House Bills 2012 and 2731 will allow counties near large metropolitan areas to ban animal sales in outdoor public spaces. These rules will also apply to counties along the U.S.-Mexico border with at least 200,000 residents.

According to Katie Fine, senior advocacy strategist at Best Friends Animal Society, the laws represent “significant progress in breaking the supply chain for puppy mills in Texas.” The organization works to end euthanasia in animal shelters across the nation. "These laws protect communities, empower consumers, and hold deceptive sellers accountable,” Fine said. "It is smart and responsible legislation that prioritizes public safety and transparency." Since 2007, only counties with at least 1.3 million residents could regulate outdoor animal sales in Texas. The new laws expand that power to counties with over 600,000 residents that border another county with more than 4 million people. Counties newly granted this authority include Fort Bend, Montgomery, El Paso, Cameron, Webb and Hidalgo. These counties now join Harris County and the cities of Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth — which have all banned roadside sales of dogs and cats.

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CBP plans to process migrants arrested in new Rio Grande Valley military zone, agency says

Migrants who are apprehended from within a newly established military zone on the border in two South Texas counties will be processed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, the agency told Border Report on Monday. Last week, the Air Force announced that 250 miles of borderlands in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, which were previously managed by the International Boundary and Water Commission, are now part of an extended military base. The lands are now part of Joint Base San Antonio, a facility near 250 miles north of the border with Mexico. Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez told Border Report that the military will have the authority to withhold those for trespassing on military property, but that they would turn them over to other federal authorities.

Border Patrol spokeswoman Christina Smallwood said in a statement: “All 9 stations in the RGV Sector are equipped with processing facilities. RGV Sector also has a Centralized Processing Center.” Cortez emphasized that the land transfer was from one federal agency to another, specifically to create the new National Defense Area along the Southwest border. It was completed on Wednesday by the General Services Administration. Cortez says he was not informed prior to the land transfer. But much of the land in Hidalgo and Cameron counties are privately owned. In 2018 almost 300,000 parcels of land in Hidalgo County were privately owned, and 175,000 parcels of land in Cameron County were privately owned, according to a 2019 report by Texas Land Trends, of Texas A&M. That included over 5,600 parcels within a mile of the Rio Grande in Hidalgo County, and over 24,000 parcels within a mile of the river in Cameron County.

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National Stories

Mortgage refinance demand surges, as interest rates drop further

ortgage rates fell last week to the lowest level since April, leading current homeowners to seek savings. Applications to refinance a home loan rose 7% last week compared with the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Demand was 40% higher than the same week one year ago. The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances, $806,500 or less, decreased to 6.79% from 6.88%, with points decreasing to 0.62 from 0.63, including the origination fee, for loans with a 20% down payment. That rate is 24 basis points lower than the same week one year ago.

“This decline prompted an increase in refinance applications, driven by a 10 percent increase in conventional applications and a 22 percent increase in VA refinance applications,” said Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist. “As borrowers with larger loans tend to be more sensitive to rate changes, the average loan size for a refinance application increased to $313,700 after averaging less than $300,000 for the past six weeks.” Homebuyers, however, were less driven by the drop in rates. Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home increased just 0.1% for the week and were 16% higher than the same week one year ago. “Purchase activity was essentially flat over the week, as overall uncertainty continues to hold homebuyers out of the market,” added Kan. Mortgage rates fell further to start this week, according to a separate survey from Mortgage News Daily. They were then flat Tuesday, following the release of job openings data which showed another increase.

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How holdout Alaska senator shaped Trump’s megabill

At 3 a.m. Tuesday, with President Trump’s sprawling domestic-policy bill in trouble on the Senate floor, no one had more leverage than Sen. Lisa Murkowski. With two GOP senators firmly opposed and Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) likely to vote “no,” the senior senator from Alaska was the pivotal vote for Trump’s legislative agenda. Murkowski, a patient and often inscrutable moderate Republican, was dead set on amending the bill to benefit her constituents and softening the blow from spending cuts in the package. By 5 a.m., Medicaid officials were on the phone with staffers representing Alaska’s other and more conservative Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, to iron out rural-hospital provisions that would help Murkowski get to “yes.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) could have chosen to shrink the bill’s debt-ceiling increase to sway Rand Paul (R., Ky.), or adjust the Medicaid provisions to woo Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) and Collins. Instead, he gave more to Alaska—and it worked.

At the end of a marathon voting session that lasted more than 26 hours, Murkowski offered a soft-spoken yes for the bill just before noon, bringing the total number of senators supporting it to 50 and allowing Vice President JD Vance to break the tie. Then she stepped outside the Senate chamber and said she hopes the House changes the bill she had just supported. “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” she told a clutch of reporters before heading off for a nap. Murkowski said that senators rushed too much because Trump created the July 4 deadline. In a subsequent statement, she said that while she protected Alaska’s interests, the bill was “not good enough for the rest of our nation.” House Republican leaders said they don’t plan to change the legislation and want it passed out of the chamber as soon as Wednesday—though the raucous nature of their members make the proceedings unpredictable. No members of the Democratic caucus supported the bill, and the wins for Alaska prompted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to call the final legislation a “polar payoff.” Sullivan, who is up for re-election next year, brushed off the criticism. “I can see why he’s jealous of my hard work,” Sullivan said. “If he’s calling it the polar payoff, I’d call it the New York nothingburger.”

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Musk proposes a new political party, Trump suggests DOGE 'might have to go back and eat Elon'

Elon Musk’s feud with President Donald Trump — and seemingly any congressional Republicans who support the president’s massive tax cuts and spending package — has reignited, with the tech billionaire threatening to launch a new political party, and Trump suggesting Musk could be punished for his opposition. The dispute has laid bare not only the differences between the Republican president and one of his most vociferous one-time advocates, but also has reignited the possibility that the world’s richest man will — along with his billions — reenter the political spending arena.

Musk — who spent at least $250 million supporting Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign as the main contributor to America PAC — said in May that he would likely spend “a lot less” on politics in the future. But his recent statements seem to indicate Musk might be rethinking that stance. On Monday, the tech billionaire and former Department Of Government Efficiency chief lashed out multiple times at Republicans for backing Trump’s tax cuts bill, calling the GOP “the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” for including a provision that would raise the nation’s debt limit by $5 trillion and calling the bill “political suicide” for Republicans. After a post pledging to work toward supporting primary challengers for members of Congress who backed the bill, Musk responded “I will” to a post in which former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash asked for Musk’s support of Rep. Thomas Massie. Trump and his aides are already targeting the Kentucky Republican for voting against the measure, launching a new super PAC devoted to defeating him. Musk and Trump’s potent political alliance seemed to meet a dramatic end a month ago in an exchange of blistering epithets, with Trump threatening to go after Musk’s business interests, and Musk calling for Trump’s impeachment. Much of it has boiled down to Musk’s criticism of the tax cuts and spending bill, which he has called a “disgusting abomination.” Both the House and Senate versions propose a dramatic rollback of the Biden-era green energy tax breaks for electric vehicles and related technologies.

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Trump tours 'Alligator Alcatraz,' a day before its first arrivals are expected

President Trump visited Florida on Tuesday to tour what's been dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz," a controversial migrant detention center in the Everglades that officials say is poised to start filling its bed in a matter of hours. The president was joined by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state emergency management officials as he toured the makeshift facility, which the state put together within days of receiving federal approval last week. "I thought this was so professional, so well done," Trump said after touring the center, which features rows of fenced-in bunk beds and a razor-wire perimeter. "It's really government working together."

The facility is situated within the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, an isolated, 39-square mile airstrip located within the wetlands of the Big Cypress National Preserve, next to Everglades National Park. The site's nickname — coined by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier — references its proximity to the predators of the marshy Everglades, from pythons to alligators to mosquitoes. "What'll happen is you'll bring people in there, they ain't going anywhere once they're there unless you want them to go somewhere, because, good luck getting to civilization," DeSantis said at an unrelated news conference on Monday. "So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise." Speaking to reporters before departing for Florida, Trump described the facility as "an East Coast" version of the infamous island prison off the San Francisco coast. When asked if the idea was for detainees to get eaten by alligators if they try to escape, Trump replied, "I guess that's the concept." "Snakes are fast but alligators — we're going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don't run in a straight line, run like this," he said, waving his hands in a zigzag. "You know what, your chances go up about one percent." The airstrip's roughly 11,000-foot runway has largely been used for training purposes, but officials say it will soon accommodate deportation flights. DeSantis has repeatedly said the state will deputize National Guard judge advocates to serve as immigration judges in order to expedite the removal of migrants — both from the facility and the country.

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Paramount to pay Trump $16 million to settle ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit

Paramount said late Tuesday that it has agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” an extraordinary concession to a sitting president by a major media organization. Paramount said its payment includes Mr. Trump’s legal fees and costs and that the money, minus the legal fees, will be paid to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library. As part of the settlement, Paramount said that it had agreed to release written transcripts of future “60 Minutes” interviews with presidential candidates. The company said that the settlement did not include an apology. The deal is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Trump’s ability to intimidate major American institutions extends to the media industry.

Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information. But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Mr. Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval. After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Mr. Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal ahead of a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. Another deadline loomed: Paramount was planning to make changes to its board of directors this week that could have complicated the settlement negotiations. A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the settlement was “another win for the American people” delivered by the president, who was holding “the fake news media accountable.”

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Three shootings at Utah Hare Krishna temple raise concerns about hate, safety

In the heart of Mormon Utah, a Hare Krishna temple has stood as a beloved cultural landmark for more than three decades. Tens of thousands of locals flock to the ISKCON Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork each spring for its annual Holi color festival, and children from diverse backgrounds enjoy field trips to the 15-acre property — which includes an AM radio station and an animal park with llamas, cows, peacocks and parrots — throughout the year. “We’re trying to do good and enrich the community pretty much 24 hours a day,” said Caru Das Adhikari, the temple’s founder and head priest, who once distributed copies of the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, in the 1970s on the campus of Brigham Young University, the flagship university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But over the past month, three attacks on the temple’s building have left Utah’s Hare Krishna devotees concerned about the presence of hatred amid their otherwise peaceful coexistence. On June 18, Adhikari’s wife and temple co-founder, Vaibhavi Warden, heard a loud noise and observed smoke coming from the temple’s radio station roof. The next day, several bullet holes were discovered on various parts of the temple’s main structure, including on its hand-carved arches and through a second-story window that opens into the main worship hall. More gunfire followed later that night, and again on June 20, based on security footage reviewed by temple staff. No one was injured in the attacks. About 20 shell casings were recovered by Utah County police, who said in a statement that the shots were likely fired from over 100 yards away. Surveillance video from the three days captured a pickup truck approaching the temple grounds, stopping near its fence and someone opening fire from the vehicle before speeding away.

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Lead Stories

Dallas Democrat Colin Allred launches Senate campaign for seat held by John Cornyn

Former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred has launched a campaign for the Senate seat held by Republican John Cornyn, pledging to be a voice for Texans wracked by higher costs of living and what he views as a “rigged” political system. “Everything’s backwards. Folks are working harder than ever and they still can’t get ahead, but the folks who are cutting corners and cutting deals are doing just fine,” Allred told The Dallas Morning News in an exclusive interview, on Monday. “I know Washington is broken and I’m going to be laser-focused in this campaign on getting back to some of the basics, on lowering costs, on fighting for health care, for fighting against corrupt politicians like John Cornyn and Ken Paxton.” In a campaign kickoff video launched Tuesday, Allred stressed his commitment to working Texans.

“Texans are working harder than ever, not getting as much time with their kids, missing those special moments, all to be able to afford less,” Allred said in the video. “And the people that we elected to help — politicians like John Cornyn and Ken Paxton — are too corrupt to care about us and too weak to fight for us.” Allred, 42, is staging his second statewide campaign launch in two years. Last year he lost a Senate challenge against incumbent Ted Cruz by nearly 9 percentage points. It was a disappointment for Democrats hoping Allred would propel them to their first statewide contest since 1994. The March Senate primaries are expected to be competitive. Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, is challenging Cornyn in a GOP primary that could also draw other contenders. Several hopefuls are considering running in the Democratic primary. The Dallas Democrat said he’s learned from the loss to Cruz. His time away from Washington, spent primarily at home raising his two young sons, gave him a different view of the political scene. he said.

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Texas schools still struggle with deficits despite HB 2 funding boost

Many local school districts expect to collect millions from House Bill 2, an $8.5 billion funding package passed through the Texas Legislature and signed into law by the governor this month. The bill was the first comprehensive funding package state lawmakers have passed since 2019, though districts have received funding increases in areas such as tutoring, instructional materials and school safety. For many districts in Central Texas, HB 2 will provide some relief after two years of budget slashing, campus closures and staff layoffs. Despite the infusion of state funding, many local school leaders are still turning their attention to austerity measures next year to reduce lingering budget deficits.

HB 2’s largest investment is $4 billion for teacher and staff pay raises and an expansion of Texas’ merit-based teacher pay program, the Teacher Incentive Allotment. Gov. Greg Abbott declared teacher pay raises an emergency item at the beginning of this year's session. During a signing ceremony for HB 2 at Salado Middle School on June 4, Abbott touted the educator raises. "We want to attract and keep the very best teachers," Abbott said. The law allocates $1.3 billion for a new fixed cost allotment to help districts with operational costs, utilities or transportation; $850 million for special education; and almost $650 million for early literacy and numeracy. HB 2 also allocates $430 million in safety funding. The Austin district expects to collect about $35.9 million from HB 2, with almost $20 million going to staff raises. Interim Chief Financial Officer Katrina Montgomery told the school board at a Thursday meeting that she expects the district to net about $9 million in flexible money after accounting for directed spending and added costs – such as additional payments to teacher retirement.

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‘The right person to step in’: Brazos County Commissioner talks new county judge appointment

Former Texas State Representative Kyle Kacal was appointed interim Brazos County Judge on Sunday as Judge Duane Peters recovers from a health issue. In a statement, now Judge Kacal said he feels “humbled and appreciative” to be stepping into the role. I am humbled and appreciative of Judge Peters’ request for me to serve as County Judge in his absence. He is a longtime, highly respected friend and I do not take this appointment lightly. Once my bond is approved by Commissioners Court and I am sworn-in to office, I will begin official duties as County Judge. Until then, I’m meeting with elected officials and department heads to gather as much information as possible. I am a public servant honored to answer a call to serve the residents of Brazos County once again and will do so as long as I am needed.

Brazos County Commissioner Bentley Nettles told KBTX this isn’t his first time working alongside Judge Kacal. According to Commissioner Nettles, the two worked together while he was the Executive Director of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and Judge Kacal was still an elected representative. “He’s certainly a public servant and the right person to step in to be able to handle all the moving parts of a county,” he vouched. According to county officials, commissioners were not made aware until shortly after the appointment was made, nor did they have a say in the process. Commissioner Nettles said the county’s chief of staff informed him on Sunday that Judge Peters would have to make an appointment, but expected it to happen during the week. He explained why the decision was made unilaterally, saying under the law, Judge Peters has 30 days from the time of his last official act to make an appointment like this himself. “If he did not meet that 30-day requirement, then that burden would shift to the Commissioner’s Court to make an appointment,” detailed Commissioner Nettles. Judge Peters’ last official act was in early June.

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Senate's long day turns to night as GOP works to shore up support on Trump’s big bill

The Senate’s long day of voting churned into a long Monday night, with Republican leaders grasping for ways to shore up support for President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts while fending off proposed amendments from Democrats who oppose the package and are trying to defeat it. The outcome was not yet in sight. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota acknowledged the Republicans are “figuring out how to get to the end game.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled the potential problems the Senate package could face when it is eventually sent back to his chamber for a final round of voting, which was expected later this week, ahead of Trump’s Fourth of July deadline. “I have prevailed upon my Senate colleagues to please, please, please keep it as close to the House product as possible,” said Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, as he left the Capitol around dinnertime. House Republicans had already passed their version last month.

It’s a pivotal moment for the Republicans, who have control of Congress and are racing to wrap up work with just days to go before Trump’s holiday deadline Friday. The 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as it’s formally titled, has consumed Congress as its shared priority with the president. The GOP leaders have no room to spare, with narrow majorities in both chambers. Thune can lose no more than three Republican senators, and already two — Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who warns people will lose access to Medicaid health care, and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who opposes raising the debt limit — have indicated opposition. Tillis abruptly announced over the weekend he would not seek reelection after Trump threatened to campaign against him. Attention quickly turned to key senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who have also raised concerns about health care cuts, but also a loose coalition of four conservative GOP senators pushing for even steeper reductions. And on social media, billionaire Elon Musk was again lashing out at Republicans as “the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” for including a provision that would raise the nation’s debt limit by $5 trillion, which is needed to allow continued borrowing to pay the bills.

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State Stories

Rep. Cook jumps into race to succeed Sen. Birdwell

Shorlty after Texas Sen. Brian Birdwell announced Monday that he will not seek re-election in 2026, state Rep. David Cook said he would run for the seat. Birdwell, a Granbury Republican representing Senate District 22 since 2010, thanked Jesus, his wife Mel, his constituents and his staff members for their support throughout his four terms. “It has been the high honor of my life, on par with commanding United States soldiers, to serve my fellow Texans for over 15 years,” Birdwell stated in a X post. Cook, 53, is a Mansfield Republican serving his third term for House District 96. He ran for House speaker before this past legislative session. In his announcement, he thanked Birdwell for his service, calling him “the personification of a servant leader.”

“While we’ve accomplished a great deal, there’s more work to be done!” Cook stated in the news release. “I look forward to hitting the campaign trail to earn the support of the people of Texas Senate District 22.” Other officials also showed their appreciation for Birdwell, including Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare. Some of Cook’s priorities include securing the border, lowering property taxes and supporting public schools, among others, according to his website. Birdwell, 63, will finish the remainder of his term, which will end in January 2027. The next Texas Senate election is in November 2026. Senate District 22 represents the counties of Bosque, Comanche, Eastland, Erath, Falls, Hamilton, Hill, Hood, McLennan and Somervell, as well as parts of Ellis and Tarrant counties.

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Abbott vetoes bill to boost oversight of migrant child detention centers

For years, Texas mom Sheena Rodriguez has worn a band with the number 3120 everywhere she goes. She had it on when she testified in Congress about unaccompanied migrant children, and every time she urged Texas state lawmakers to pass a bill that would increase oversight of facilities that house them. Human smugglers had put the band on a 13-year-old girl from Belize before she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Rodriguez, who met the girl there in fall 2022, told her she wouldn’t need it now that she was in the care of the U.S. It wasn’t until a few months ago that she registered that the bill she had fought for — House Bill 3120 by Republican state Rep. Stan Kitzman of Pattison — happened to have the same number. “You can’t make this up,” Rodriguez, a Republican, said in a phone interview.

Lawmakers passed the bill to address what the elected officials described as longstanding problems with abuse, neglect and sanitation at facilities that house unaccompanied minors – the majority of whom are migrant children. It would have required detention facilities to share information on safety practices, illness prevention, criminal incidents and education plans with local authorities. Facilities that receive state funding would also need to put new hires through criminal background checks. Gov. Greg Abbott, however, vetoed HB 3120 hours before a June 22 deadline, killing the bipartisan proposal that could have put the Trump administration’s immigration practices — and those of future presidents — under a microscope. The bill passed with just two “no” votes in the GOP-controlled House and gained unanimous approval in the Republican-led Senate this legislative session, three years after Kitzman first filed a version of the proposal. State Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, sponsored it in the upper chamber. Unaccompanied children in U.S. detention centers have made thousands of reports of sexual abuse to federal authorities, including about 2,000 complaints in 2023 alone, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Oversight agencies have also identified problems with overcrowding, dangerous flu outbreaks and lack of access to sufficient food and water. In legislative hearings, Kitzman and Huffman referenced these reports and expressed concern about a lack of communication with local authorities, including in two facilities in the rural southeast Texas communities they represent. Both facilities opened in the past four years, most recently in Wallis in 2022. In a veto statement, Abbott praised the bill’s goals, saying it could help local authorities respond to emergencies in detention centers.

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South Texas county judge calls military border zone ‘drastic’

Standing atop an earthen levee just north of the Rio Grande and near the famous Santa Ana National Wildlife Refugee, environmentalist Scott Nicol wondered Friday where signs indicating that this area is now a military zone would go. And if people would notice them, or face arrest. “Where are they going to put it? Look around,” said Nicol surrounded by mesquite trees and hardy drought-resistant thick brush. Nicol took a stroll atop the levee with Border Report, which now is part of a new military zone that the Air Force says spans 250 miles in Hidalgo and Cameron counties of deep South Texas. “It is very concerning because the whole part of this announcement is to restrict access – to make sure that people can’t get anywhere near the river, can’t get across the river. What does that also mean for residents? Does it mean the entire Rio Grande Valley is cut off from the river, which is the lifeblood of our region?” Nicol said.

The federal lands — previously under management by the International Boundary and Water Commission — were transferred Wednesday by the General Services Administration, an IBWC official confirmed to Border Report. The lands now are part of Joint Base San Antonio, a facility nearly 250 miles away. Establishing these new National Defense Areas along the Southwest border are “designed to support the Department of Defense’s ongoing mission to secure the southern border in coordination with inter-agency and partner stakeholders,” the Air Force said in a statement. But Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez on Friday told Border Report it’s a “drastic” move, annd one of which he had no knowledge. “We have an issue that we haven’t been able to resolve with immigration and I think that this is kind of a drastic way of addressing it,” Cortez said. Cortez, who is the top elected official in a county of 1 million people, said on Friday that federal officials told Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra that it’s meant as an extra layer of border security. “It’s all federal land and basically our understanding is it allows the military to be able to go in there and do surveillance of the property and anyone illegally trespassing they can withhold them. They cannot arrest them but they can withhold them and turn them over to other authorities,” Cortez said. That means that anyone caught on these lands can be arrested and charged with trespassing – a criminal misdemeanor punishable by up to 18 months in prison.

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Tarrant County commissioners to consider $250K contract with law firm in gerrymandering lawsuit

Tarrant County commissioners will consider a quarter million-dollar contract with the conservative law firm that led the county's controversial redistricting process — this time to defend the county in a lawsuit. A group of Tarrant County residents sued over the new commissioners court map on June 4, arguing the redrawn precinct boundaries are racially discriminatory. The map gives white non-Hispanics the majority in three out of four commissioners court precincts, even though they make up less than half the county’s population, the lawsuit states. The Public Interest Legal Foundation got a $30,000 contract to lead the redistricting process in April. Now, a vote for a $250,000 contract to defend the county in the lawsuit is on the commissioners court agenda for Tuesday’s meeting. The Republican commissioners, who led the push to redistrict, have denied the new map took race into consideration. All three have been open about their intentions to grow their existing majority on the commissioners court.

The redrawn map makes Precinct 2 — represented by Democratic County Commissioner Alisa Simmons — more conservative, past election data shared by the county shows. Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, a Republican, defended the county’s redistricting process in an interview on Lone Star Politics posted June 22. When asked whether the new maps targeted Black voters, who generally vote for Democrats, O’Hare responded that the media is responsible for a lot of this country’s polarization. “You’ll always talk about race, and race, race, race, and you do things that divide people,” he said. O’Hare did not consider race in choosing a new map, he said. “It's real simple, no matter how many ways you want to ask it, or how many ways you want to word it, I wanted another Republican on the court,” he said. “We have three Republicans on the court. We wanted another one, and that’s why we chose to do it.” The Public Interest Legal Foundation also defended Galveston County in a lawsuit over accusations of racial gerrymandering. The county commissioners court there redrew its maps and got rid of the lone majority-minority precinct, The Texas Tribune reported. A federal district court ordered the county to rethink that map, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out that ruling and sent the case back to district court. Different racial and ethnic groups – in this case, Black and Latino Galveston County residents – cannot form coalitions to sue over racial gerrymandering together, the appeals court ruled, going against decades of precedent, according to Houston Public Media.

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Supreme Court upholds record $14M penalty against Exxon for Baytown air pollution

Air pollution from Exxon Mobil's petrochemical complex in Baytown took the national stage Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court denied the company's bid to overturn a record $14.25 million civil penalty levied against it in a Houston courtroom. The plaintiffs, nonprofit groups Environment Texas and Sierra Club, first filed the long-running lawsuit in 2010 on behalf of residents living near one of the largest petroleum and petrochemical complex in the nation. They sought penalties for the company's repeated violations of the Clean Air Act, a federal law that limits air pollution from industrial emitters. "Our members in Baytown knew Exxon might fight this case all the way to the Supreme Court, but we matched Exxon’s persistence," said Neil Carman, the Clean Air director of the Sierra Club in Texas.

The penalty Exxon must now pay to the federal government, issued by U.S. District Judge David Hittner in 2021, is the largest to date in a Clean Air Act lawsuit initiated by citizens. Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Houston Chronicle. In its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Exxon argued that people who have been exposed to pollution from Clean Air Act violations should have standing to sue only if their injuries were "likely" caused by a company's conduct, rather than if they "could have been" caused by the pollution. Environmental contamination has cumulative impacts on human health, so while the health effects of air pollution are well established, it is often impossible to attribute an ailment exclusively to one pollution event or source. Exxon's anticipated payout is already reduced from Hittner's original ruling in 2017, which demanded the company pay $19.95 million for pollution released from its Baytown complex between 2005 and 2013. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the judge's first penalty, but upheld his revised amount of $14.25 million.

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George Foreman IV to run for Congress in Houston district

George Foreman IV, the son of the legendary Houston boxer, is running for Congress. Foreman said he will run as an independent in the crowded race to replace the late U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, who died in March. A special election to determine who will finish Turner’s term for the 18th Congressional District will be held on Nov. 4. “I want to make life better for working families, for small business owners, for students trying to find their path, and for people who feel unseen,” Foreman said on his campaign website.

Foreman, who grew up in Humble, is an educator who has degrees in journalism and public administration from Texas Southern University. On his website, he emphasized wanting to help prepare young people for the workforce and supporting law enforcement. Foreman is one of 12 children of George Foreman Sr., a former heavyweight boxing champion, businessman and minister who died in March at the age of 76. There are 29 candidates who have announced they are running for the seat. Nineteen are Democrats, four are Republicans, and the rest are independent or minor party candidates. The district, previously represented by the late Sheila Jackson Lee, heavily favors Democrats. It includes downtown Houston, the Fifth Ward and stretches north into Humble. Other notable candidates in the race include Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, former Houston city councilwoman Amanda Edwards and State Rep. Jolanda Jones.

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Bradford William Davis: GOP leaders slammed Tarrant chair over post, but some embraced this hater

It was the summer of 2020, and Black Lives Matter protests against police violence erupted across the country. As an energetic, multiracial coalition formed in opposition to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a rising star of Tarrant County Republican politics feared the rallies, but had a solution to keep the community safe. “Sadly, they need to die,” the rising star wrote about the demonstrators in a Facebook post advising Southlake residents to, if necessary, exercise their Second Amendment rights. Whatever that means. “But,” the GOP leader lamented of the protesters, many of them Black teens who had for years, identified racism at the school, “they would still vote.” I wouldn’t blame anyone for guessing this local leader was Bo French, the Tarrant County Republican Party chair who recently polled his followers over whether Jews or Muslims were the bigger threat to America. It provoked a host of local Republicans to call for his resignation, most notably Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who tweeted June 27 that “French’s words do not reflect my values nor the values of the Republican Party.

However, the apparent calls to murder protesters wasn’t from French. This time. No, that was Leigh Wambsganss, who suggested on her Facebook account that Southlake residents defend themselves by any means necessary against the student demonstrators. Yet while French was hastily disfellowshipped by Patrick and other Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker and U.S. Rep Craig Goldman of Fort Worth — the lieutenant governor celebrated Wambsganss’ announcement that she would campaign for the open Texas Senate District 9 seat. French’s X (formerly Twitter) feed is like a sponge rotting at the bottom of a dirty sink, absorbing and releasing the waste you forgot the human mind was capable of assembling. Jovial governor Tim Walz? “Gay child molester.” Immigrants? Deport 100 million of them, and their children. French’s hate-spewing is common knowledge. So why the sudden Republican intifada? French’s problem isn’t racism. No, he’s something worse: sloppy. When he tweets, you can feel the foam dripping from his lips. Wambsganss, however, cloaks her bigotry in a veneer of ambiguity so thin, you’d need your eyes stapled shut to miss it.

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Dallas judge dismisses AG Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against State Fair of Texas’ gun ban

A Dallas County judge dismissed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against gun restrictions adopted by the State Fair of Texas following a 2023 shooting that injured three fairgoers. The ruling came a day after Cameron Turner, the 23-year-old gunman, pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and 10 years for unlawfully carrying a weapon in a prohibited place. Judge Emily Tobolowsky, who previously denied Paxton’s request for a temporary stay on the fair’s ability to enact its gun policy, sided with the city and the State Fair again, and ended the lawsuit before it went into trial, according to a June 24 ruling. Her ruling did not explain her reason for dismissing the case. Paxton and the city of Dallas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karissa Condoianis, a spokesperson for the State Fair of Texas, said Monday the fair was pleased with the outcome, and possibly the conclusion, of the litigation. “The State Fair takes no political position on the complex issues related to the lawful carrying of firearms in Texas, and in fact, has long been, and continues to be, a strong supporter of the rights of responsible gun owners in Texas,” she said, adding that last year’s gun policy was comparable to similar events like concerts, athletic competitions and other fairs and festivals. More than 200 uniformed police officers patrol the fairgrounds. “We take the safety of State Fair patrons very seriously and will continue to do so,” Condoianis said. Paxton’s lawsuit argued the city and the State Fair of Texas, its tenant at Fair Park during the 24-day event, violated state law and infringed upon a resident’s Second Amendment rights by prohibiting licensed owners from carrying their guns. Only current law enforcement officials and qualified retired officers can carry firearms at the fair in accordance with state law, officials said last year while announcing their plans to ramp up security screening.

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Northside ISD responds to ESAs by opening its enrollment

With the passage of education savings accounts and enrollment decreases in San Antonio’s biggest school districts, it’s no surprise that “school choice” has become more competitive for public and private schools alike. Northside Independent School District, the largest district in San Antonio, recently started “Excellence Without Boundaries,” an open enrollment program allowing any student in the San Antonio area to apply to attend any one of its schools. While the district has long housed magnet schools and in-district charters that enroll students regardless of their address, Superintendent John Craft said it was the “right time” to go ahead with a more competitive strategy.

There are over 130 charter schools in San Antonio vying for the same pool of students, and the recently passed ESAs, which pay for private school tuition, therapy, transportation and other education-related costs, won’t help. ESAs, sometimes called school vouchers, cannot be used by families who enroll in public schools. Because of this, public school advocates and officials say school vouchers could result in the “disenrollment” from public schools. Schools rely on enrollment and average daily attendance of students to determine how much money they get from the state. There are a few caveats to NISD’s open enrollment program however, Craft said. Applying for the program doesn’t grant a student automatic acceptance to their preferred campus. Before accepting someone transferring from outside of the district, officials will consider a student’s attendance record, disciplinary history and the campus’ capacity. Formally launched June 18, the open enrollment application portal had 6,000 users and 76 applications within its first week, and Craft expects most of the students transferring into the district will be children of parents who commute to work within NISD’s boundaries.

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African American Museum, Dallas names new CEO.

Founding CEO Dr. Harry Robinson Jr. retired from the African American Museum, Dallas, in January, and the museum has been conducting a national search for the next CEO and president since. Today, it announced that Lisa Brown Ross would step into the role beginning July 21. Robinson led the museum for its entire first 50 years. In a statement this morning, he gave his full-throated support to the new hire.

“As someone who has spent a lifetime building this institution, I see in Lisa the same dedication to education, a steadfast resolve to preserving our heritage, and a passion for building community. She is not only capable – she is called to this work,” he said. “It brings me great joy to pass the torch to someone as accomplished, creative, and committed as Lisa.” Ross says Robinson “built something extraordinary,” adding that she sees her new job as “more than a professional calling—it’s a personal mission.” Ross most recently served as director of marketing and development at Anthem Strong Families, leading rebranding efforts and helping secure $15 million in federal funding. Her resume also includes stints at USAID, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Seattle Police Department. She has also been active in the North Texas arts community, helping the Bishop Arts Theatre complete its strategic plan, serving on the board of Jubilee Theatre in Fort Worth for six years, and more. Last summer, James Russell spoke with Robinson about the museum and his work, including his mission to acquire a piece by Dave the Potter. It’s a valuable insight into the work Ross is now undertaking.

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All 13 people killed in early June flash flood in San Antonio identified

The Bexar County Medical Examiner has identified the 13th victim deadly flooding and storms earlier this month. 77-year-old Esther Chung died near Loop 410 and Perrin?Beitel on the Northeast Side. She was the oldest victim recovered — the youngest was 28.

The storms unleashed more than 6 to 7 inches of rain in just a few hours on San Antonio, causing sudden flash floods across the city. Near Loop 410 and Perrin?Beitel on the Northeast Side, a wall of water swept more than a dozen vehicles into Beitel Creek — killing 11 of the 13 victims. The other two victims were found in separate flood-affected areas: near Leon Creek/Highway 90 and several miles upstream. The San Antonio Fire Department, along with SAPD and volunteers, including Texas A&M Task Force 1, launched extensive rescue operations. They conducted more than 70 water rescues and saved numerous individuals stranded in trees or stuck in waterlogged vehicles. In mid June, the City of San Antonio and Bexar County issued a joint disaster declaration following the floods. It called for the State of Texas to evaluate if the disaster qualifies to request federal assistance for the recovery process. City and county officials said they specifically seek state support to assist with cleanup, infrastructure stabilization, and any other recovery efforts.

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National Stories

Trump vowed to deport the 'worst of the worst' -- but new data shows a shift to also arresting non-criminals

President Donald Trump campaigned for president on the promise of mass deportations that targeted criminals -- and while ICE agents have arrested over 38,000 migrants with criminal convictions, new data shows a recent shift toward also arresting those who have not been accused of crimes. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has arrested an increasing number of migrants with no criminal convictions, according to an ABC News analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data. The numbers, which were obtained through a public records lawsuit and released by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California Berkeley, give the first real glimpse of how Trump's immigration enforcement policy is playing out in the streets.

Over the first five months of the Trump administration, ICE has arrested over 95,000 individuals, according to data analyzed by ABC's owned television stations' data team. At the start of the administration, ICE tended to target migrants with pending or criminal convictions. From Inauguration Day to May 4, 2025, 44% of those arrested had a criminal conviction, while 34% of those arrested had pending charges and 23% had no criminal history, according to the data. But beginning May 25, the data appears to show there was a shift in enforcement -- with individuals with criminal convictions making up only 30% of those arrested. Those arrested with pending criminal charges accounted for 26% of the individuals arrested and 44% had no criminal history. "It looks like there's been a shift from about Memorial Day this year up until now, to an increasing number of people who have been detained who have no criminal charges," said Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University who reviewed the data.

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Preppers distance themselves from Minnesota murderer, say their movement is about defense, not violence

Troy McKinley was launching the first day of his Minnesota Prepper Expo on June 20 when someone handed him a phone with breaking news. Like most in the movement, McKinley bristled at the implication that Boelter’s actions had anything to do with being a prepper. The term denotes anyone who stockpiles food and supplies in preparation for an emergency, whether it’s a snowstorm or civil war. “It’s a simple word that’s been turned evil,” McKinley said. “You get people of all kinds: People worried about economic collapse, World War III. Look at Minneapolis — what happened down there," he said, referring to the riots that broke out after George Floyd’s killing by police. Authorities on preppers say most people associate the term with religious zealots. But preppers cross the political spectrum and date to the country’s founding.

“Americans have seen themselves as a people who are prepared to take on the dangers of the frontier on their own,” said Arizona State University associate professor Robert Kirsch, who co-authored a book on preppers. “That sort of individualistic character gets translated into emergency preparedness in unique ways.” Prepping is often viewed as a practice by “aberrant, marginal, fringe, weird people,” said Kirsch. But he found it’s a mainstream behavior that has “some worrying dimensions if taken too far.” As for Boelter being a prepper, he said: “Plenty of people do this kind of stuff and they don’t start murdering politicians.” FBI agent Terry Getsch said in an affidavit that Boelter and his wife Jenny were preppers who had a “bailout plan” to go to her mother’s home in Spring Brook, Wis. He wrote the affidavit while Boelter was on the run after shootings that killed Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and injured state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Prosecutors say that after shooting the Hortmans and Hoffmans, Boelter sent his family a text saying “Dad went to war,” and warning them to leave their house because people with guns might show up.

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Bush, Obama — and singer Bono — fault Trump's gutting of USAID on agency's last day

Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered rare open criticism of the Trump administration — and singer Bono recited a poem — in an emotional video farewell Monday with staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Obama called the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID “a colossal mistake.” Monday was the last day as an independent agency for the six-decade-old humanitarian and development organization, created by President John F. Kennedy as a peaceful way of promoting U.S. national security by boosting goodwill and prosperity abroad. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered USAID absorbed into the State Department on Tuesday.

The former presidents and Bono spoke with thousands in the USAID community in a videoconference, which was billed as a closed-press event to allow political leaders and others privacy for sometimes angry and often teary remarks. Parts of the video were shared with The Associated Press. They expressed their appreciation for the thousands of USAID staffers who have lost their jobs and life’s work. Their agency was one of the first and most fiercely targeted for government-cutting by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, with staffers abruptly locked out of systems and offices and terminated by mass emailing. Trump claimed the agency was run by “radical left lunatics” and rife with “tremendous fraud.” Musk called it “a criminal organization.” Obama, speaking in a recorded statement, offered assurances to the aid and development workers, some listening from overseas. “Your work has mattered and will matter for generations to come,” he told them. Obama has largely kept a low public profile during Trump’s second term and refrained from criticizing the monumental changes that Trump has made to U.S. programs and priorities at home and abroad.

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California dismantles landmark environmental law to tackle housing crisis

California lawmakers on Monday night rolled back one of the most stringent environmental laws in the country, after Gov. Gavin Newsom muscled through the effort in a dramatic move to combat the state’s affordability crisis. The Democratic governor—widely viewed as a 2028 presidential contender—made passage of two bills addressing an acute housing shortage a condition of his signing the 2025-2026 budget. A cornerstone of the legislation reigns in the California Environmental Quality Act, which for more than a half-century has been used by opponents to block almost any kind of development project. The abuses of the law have spread so widely that opponents used it to block some bicycle-lane expansions when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor, he said during a signing ceremony at the Sacramento capital. Democratic leaders of the Assembly and Senate, who had steered the bills to bipartisan passage earlier Monday, flanked him.

“We have seen this abuse over and over and over again,” the governor said. “We have fallen prey to a strategy of delay. As a result of that, we have too much demand chasing too little supply. This is not complicated, it is Econ 101.” Some environmentalists and other defenders of the longstanding law were furious, and warned that developers will now go unchecked. “Who needs Trump when we have a wolf in sheep clothing negotiating back room deals while he and his oligarch donors score big,” one critic wrote on X. The lack of affordable housing has climbed to the top of voter concerns in other coastal blue strongholds. New York City’s brutal rental market became a flashpoint in the city’s recent Democratic primary for mayor, and helped propel Zohran Mamdani to victory. But California sits at the epicenter of America’s home shortage. The state has faced a homelessness crisis. And nine of the 10 least affordable cities in the country are located there, according to a May 20 report by WalletHub, a personal finance company. And the heart of the problem, say housing experts, are the regulatory barriers to construction. The state needs 3.5 million units, but only about 100,000 are built annually. “We have turned off the spigot on housing for the last 20 to 30 years,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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'Alligator Alcatraz' immigrant detention facility set to open, with Trump in attendance

President Donald Trump will be in the Florida Everglades on Tuesday for the opening of a controversial immigrant detention center spearheaded by state Republican leaders, which has faced vocal pushback from Democrats, Native American leaders and activist groups over humanitarian and environmental concerns. The facility, informally dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" by state Republicans, was the brainchild of state Attorney General James Uthmeier. It has received significant national attention, including during a "Fox and Friends" interview with Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday. DeSantis described the push as Florida's continued effort to align the state with Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. But Trump's decision to attend in person, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has shifted some of the focus to the administration, which had to approve Florida’s plan to run the facility.

“When the president comes tomorrow, he’s going to be able to see the facility, which is expected to be ready for operation on Tuesday” DeSantis said at a news conference Monday. He said that he spoke to Trump over the weekend and that Trump is “very excited.” Noem said last week on X: “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens. We will expand facilities and bed spaces in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.” NBC News first reported Sunday night that Trump would attend, a big boost for the effort. Noem had to approve creating the project and is likely to reimburse the state with significant federal funding, but until Monday’s public announcement, it was unclear how the White House formally viewed the project. There has been significant pushback from Democrats and immigration advocates who see the project as inhumane. They have objected to putting people whom the administration has identified as being undocumented in the middle of a swamp surrounded by snakes and alligators in the middle of the Florida heat — and in an area of the state that is prone to hurricanes. But those reasons are why Uthmeier, DeSantis and other Republicans have said the facility is needed.

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Air travel hits new milestone with 6 record days in 2025 -- and July Fourth surge expected ahead

Air travel is surging to new highs, and the Transportation Security Administration has added two more record-breaking days to the history books amid a summer of staggering passenger volumes. Just last week, as millions of Americans took to the skies, June 27 and June 29 now rank as the seventh and eighth busiest days respectively in TSA history, pushing 2025 to claim six of the agency's top 10 busiest days on record. The surge shows no signs of slowing down. TSA expects to screen 18.5 million travelers during the upcoming Fourth of July holiday period, which officially starts Tuesday. Sunday, July 6, is projected to be the busiest day as an estimated 2.9 million passengers pass through security checkpoints.

This record-breaking trend began earlier this month when TSA screened nearly 3.1 million travelers on Sunday, June 22, marking the single busiest day in the agency's history. "Airlines are offering great deals, and with Fourth of July falling on a Friday this year, it extends the weekend for many folks," explains Keith Jeffries, former federal security director at Los Angeles International Airport. "People are out of school, and they're going to enjoy themselves this summer." The robust travel numbers reflect broader economic strength, according to Jeffries. "When you see TSA hitting some of the busiest days in its history, it's a testament to how well the economy is doing. People are traveling again, and that's exciting to see." Major airlines are preparing for the surge. American Airlines announced its largest-ever July Fourth operation, planning to accommodate nearly 7.6 million customers across 71,000 flights from June 27 through July 7. United Airlines expects to transport more than 6 million passengers during the same period -- 500,000 more than last year.

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In 24-hour span, two in GOP who split with Trump say they won’t seek reelection

Two of the best-known Republican lawmakers who have split with President Donald Trump in his second term said in a span of 24 hours this week that they would not seek reelection — illustrating how little room there is in the party for dissenting voices and complicating the GOP’s path to keeping its majorities in the midterm elections. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) — who has taken issue with Trump’s tariff policy, his posture toward Russia and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, among other things — announced his retirement Monday, calling himself a “traditional conservative” caught in a “tug of war” in his party over issues such as foreign policy and trade. A day earlier, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) declared that he would not seek a third term, after drawing Trump’s wrath for opposing the president’s priority legislative package. The developments emboldened Democrats in their efforts to try to defeat the sweeping tax and immigration bill as well as capture both lawmakers’ seats next year — and worried some Republicans on both fronts.

Bacon represents one of only three GOP-held House districts nationwide that Trump lost last year, while Tillis was considered the most vulnerable Senate Republican up for reelection next year. “When the energy’s on the other side, you really don’t want to have to defend an open seat,” said Tom Davis, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The ranks of Republican elected officials who have differed with Trump in recent years has thinned considerably, as fealty to him has become the biggest litmus test in the party and the president has frequently vowed retribution against his critics. Some have stepped down voluntarily, while others have been ousted in Republican primaries. That dynamic is in play once again ahead of the 2026 elections, with other Republicans facing difficult decisions. In Texas, Republican Sen. John Cornyn is already facing a tough primary challenger in a vocal Trump ally, state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn has said he is fully committed to running again. But Paxton sought to stoke doubts about that. “You next?” Paxton asked Cornyn on X after Tillis announced his retirement.

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Kristi Noem secretly took personal cut of political donations

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show. In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown. Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is nothing remarkable about a politician raising money for nonprofits and other groups that promote their campaigns or agendas. What’s unusual, experts said, is for a politician to keep some of the money for themselves. “If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” said Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now leads the Brennan Center’s work on campaign finance. ProPublica discovered details of the payment in the annual tax form of American Resolve Policy Fund, which is part of a network of political groups that promote Noem and her agenda. The nonprofit describes its mission as “fighting to preserve America for the next generation.” There’s little evidence in the public domain that the group has done much. In its first year, its main expenditures were paying Noem and covering the cost of some unspecified travel. It also maintains social media accounts devoted to promoting Noem. It has 100 followers on X.

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Lead Stories

Senate GOP looks to pass marathon final test on Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

Senate Republicans are facing a marathon session on Monday in order to pass President Trump’s ambitious tax and spending package and meet the White House’s end-of-week deadline to OK its top domestic agenda item. Senators will convene on Monday morning for a lengthy “vote-a-rama,” during which lawmakers can offer an unlimited number of amendments that are related to the mammoth proposal. The hours-long voting session was expected to start overnight, but GOP leaders opted to push it until 9 a.m. after a grueling weekend, which included Democrats forcing the Senate clerks to read all 940 pages of the bill. That process took nearly 16 hours to complete, and was followed by debate on the bill itself that lasted into Monday morning before the chamber finally recessed.

“The debate and eventually voting on the ‘big, beautiful bill.’ has begun. Hallelujah. It’s taken a while for us to get there,” Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on the floor on Sunday afternoon. “I’ve worked a long time with my colleagues to get to where we are today.” As Graham referenced, Republicans have been working on the bill — which extends much of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and includes the elimination of taxes for some tipped and overtime income — dating back to even before their 2024 electoral victory. And they still have to clear some hurdles in order to finish the job. Republicans can lose a maximum of three votes, with two of those already spoken for. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are both expected to vote “no” over their opposition to proposed Medicaid cuts and the inclusion of a $5 trillion debt ceiling hike, respectively. Both voted against advancing the bill past a procedural hurdle Saturday night. This has left GOP leaders little room for error, forcing them to quell potential opposition from a key group of conservatives who are seeking to further reduce Medicaid spending.

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Gov. Greg Abbott ignored dysfunction at the Texas Funeral Service Commission, lawyer says

A lawyer for the state agency tasked with overseeing funeral homes and regulations has backed up his now-fired boss, alleging that the head of the funeral board has far exceeded her authority. Further, Christopher Burnett — a 20-year state worker — notes the governor’s office was aware of the strife between staff at the Texas Funeral Service Commission and board chair Kristin Tips. Burnett’s comments follow the June 18 firing of former executive director Scott Bingaman, who had complained of a “rot” that permeated the commission board, making the agency unable to properly function. “Yet instead of stopping Tips’ behavior themselves, the governor’s office sat mute and allowed Tips and the other commissioners to terminate Mr. Bingaman,” Burnett wrote in a June 26 letter.

Neither Tips nor Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints the seven-member board, responded to requests for comment on Friday. The letter is the latest salvo in the divide between the funeral commission board and its staff, as the agency addresses its dual focus of regulating funeral homes and enforcing the proper disposal of corpses. The funeral commission board on June 18 unanimously and immediately fired Bingaman as executive director, ending his nine-month tenure. The vote, which led to a walkout by funeral commission staff, followed Bingaman airing concerns about the board’s own actions and months of disarray related to the proper handling of human remains and the regulations governing the industry. “I have never seen a mess like this in my life. It is just astounding,” Burnett said Friday morning. Commission board members are scheduled to meet July 3 and potentially choose an interim replacement for Bingaman. The board also oversees donations of bodies for medical studies and research, a task previously handled by the now-defunct State Anatomical Board of Texas. Burnett confirmed many of the concerns Bingaman raised in his own letter to the commissioners, sent in the runup to his firing. Burnett, echoing Bingman, said Tips “directed agency staff to research limiting damages for pain and suffering and mental anguish in lawsuits against funeral homes," despite the commission having no authority over the court system. Tips, along with her husband Robert “Dick” Tips, own and operate the Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries and Crematories in San Antonio. Further, Burnett wrote, “Tips wasted two years of the agency’s time,” as the commission ineffectively regulated donations of bodies for medical research and training.

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Texas keeps adding jobs, setting records; Austin jobless rate edges up

Despite concerns about government cutbacks and tariffs slowing down the economy, Texas has kept on growing. For the sixth month in a row, it has posted a record number of number of jobs, the Texas Workforce Commission said. The state also set a record in terms of its labor force, which has grown in 59 of the last 61 months. “Texas continues to be a top state for growth and economic success with thousands of jobs added by employers in May,” Workforce Commission Chairman Bryan Daniel said in a statement. Leading the way for statewide growth was the sector tied to trade and transportation, followed closely by hospitality. Texas added 28,100 jobs over the month of May, reaching 14.3 million positions, according to the latest data from Texas Workforce Commission and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since May 2024, its added 213,300 jobs, for a growth rate of 1.5%, as compared with 1.1% for the nation.

The state’s labor force, the count of people working or actively looking or work, grew by 24,900 people to reach a record of nearly 15.84 million people. The statewide seasonally adjusted unemployment rate held steady at 4.1% in May, a notch better than the U.S. rate of 4.2%, which also was unchanged. The unadjusted unemployment rate for both the San Antonio-New Braunfels region and the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos region edged up in May compared with April although both added jobs. All of the state’s metro areas saw their unadjusted rates creep higher. Statewide, the trade, transportation, and utilities sector had the largest over-the-month increase in May, adding 8,400 jobs. Leisure and hospitality was close behind with 8,200 new jobs. Coming in third was the private education and health services sector, which added 4,300 positions. Job growth in the leisure and hospitality sector led both the San Antonio-New Braunfels and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos regions in May. The greater San Antonio area added 2,400 jobs in the sector while the greater Austin area had even more new jobs, 3,700. The Austin region also added more total jobs during the month — 6,700 new positions in the capital city compared with 5,700 in the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area.

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From tariff pain to record highs, a wild quarter on Wall Street

A historic and tumultuous quarter is wrapping up with U.S. stocks at records and many investors betting the ride isn’t over yet. The April swoon that carried the S&P 500 to the brink of a bear market has been erased and then some. The broad index has now added more than 8% since President Trump announced sweeping tariffs that sparked havoc in markets. Now, investors have more reasons to feel upbeat. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index hit fresh all-time highs on Friday. Robust corporate earnings and solid economic data suggest that the growth remains resilient. Inflation is trending near the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Banks that slashed their year-end targets for the S&P 500, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are raising them again.

“Markets can take some comfort in that we’ve, in a sense, weathered some of the storm,” said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at PNC Asset Management. “The worst is probably behind us.” That optimism has fueled fresh gains for some recent stalwarts. The AI trade has rebounded from a rocky start to the year, when the emergence of Chinese upstart DeepSeek’s artificial-intelligence model erased billions of dollars of value from Nvidia and other tech giants. Nvidia shares have climbed 17%, Meta Platforms has gained 25% and Microsoft has added 18%. Shares of data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies and chip maker Broadcom, are up 73% and 16%, respectively. The price of bitcoin has climbed back above $100,000, with Trump reaffirming his promise to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and Congress seeking to advance legislation that could integrate crypto into the mainstream financial system. Coinbase led the recovery from the April lows, rising around 130%. At the same time, some warn that it is just a matter of time before tariffs hurt economic growth, rekindle inflation and weigh on corporate earnings.

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State Stories

Northwest ISD trustee is running for Texas House District 93

Northwest school board trustee Steve Sprowls announced this week he will challenge Rep. Nate Schatzline in House District 93 next year. Schatzline said earlier this week he would run for an open Senate seat in District 9, but on Friday changed his mind after conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss announced she was entering the Senate race. Schatzline now intends to run for reelection. Sprowls said Friday he intends to stay in the House District 93 race. “My initial intention was to run against Nate,” he told the Star-Telegram. “This is the race I wanted.”

Sprowls, a 54-year-old Republican who previously served as the school board’s president, said he had been thinking about serving in the legislature for several months after growing frustrated with what he described as a lack of support for public education from Schatzline. The election is in 2026. Sprowls, who has served on the Northwest ISD board for nine years, said he invited Schatzline to several events in the school district such as an all-community pep rally and reading to elementary students. He said that Schatzline attended the school events but did not advocate for students while in Austin. “He pretended to care, but once he got to Austin it was a different story. I just got tired of our kids being ignored and put on the back burner for personal ambition,” Sprowls said. Schatzline declined to comment on Sprowls running for District 93. “I’m focusing on my own race right now,” he told the Star-Telegram. Sprowls said he decided to seek the District 93 seat when Schatzline announced this week that he is running for the open Senate District 9 seat, previously held by Kelly Hancock of North Richland Hills, who resigned to become Texas comptroller on July 1.

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Tropical Storm Barry has formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Could it affect Texas?

A tropical storm has developed in the Bay of Campeche, in the far southern part of the Gulf of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center announced Sunday morning. The storm has been given the name Tropical Storm Barry, and it is the second storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season. The first named storm of the year was Tropical Storm Andrea, which developed in the central Atlantic Ocean on June 24, only to dissipate just 12 hours later. The National Hurricane Center first noted the tropical system on Saturday afternoon, denoting the system as a tropical depression with sustained winds of 30 mph. In the past 18 hours, the storm strengthened its wind speeds to 40 mph, which makes it officially a tropical storm and is thus, given a name. Barry is the first tropical system to develop within the Gulf of Mexico this year. The center of the tropical depression is located 90 miles east-southeast of Tuxpan, Mexico. Heavy rain and potential flooding is possible across eastern Mexico. The state of Texas is not expected to see a direct effect from Barry. However, leftover moisture from the storm may help to produce scattered showers and thunderstorms across parts of South Texas during the middle of the week. Some of this tropical moisture could reach the Houston area in the form of scattered showers and storms by the middle to later part of the week, but big impacts are not expected.

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Former San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg gearing up to run for office

Since former San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg left City Hall earlier this month, there’s been a lot of speculation about his next move in politics. Nirenberg told TPR he’s gearing up for the midterm elections. He made the comment at a rally hosted by former El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke Friday at Pearl's Stable Hall. “This is more than about Democrats and Republicans — this is about right and wrong," Nirenberg told a crowd of more than 1,000 people who turned out to see O'Rourke along with fellow Democrats, Rep. Joaquin Castro and State Rep. James Talarico. They are all being talked about as statewide office candidates in 2026. Nirenberg, who served as mayor of San Antonio from 2017 to 2025, said he could also be on the midterm ballot. “I will tell you that the challenges that are facing this country and our nation and our state and our communities are complex and they're urgent — and I'm not going to sit on the sidelines," Nirenberg said. He said he’s not ready to make an announcement yet on what office he might pursue, but his time in politics isn’t over.

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Harlandale ISD superintendent named best in the region

Harlandale Independent School District Superintendent Gerardo Soto was named the region’s superintendent of the year by the Texas Association of School Boards. Region 20 includes all school districts in Bexar County, stretches out toward Kerr and Atascosa counties and reaches parts of the Southwest Texas border. Each year, the TASB picks one superintendent from each region to recognize “achievement and excellence in public school administration.” “I’m honored to serve a community that believes so deeply in the power of education,” Soto said in a statement after his family, campus leadership and school board members surprised him with the announcement on Tuesday morning. “This recognition is a reflection of the work we’ve accomplished together for the betterment of our students,” he said in a statement.

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No disrespect to the past, but the Spurs look to bright future with young core

No disrespect to the past, but the Spurs look to bright future with young core. A rookie born in 2006 held up a jersey with the number he always wanted. He grinned from ear to ear. He wasn’t insulting anybody. Neither was the team that gave it to him. Nothing about this scene was disrespectful, and it’s doubtful that someone on a beach or in a practice gym 1,300 miles away felt the sting of any purported affront. It’s simple, really. You can’t slap a man in the face after he’s turned his back on you and walked away. Dylan Harper wears No. 2 for the San Antonio Spurs now, and that’s because seven years ago Kawhi Leonard chose to let him. The most valuable player of the Spurs’ last NBA Finals victory had no illusions back then about what he was doing, and he understood as well as anyone that the clean break he wanted was irrevocable. Leonard had his reasons for wanting to move on in 2017. That was his right. He chose his future over his past. And now that the Spurs have done the same? Some might say it’s about dang time.

Year by year, era by era, it’s hard to notice sometimes when the stuff we still consider current events starts slipping into children’s history books. Who put the cutting-edge music that blew our minds on the classic rock station? Why is one of my favorite “new” films on Turner Classic Movies? It happens. Near the end of his playing days, Tim Duncan would get mildly perturbed when opposing rookies would approach him during games and tell him they grew up watching him play. He didn’t want to be reminded of how old he was. He also didn’t realize how much worse it could get. On Saturday, when the Spurs held a press conference to introduce their two newest first-round picks, it was a good thing Duncan wasn’t there. “Timmy D,” 19-year-old Carter Bryant said, “was my uncle’s favorite player.” The lesson here is that the Spurs’ championship dynasty isn’t the stuff of fuzzy childhood memories for NBA players anymore. It’s now basically ancestral, no different than a great-grandfather’s stories about World War II, or the moon landing, or accessing the internet with a dial-up modem.

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Houston scored big wins in the Texas Legislature this session.

Houston leaders are calling the recent legislative session the “most successful” one in its history, reaping a catalog of benefits that included everything from new supplies to new laws and more funding. The city took a team of six people, led by Mayor John Whitmire’s intergovernmental relations chief Josh Sanders, to Austin to lobby for policy that would directly impact Houston. Here’s a breakdown of some of the new state laws that will help Houstonians: The 2024 hurricane season was nothing short of detrimental for Houstonians, and included a derecho that took the city by surprise and a Category 1 hurricane that led to the largest outage in CenterPoint’s history in Houston with 2.7 million impacted customers.

That power loss inhibited Houston from being able to provide vital services residents needed during the hurricane. Around 10 fire stations went offline, and many of the city’s multi-service centers couldn’t open as cooling shelters for those who needed a place to go to beat the blistering heat. Whitmire’s team just unrolled a plan where the city will install 100 generators at critical city facilities before the end of his first term to help keep city buildings online when the power goes out. But that move will get an extra boost with House Bill 1584, led by state Rep. Lacy Hull, R-Houston, which will require energy companies to prioritize critical facilities like public safety buildings and water treatment plants when they’re working to turn the lights back on. Houston also saw gaps in its ability to provide mental health services during the winter freeze in January. Officials tried to help a man to shelter, but he denied assistance and ended up dying at a Metro bus stop in what city leaders said was a mental health case. Under Senate Bill 1164, led by state Sen. Judith Zaffirnini, D-Laredo, city officials will better be able to help those who don’t know they need it. Those experiencing mental health emergencies will be able to be transported to help with proper notification. Some Houston neighborhoods have had some serious problems with bandit signs, which is any sign placed in a public right of way. Some of the sign placers, too, have bad intentions and put up signs that look like they might help residents but ultimately end up scamming them. And after six years of effort to get lawmakers to pass a law change to help the issue, Houston was finally successful. House Bill 3611, carried by state Rep. Pat Curry, R-Waco, ups the penalties the city can give out to people who repeatedly put bandit signs in public right of ways.

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Resolutions seeking to admonish ‘MAGA mayor’ John Whitmire grow to 100 signatures from Democrats

Resolutions attempting to admonish Houston Mayor John Whitmire and prevent him from seeking Democratic party endorsement have so far gleaned more than 100 signatures from a growing coalition of fringe Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs. The collective is also hoping to make sure Whitmire and other elected officials are bound to the same rules that precinct chairs are for fundraising. Democratic precinct chairs in Harris County are not allowed to endorse or fundraise for members of a different political party. The resolutions came to life after Whitmire made plans to appear at a Houston-based fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican representing parts of northern Harris County and Montgomery County.

Experts, at the time, did not think the move was unlike something the mayor of a big city would do. They reasoned that mayors have to make friends on both sides of the aisle in order to get the city resources. Whitmire, too, justified his attendance and said he worked closely with those who helped the city. But some Democratic precinct chairs begged to differ. “John Whitmire’s agenda is indistinguishable from that of a MAGA mayor,” the collective wrote in its resolution, referring to the Trump campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” “With Trump in office and pursuing an illegal and authoritarian agenda impacting millions of Houstonians, we deserve to have a fighter who wants to represent us, not a willing enabler of an emerging dictatorship,” the resolution continued. “If Whitmire wants to be a Republican, that’s OK, but he shouldn’t be able to do that and count on the support of thousands of grassroots volunteers who shed blood, sweat and tears to knock on doors and elect people who represent our values.” When the resolutions were first announced, it only had about 30 signatures. Cameron Campbell, the leader of the charge, said Friday he was proud of the grassroots group of Democrats who had come together to learn a new fighting style. “I'm just really proud of our ability to learn a different way to use our voices, and how aligned and unified everybody (is),” Campbell said.

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Dallas Stars closing in on hiring Glen Gulutzan as new head coach

A familiar face could soon be taking over as the Dallas Stars' next head coach. The Stars are closing in on hiring Glen Gulutzan as the franchise’s next head coach, a person familiar with the team’s search confirmed with The Dallas Morning News. Gulutzan, who was most recently an assistant for the Edmonton Oilers, served as the Stars’ head coach for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons before being fired by Jim Nill as one of his first acts as general manager. But for the second time in his career, Nill could be hiring a former Stars coach to take over the team. He hired Stanley Cup-winning Ken Hitchcock for his second stint in Dallas in the 2017-18 season.

The likely hire comes three weeks after the Stars fired Pete DeBoer after three years leading the team. Nill said earlier this month that he planned to conduct a patient and open-minded search for DeBoer’s replacement, as the Stars were the only NHL team actively searching for a new head coach. Gulutzan was one of three known candidates interviewed for the opening, alongside Texas Stars head coach Neil Graham and Dallas Stars defensive assistant Alain Nasreddine. Gulutzan has not served as a head coach since the 2017-18 season. After his two years in Dallas, which followed two seasons as the Texas Stars’ head coach, he went on to coach the Calgary Flames. He has a 146-125-23 record in his 294 games as a head coach and made the playoffs just once when Calgary lost in the first round to Anaheim in 2016-17. The Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, native also served as an assistant for the Vancouver Canucks and the Oilers, most recently. He had worked in Edmonton since 2018, running the Oilers’ lethal power play led by Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. Gulutzan’s Oilers eliminated the Stars in the Western Conference finals in each of the last two seasons. The Oilers went 6 for 16 on the power play in their five playoff games against the Stars this year. Gulutzan’s contract with the Oilers is set to expire Monday. The 53-year-old would become the Stars’ sixth head coach in the last decade and under Nill. He replaces DeBoer, who led the Stars to three consecutive Western Conference finals, but lost his job after many felt he lost the locker room.

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Brian Nyquist: Texas patients deserve better than price-control politics

(Brian Nyquist is the president and chief executive of the National Infusion Center Association.) Every day, Texas patients walk into infusion centers to receive treatments that help them manage cancer, autoimmune conditions, rare diseases, and more. These therapies — often delivered in community-based settings — are critical to keeping Texans healthy, productive and out of the hospital. But there’s a threat lurking in Washington that would upend the progress each of our centers is making in helping keep Texans healthier. It’s called the “Most Favored Nation” policy, an artificial drug price control, that we adamantly oppose. Here’s why. The MFN policy would peg Medicare drug reimbursements to prices paid by foreign governments with entirely different health care systems — systems that ration care, limit innovation, and often delay or deny access to lifesaving treatments. That may be how Europe handles its health care system. But it’s not how we do things in Texas.

In fact, data from the PRI Center for Medical Economics and Innovation show that in countries with government-imposed drug price controls, patients have access to only 29% of new medicines. Here in the U.S., it’s 85%. Why? Because we’ve created an environment that rewards innovation and supports timely access to cutting-edge care. MFN would upend that balance — hurting not just patients, but the doctors and infusion centers that serve them. Texas has one of the largest networks of community-based infusion centers in the country. Many of these centers operate on tight margins, particularly in rural and underserved communities. If Medicare suddenly slashes reimbursement rates to match artificially low international prices, it could force Texas providers to stop offering key therapies — or close altogether. That means less access to care, more delayed treatments, and more patients pushed into higher-cost hospital settings. Worse, MFN wouldn’t actually solve the root causes of high out-of-pocket costs for Texas patients. The real culprits are middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers, who use opaque pricing practices and rebates that often do nothing to lower costs for the people filling prescriptions. We also see continued abuse of the 340B drug discount program by large health systems that divert savings away from patients. These are the places Congress should continue to focus reform — not on punishing local providers trying to do right by their patients. Supporters of MFN like to argue it’s fiscally responsible. But there is nothing fiscally smart about destroying a cost-effective, community-based care delivery system and shifting care to more expensive hospital outpatient departments. That’s not savings — it’s cost-shifting. MFN is also a threat to Texas’ growing life sciences economy. Our state is a hub for clinical trials, medical research and biopharmaceutical investment. Policies that import foreign price controls would send a chilling message to innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers working on the next generation of treatments and cures. Why invest in tomorrow’s breakthrough if Washington can arbitrarily cap its value based on what Europeans pay?

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South Texas county judge calls military border zone ‘drastic’

Standing atop an earthen levee just north of the Rio Grande and near the famous Santa Ana National Wildlife Refugee, environmentalist Scott Nicol wondered Friday where signs indicating that this area is now a military zone would go. And if people would notice them, or face arrest. “Where are they going to put it? Look around,” said Nicol surrounded by mesquite trees and hardy drought-resistant thick brush. Nicol took a stroll atop the levee with Border Report, which now is part of a new military zone that the Air Force says spans 250 miles in Hidalgo and Cameron counties of deep South Texas. “It is very concerning because the whole part of this announcement is to restrict access – to make sure that people can’t get anywhere near the river, can’t get across the river. What does that also mean for residents? Does it mean the entire Rio Grande Valley is cut off from the river, which is the lifeblood of our region?” Nicol said.

The federal lands — previously under management by the International Boundary and Water Commission — were transferred Wednesday by the General Services Administration, an IBWC official confirmed to Border Report. The lands now are part of Joint Base San Antonio, a facility nearly 250 miles away. Establishing these new National Defense Areas along the Southwest border are “designed to support the Department of Defense’s ongoing mission to secure the southern border in coordination with inter-agency and partner stakeholders,” the Air Force said in a statement. But Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez on Friday told Border Report it’s a “drastic” move, annd one of which he had no knowledge. “We have an issue that we haven’t been able to resolve with immigration and I think that this is kind of a drastic way of addressing it,” Cortez said. Cortez, who is the top elected official in a county of 1 million people, said on Friday that federal officials told Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra that it’s meant as an extra layer of border security. “It’s all federal land and basically our understanding is it allows the military to be able to go in there and do surveillance of the property and anyone illegally trespassing they can withhold them. They cannot arrest them but they can withhold them and turn them over to other authorities,” Cortez said. That means that anyone caught on these lands can be arrested and charged with trespassing – a criminal misdemeanor punishable by up to 18 months in prison.

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Tony Quesada: Losing spent nuclear fuel storage case may be win in long term for Texas

The Texas government's recent loss in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling may prove to be a long-term victory for the state — at least in the eyes of those who see nuclear energy as a viable and desirable part of the state’s future electricity generation. In a 6-3 decision, the court rejected litigation by the Lone Star State and a private business challenging the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to issue a license to a company to operate a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in West Texas. The decision, which concludes years of legal wrangling, comes in the wake of the Texas Legislature allocating $350 million during its recent session to foster development of advanced nuclear energy projects. The Texas Advanced Nuclear Development Fund, created by newly enacted House Bill 14, supports the ambitions of Gov. Greg Abbott, who said last year that he wants Texas to be “the global leader in advanced nuclear power.”

But while Abbott and Texas lawmakers are putting taxpayer money behind nuclear power generation, the state has sought to block a necessary aspect of the full nuclear power life cycle — a place to store radioactive waste after it’s fissionable material is depleted. In 2021, the state and Fasken Land and Minerals Ltd., a West Texas business, sued the NRC after the agency issued a license to Waste Control Specialists to operate a temporary storage facility for up to 11 million pounds of spent uranium fuel at a Permian Basin facility it owns that currently accepts low-level nuclear waste. After Texas prevailed before a federal judicial panel in 2023, the NRC appealed. In October, the Supreme Court granted review primarily on two questions: Can a nonparty challenge a federal agency’s final order under the judicial review provisions of a law called the Hobbs Act? Do federal laws — namely, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 — allow the NRC to license private entities to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel away from where it was generated? While Texas said “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, the high court said “no” to the first and “it doesn’t matter” — for now, at least — to the second. In doing so, the commercial nuclear energy industry averted a major setback — again, at least for now — in its decadeslong quest for a solution to its long-term waste storage needs.

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National Stories

The Trump administration is building a national citizenship data system

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system. The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for. NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system. For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is offering another way.

DHS, in partnership with the White House's Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) team, has recently rolled out a series of upgrades to a network of federal databases to allow state and county election officials to quickly check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists — both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens — using data from the Social Security Administration as well as immigration databases. Such integration has never existed before, and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens — something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans' personal information has long been considered a third rail — especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government. Legal experts told NPR they were alarmed that a development of this magnitude was already underway without a transparent and public process. "That is a debate that needs to play out in a public setting," said John Davisson, the director of litigation at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's one that deserves public scrutiny and sunlight, that deserves the participation of elected representatives, that deserves opportunities for the public to weigh in through public comment and testimony."

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Sen. Thom Tillis says he won’t seek re-election after opposing Trump megabill

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, N.C., will not run for re-election when his term is up, he announced Sunday, hours after he voted against advancing President Donald Trump’s tax bill and drew the president’s ire. “As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven’t exactly been excited about running for another term,” Tillis said in a statement. “That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beautiful grandchildren, and the rest of our extended family back home,” he said.

“It’s not a hard choice, and I will not be seeking re-election,” he continued. Tillis’ announcement is likely to spur a competitive — and costly — election in the key battleground, where Trump had already said he would explore supporting a primary challenger to the two-term senator. Tillis has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s megabill, and he voted against advancing the package in a key late Saturday vote, making him one of two Republicans to do so. After Tillis’ “no” vote,Trump took to Truth Social to criticize the North Carolina Republican. “Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against “Senator Thom” Tillis,” Trump wrote. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America,” he continued. Tillis’ seat, which he has held since 2014, has also been a target for Democrats in next year’s midterms eager for a pick-up opportunity.

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Zohran Mamdani wants to build government supermarkets. America already has them

Zohran Mamdani, the favorite to become New York City’s next mayor after winning the Democratic primary, has a contentious plan to create a network of city-owned grocery stores. But it’s less radical than critics portray, some food policy and grocery industry experts say. Mamdani has proposed five municipally owned stores, one in each New York City borough, to offer groceries at lower prices to customers with limited access to supermarkets. In some New York City neighborhoods, more than 30% of people are food insecure. The proposal has been blasted as a “‘Soviet’ style disaster-in-waiting,” “farcical” and “economically delusional.” John Catsimatidis, the owner of New York City-based supermarket chain Gristedes, threatened to close stores if Mamdani is elected. (Catsimatidis is a two-time Republican candidate for mayor.)

But Mamdani is drawing on government-owned and subsidized models that already exist in the United States, such as the Defense Department’s commissaries for military personnel, public retail markets that lease space to farmers and chefs, and city-owned stores in rural areas such as St. Paul, Kansas. Atlanta is opening two municipal grocery stores later this year after struggling to draw a private grocery chain. Madison, Wisconsin, and rural Venice, Illinois, also plan to open municipally owned stores. “This is more common than people are aware of,” said Nevin Cohen, director of the City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute. “There’s a wide spectrum of food retail establishments that could be created by or with the support of city government.” Mamdani has not released all the details of his plan yet, and it’s not clear what role New York City would play in the opening or operation of grocery stores. Would it build stores? Lease them out to a private company or a non-profit? Would the employees be on the city’s payroll? But a government-owned supermarket “concept is sound” and can take a “variety of formats,” Cohen said. “Rather than giving incentives to private supermarkets without the assurance of low prices, a city-focused program that puts affordability front and center is a better approach.” Yet municipal-owned stores have recently closed in several towns, such as in Baldwin, Florida. Chicago also shifted its effort from building city-owned stores to a city-run public food market, despite a study showing stores were “necessary, feasible and implementable.” These cities’ struggles underscore the challenges of government stepping into the grocery business amid fierce resistance from the private sector.

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2 firefighters dead after apparent ambush on first responders in Idaho

Residents of Coeur d’Alene lined the highway on Sunday to honor two firefighters killed in an ambush while responding to a fire. The procession transporting the firefighters from Kootenai Health to Spokane, Washington, drew a large turnout from the community. “It was very moving to see all the people that came out. They just kept coming out. Even after the procession was done, people kept coming out,” Bill Buley, assistant managing editor for of the Coeur d’Alene Press, told CNN’s MJ Lee. Many stood in silence, waving flags or holding one another in comfort as a stream of vehicles passed by, Buley said. “I think a lot of people were hit hard to think that this could happen — to their firefighters, the front-line guys, who are there to protect them,” Buley said. “Coeur d’Alene is a pretty small community. People know who these front-line guys are and hold them with a great amount of respect. So when this happened, I think a lot of people were really shaken and just really wanted to come out and show their support for the firefighters and for their families.”

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National pride is declining in America. And it's splitting by party lines, new Gallup polling shows

Only 36% of Democrats say they’re “extremely” or “very” proud to be American, according to a new Gallup poll, reflecting a dramatic decline in national pride that’s also clear among young people. The findings are a stark illustration of how many — but not all — Americans have felt less of a sense of pride in their country over the past decade. The split between Democrats and Republicans, at 56 percentage points, is at its widest since 2001. That includes all four years of Republican President Donald Trump’s first term. Only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults who are part of Generation Z, which is defined as those born from 1997 to 2012, expressed a high level of pride in being American in Gallup surveys conducted in the past five years, on average. That’s compared with about 6 in 10 Millennials — those born between 1980 and 1996 — and at least 7 in 10 U.S. adults in older generations.

“Each generation is less patriotic than the prior generation, and Gen Z is definitely much lower than anybody else,” said Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup. “But even among the older generations, we see that they’re less patriotic than the ones before them, and they’ve become less patriotic over time. That’s primarily driven by Democrats within those generations.” America’s decline in national pride has been a slow erosion, with a steady downtick in Gallup’s data since January 2001, when the question was first asked. Even during the tumultuous early years of the Iraq War, the vast majority of U.S. adults, whether Republican or Democrat, said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. At that point, about 9 in 10 were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. That remained high in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but the consensus around American pride slipped in the years that followed, dropping to about 8 in 10 in 2006 and continuing a gradual decline. Now, 58% of U.S. adults say that, in a downward shift that’s been driven almost entirely by Democrats and independents. The vast majority of Republicans continue to say they’re proud to be American. Independents’ pride in their national identity hit a new low in the most recent survey, at 53%, largely following that pattern of gradual decline. Democrats’ diminished pride in being American is more clearly linked to Trump’s time in office. When Trump first entered the White House, in 2017, about two-thirds of Democrats said they were proud to be American. That had fallen to 42% by 2020, just before Trump lost reelection to Democrat Joe Biden.

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Lead Stories

Senate votes to move forward on Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ though measure’s fate remains in question

Senate Republicans took a major step toward delivering President Donald Trump his “big, beautiful bill” late Saturday, though the fate of the giant tax cuts and spending measure is still in question as other hurdles remain. After an hourslong push by Senate GOP leaders Saturday, the bill cleared a key procedural vote, 51-49. Republican leaders must now satisfy numerous holdouts still demanding changes to the bill. Trump’s multitrillion-dollar bill would lower federal taxes and infuse more money into the Pentagon and border security agencies, while downsizing government safety-net programs including Medicaid. The timeline is extremely tight: Trump has demanded to sign the bill on the Fourth of July, but the measure must still go back to the House if it passes the Senate. Saturday’s vote allows the Senate to begin debating Trump’s bill, teeing up a final passage vote in that chamber as soon as Monday.

In a late-night post on social media, Trump declared a “GREAT VICTORY” after the bill cleared the Senate, offering praise to four key senators who shifted their votes to get the procedural bill over the finish line. “Tonight we saw a GREAT VICTORY in the Senate with the ‘GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,’ but, it wouldn’t have happened without the Fantastic Work of Senator Rick Scott, Senator Mike Lee, Senator Ron Johnson, and Senator Cynthia Lummis. They, along with all of the other Republican Patriots who voted for the Bill, are people who truly love our Country!” the president said on his Truth Social platform. Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Rand Paul voted against the measure. Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Capitol on Saturday evening to help Senate Majority Leader John Thune convince remaining holdouts, including the handful of GOP hardliners who demanded more changes to the bill. As president of the Senate, Vance was also on hand in case he needed to break a tie.

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Wall Street hangs on to hopes for a boom in deals

Dealmaking is off to its best start of the year since 2022 by some measures, showing demand for corporate tie-ups has held up despite market turmoil, global conflicts and President Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs. U.S. deal value this year through June 25 is up about 10% from last year and at its highest level in three years, according to the London Stock Exchange Group. The second quarter got off to a slow start after Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April sent stocks swinging and spooked dealmakers. But activity has since picked up again. “Deals beget deals,” said Michael Kollender, co-head of investment banking at Stifel. “As soon as we start to see more momentum, others will jump on the wagon.”

Blockbuster deals have continued in the second quarter in industries relatively insulated from Trump’s tariffs. Charter agreed to buy fellow broadband and cable provider Cox Communications in a nearly $22 billion deal. Salesforce, meanwhile, revived a roughly $8 billion deal for data-management software firm Informatica, continuing a race by big tech to invest in artificial-intelligence capabilities. Also among this quarter’s splashy deals: Shoe-maker Skechers agreed to go private in a buyout valued at more than $9 billion. Still, the number of transactions so far this year is down 16% despite the increase in deal value. The drop is largely explained by deals under $1 billion—those account for most of transactions. Advisers say some deal hunters are waiting for more certainty on the direction of the economy before pursuing bigger game. That could help deliver on Wall Street’s expectations for a boom in mergers and acquisitions under Trump, though perhaps later than hoped.

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Lt. Gov. Patrick calls for Bo French to resign Tarrant GOP post

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and a growing chorus of Republican state and local leaders are now calling on Tarrant County GOP chair Bo French to resign over a post he made on X that polled his followers on whether Jews or Muslims were the “bigger threat to America.” “Bo French’s words do not reflect my values nor the values of the Republican Party. Antisemitism and religious bigotry have no place in Texas,” Patrick posted on X on Friday evening. “I am calling for the immediate resignation and replacement of @BoFrenchTX as @tarrantgop Chairman.” French responded on X that he has no intentions of resigning his party leadership of the largest Republican urban county in America. He deleted the poll around 7:30 p.m. and expressed regret, saying he was “misunderstood.” That appears to have done little to fend off the calls for his ouster.

Patrick’s statement is an extraordinary public rebuke of French, who has made many inflammatory comments on social media — most of them without political consequence — since the county’s Republican Party elected him chair in fall 2023. Patrick is one of the most powerful Republicans in Texas state politics, and his call on French to resign will likely give the green light to other Republican critics of French who have remained silent in the past. It didn’t take long for that to start happening Friday night. Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker joined in around 8 p.m. with a social media post saying her party needs new leadership. “Too many examples of @BoFrenchTX’s bigotry and hate. This is one of the most egregious examples. Go fishing on X for some of the other prime examples,” she wrote. “New leadership with @tarrantgop is a given. Clear the deck,” Parker said.

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ICE crackdown rattles Houston’s construction industry as contractors warn of labor shortage

Kevin Zaldaña Ramirez started Feb. 25 like any other day, framing houses at a construction site outside of Houston. But when the 20-year-old returned from a lunch break, everything changed. A local law enforcement officer pulled him over, claiming his license plate was dirty from recent rain, he said. Zaldaña Ramirez, who entered the U.S. at the age of 14, has a work permit and is considered a low priority for deportation. So he was surprised when the officer claimed his documents weren’t valid and told him there was an order for his removal from the country. Within minutes, he and a group of fellow construction workers were surrounded by ICE agents carrying large guns, he said. He was in shock. “I just wasn’t expecting this,” Zaldaña Ramirez said in an interview, through an interpreter. Then, his thoughts raced to his mother, who is visually impaired and depends on him for care. “I started thinking about what would happen to my mother because she was going to be alone,” he said.

Zaldaña Ramirez’s case drew media attention after his attorney, Susana Hart, argued his arrest was a mistake. Despite having a valid work permit and a special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) designation meant to protect vulnerable young migrants, ICE officials said he had entered the country illegally, and that his work permit doesn’t protect him from arrest or deportation proceedings because it doesn’t provide lawful status. Zaldaña Ramirez was held in a detention center for three weeks until he was released on bond in mid-March. “I felt desperate,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been there... I’m not a criminal.” His story is one of many stoking anxiety across Houston’s construction industry, where more than a third of workers are immigrants. As the Trump administration escalates enforcement, even targeting those with legal work permits, the immigration crackdown threatens to destabilize a key pillar of the industry: access to affordable foreign-born labor. With hundreds of thousands of construction jobs already unfilled nationwide, the question looms: If more immigrant workers disappear, who will be left to build? Although estimates vary, the U.S. construction industry is short anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 workers in any given month, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.

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Rick Perry’s company wants to build a giant nuclear campus near Amarillo, possibly named after Trump

Former Gov. Rick Perry is building a nuclear homage to President Donald Trump near Amarillo, he announced recently. Fermi America, a company Perry co-founded, has announced wildly ambitious plans to build what it says will be the United States’ largest nuclear power complex on 5,800 acres of land owned by Texas Tech University. The nuclear reactors, along with natural gas power plants and solar arrays, would supply electricity to what Fermi America says will be the world’s largest data center campus. Leading U.S. tech companies would be able to rent space at this campus to pursue their own artificial intelligence ambitions. The so-called Advanced Energy and Artificial Intelligence Campus project, first reported by the Washington Post, may be named after Trump. The four large-scale nuclear reactors that Fermi America aims to build on-site could also bear the president’s moniker.

In a social media post announcing Fermi America, Perry said the company was answering Trump's call for “world energy and AI dominance,” echoing language the president has used since the first day of his second term to define his energy agenda. Trump last month issued several executive orders to boost the nation's nuclear energy potential, though critics say his other policies have undermined the industry at the same time. China has built 22 nuclear reactors to power AI, while the United States has built none, said Perry, who was Trump's Energy Secretary during his first term, in a company statement. “We're behind, and it's all hands on deck,” he said in the statement. The path forward for Fermi America is difficult: The last time a company built large-scale nuclear reactors in the U.S., the Georgia-based project ended up seven years late and $17 billion over budget. The U.S. is behind because the country’s nuclear energy industry has atrophied for decades, while countries such as China and Russia have pushed ahead. Now, though, the U.S. nuclear industry says it could see a revival as it banks on the potential of a new technology known as small modular reactors, which are theoretically easier and cheaper to build. Texas lawmakers, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, recently bet big on SMRs, putting $350 million of taxpayer funds into boosting such projects. Fermi, though, is starting out by applying to build large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors, the same ones that took so long and cost so much in Georgia. And it wants to build the first one by 2032, a timeline experts think is pushing what’s possible even for SMRs.

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State Stories

Rick Perry: I’m dedicating my life to fighting for a psychedelic drug

I’ve spent most of my adult life in public service — as governor of Texas, U.S. secretary of energy and a proud veteran. And few things have moved me like what I’ve witnessed with a psychedelic drug made from a shrub in Africa. This month, Texas became the first state in the nation to allocate public funding for FDA-approved clinical trials of ibogaine, committing $50 million, the largest psychedelic research investment ever made by a government. It’s a bold, bipartisan move rooted in science and urgency. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring plant medicine derived from a shrub native to Gabon and surrounding countries in West Africa. It is quite literally a plant root, yet it’s changing the way we think about healing trauma, substance use disorder and brain injury. Clinical data shows that ibogaine has the potential to interrupt substance dependence, reduce trauma symptoms and promote neurological repair. I first heard about the drug from Morgan Luttrell, a Navy SEAL and combat veteran who was elected to Congress in 2022. He learned about other SEALs traveling to Mexico to undergo an alternative treatment for trauma and addiction — something called ibogaine.

When he told me about it, I cautioned him. Like many people, I thought I knew what psychedelics were — that they were dangerous, something to stay far away from. I grew up during the Nixon era, when the message was clear: Drugs are bad, psychedelics will ruin your life, and the only responsible path is total avoidance. But I’ve come to realize how wrong that narrative was. That fear-based messaging kept us from exploring treatments that could have saved countless lives. Morgan eventually went to Mexico for ibogaine treatment. When he came home less than a week later, he was clear, calm and centered in a way I hadn’t seen before. He had found a path forward from the psychological wounds he had been dealing with for years. Then I watched his twin brother, Marcus Luttrell — also a Navy SEAL, and a hero whose story many Americans know from the book and movie “Lone Survivor” — go through the same experience. Marcus had lived with my wife, Anita, and me at the governor’s mansion after coming home from war. He was in constant pain from his injuries and dependent on opioids just to get through the day. He also drank heavily and used nicotine to cope with stress. Worse, he was carrying the burdens that come with war: grief, trauma and survivor’s guilt. For years, we tried to find him help. And for years, nothing worked. But after undergoing ibogaine treatment at a clinic in Mexico, Marcus came back changed. He no longer needed opioids. He hasn’t touched alcohol in years. He even quit chewing Copenhagen, a longtime habit.

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Owner of famed Texas Chili Parlor dies

Scott Zublin, owner and savior of the iconic Texas Chili Parlor — the hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the state Capitol that for decades has attracted politicians, lobbyists, tourists, journalists and celebrities — died June 7. He was 67. Yellow roses and a flower arrangement were displayed at the front door of the 49-year-old restaurant June 16 in commemoration of Zublin. The restaurant’s old-school sign read, “What time is it! Love you Scott Zublin!”

Zublin, an Austinite known as "Zoob," purchased the Texas Chili Parlor in 2002 after the state comptroller seized it because of unpaid taxes and debt. Zublin paid off the debt and returned the restaurant to its original vibe that made him fall in love with it back in the late 1970s. Prior to taking on Texas' state dish — chili — Zublin traveled the world for his work in the oil industry, once earning the accolade Oil Rigger of the Year. Zublin's death was unexpected. He was slated to be on-site as manager June 8. When he didn't show up, his friends went looking for him and found him deceased, said Will Holmes, who has worked as Texas Chili Parlor's bartender for about five years. “(Texas Chili Parlor is) still here because of him. No doubt about it," Holmes said. Zublin was able to keep business flowing at Texas Chili Parlor despite Austin’s changing dining habits and the city’s transformation from a laid-back college town to a tech-centric metropolis. A historic designation next door has likely had a hand in keeping the building from being redeveloped, Holmes said. The restaurant, a staple in Austin, has been featured in a variety of local and national media, including Southern Living and Food Network's "The Grill Dads," when the show's hosts headed to Austin for a plate of homemade beef chili.

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Regulators, suspecting fraud, close tiny Texas lender in year’s second U.S. bank failure

Late Friday, a federal U.S. bank regulator said it shuttered the Santa Anna National Bank, a very small lender that served as the only bank for Santa Anna, Texas, in the country’s second bank failure of 2025. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which was appointed as receiver to help recover customers’ assets, said in a separate statement on Friday that “suspected fraud contributed to the failure of the bank.” It’s the first bank failure in Texas since 2019. A small, nearby lender, Coleman County State Bank, will absorb the failed bank’s insured deposits and some of its assets. The Santa Anna National Bank had one location and $64 million of assets in mid-June.

Representatives for Santa Anna National Bank couldn’t be reached for comment. A phone number for the bank listed on the OCC’s website prompted an automated message that said the bank had been closed and directed callers to the FDIC. The 92-year-old bank “was in an unsafe or unsound condition to transact business” and held fewer assets than its obligations to creditors, the OCC said. Lenders’ assets must exceed its liabilities in order to function. Bank collapses are rare. In 2024, two banks—Republic First Bank of Philadelphia and the First National Bank of Lindsay, in Oklahoma—failed. In 2023 there were five bank failures, including the dramatic closures of First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank during the regional banking crisis that spring. Chicago-based Pulaski Savings Bank’s failure in January was the first U.S. bank failure of 2025. The FDIC’s Office of Inspector General found that Pulaski Savings Bank failed because it had become “critically undercapitalized” and had some $21 million of deposit liabilities unaccounted for in its core system. The Texas Bankers Association, a trade group for the state’s large and community lenders, didn’t respond to a comment request about Santa Anna late Friday. The bank was run by Chief Executive Scott Morelock and President Robert Cheaney, two longtime leaders, according to archived images of Santa Anna National Bank’s website.

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Austin ISD school board adopts new budget with a nearly $20 million deficit

The Austin ISD Board of Trustees on Thursday OK'd a 2025-26 budget that has a projected deficit of $19.7 million. The new fiscal year begins July 1. Austin ISD interim Chief Financial Officer Katrina Montgomery told trustees that while they were asked to approve a deficit budget, the district will continue working on ways to reduce it. “We didn’t get where we wanted to this year having a balanced budget," she said, "but that is still something that we are going to work hard at, is making sure we have a balanced budget year over year over year."

The plan trustees approved includes roughly $1.6 billion for the district’s general fund, which is used to pay for things like salaries, school maintenance, transportation and utility bills. More than $715 million of that will also be used for Austin ISD’s recapture payment. The Texas Legislature created the recapture system in the early 1990s to redistribute money from districts with high property values to those with lower ones. According to the state’s current school finance formulas, Austin ISD collects more in local property tax revenue than it needs to operate. That’s why it has to send a big chunk of its general fund revenue to the state. The budget's approval was coupled with a vote to change the school board’s policy on the district’s fund balance, which is the cash it has on hand to cover expenses such as payroll. Austin ISD has been required to maintain a 20% fund balance, giving it the ability to cover several months' worth of operating expenses without having to borrow money.

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Texas Supreme Court partly sides with utility companies in lawsuits over 2021 winter storm

Texas residents and businesses who sued utility companies for cutting power during the 2021 winter storm didn’t adequately prove the companies were intentionally negligent in causing widespread blackouts, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday. The justices ruled plaintiffs didn’t put forth enough evidence to show Oncor, CenterPoint Energy and other utilities were purposely negligent — or caused a nuisance when they were ordered to cut power to homes across the state and allegedly failed to adequately mitigate the harm. “The plaintiffs have nowhere alleged facts supporting an inference that the Utilities were not doing the best they could in those time-sensitive circumstances,” Justice Debra Lehrmann wrote for the court.

Justices ruled, however, that the plaintiffs should get the chance to replead their gross negligence claims at the trial court level now that the high court has clarified what does and doesn't classify as "conscious indifference" in cases like this. The decision provides a relatively narrow pathway for the plaintiffs to try and prove the utility companies’ liability. KERA News has reached out to Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas and their attorneys for comment and will update with any response. When the statewide freeze put record-high demand on the state’s electrical grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — which maintains the grid — ordered the utilities to “load shed,” or cut power to homes. According to the state’s count, 246 people died, mostly from hypothermia. Thousands of residents and small businesses then sued, alleging the power cuts worsened the situation and the companies could have reasonably prepared for the freeze. The plaintiffs said the power companies’ actions caused an intentional nuisance — in other words, unreasonable discomfort or annoyance that interferes with the use of land — but the court found that’s not a good enough argument.

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John Moritz: THC dustup shows how Abbott-Patrick dynamic has shifted to governor's favor

The surprising takeaway from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's news conference Monday over a Legislature-approved THC ban was not that he took several roundhouse swings at a fellow Republican who stood in the way of a pet piece of legislation. For the firebrand conservative, such actions have become routine — and perhaps even enjoyable — during his decade in power. But what stood out when Patrick stood before reporters in a room off the Senate chambers one day after Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed Senate Bill 3, a ban on products containing THC, was that the lieutenant governor pulled his punches. “The governor of the state of Texas wants to legalize recreational marijuana," an obviously worked-up Patrick said. “That’s the headline, folks.” The remark punctuated a fusillade of head and body shots from Patrick to Abbott, and was perhaps his most outspoken criticism of the governor since they were independently elected together in 2014 and reelected twice more. But nearly every jab and uppercut was later followed with something of an olive branch.

"I respect the governor," Patrick volunteered during the Q&A session. "I'm not mad at the governor. ... I'm not angry with him, but I'm not happy that he vetoed or how he did it. "(But) we had a great session. The governor and I worked on everything. We probably passed more Senate priority bills than we've ever passed." During his two-and-a-half terms as the presiding officer of the Senate, and even during his eight years as a rank-and-file member, Patrick has raised sparring with fellow Republicans to something of an art form. Two years ago, the lieutenant governor opened a blood feud with his House counterpart, then-Speaker Dade Phelan, and remained relentlessly on offense. When such Senate-backed legislation as school vouchers bogged down in the lower chamber, Patrick branded Phelan a tool of the Democrats and mocked him with nicknames. Phelan's decision to move ahead with the House's impeachment of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2023 so angered Patrick that he served notice that not only would he campaign against the speaker in the upcoming GOP primary, but he would also go against the House Republicans in the leadership circle.

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UNT System board names Calhoun as lone finalist for HSC presidency, von Eschenbach for UTD

Dr. Kirk Calhoun is the lone finalist for president of the University of North Texas Health Science Center. System regents appointed Calhoun during a special called meeting June 27. He is currently serving as interim president of the Health Science Center. Per Texas law, the board must wait 21 days before officially hiring Calhoun as president. Calhoun took over as interim president of the Health Science Center in February. The regents also tapped UNT Dallas interim President Warren von Eschenbach as sole finalist for the permanent presidency of his campus. Addressing both finalists’ appointments, Dr. Michael R. Williams, chancellor of UNT System, said the two “are values-based leaders who have served a pivotal role.”

“There is no doubt that they will continue to serve with distinction by fostering academic excellence in innovation, furthering the mission of our institutions, and serving the students and communities entrusted to our care,” Williams said in a news release. The previous president, Sylvia Trent-Adams, resigned in January more than four months after an NBC News investigation into the school’s Willed Body Program revealed failures to contact family members of the deceased, letting their bodies go unclaimed and used for research. Before coming to the UNT Health Science Center, Calhoun served as president of the University of Texas at Tyler, where he led the opening of a medical school. Calhoun is a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

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State board declares Northeast Texas, DFW officially in conflict over Marvin Nichols Reservoir

Dallas-Fort Worth and Northeast Texas are officially in conflict over the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir, the Texas Water Development Board declared at its June 26 meeting. Northeast Texans called on state water leaders earlier this year to discard the proposed $7 billion reservoir from planning for future supplies. By declaring the dispute an interregional conflict, the state officials are leaving it to Northeast Texans and Dallas-Fort Worth water planners to find a solution. Board members did not specify how a solution could be reached but referred the two groups to come to an agreement through mediation. Board members also gave executive administrator of the water board Bryan McMath the authority to oversee the interregional conflict process.

In a June 27 interview with the Fort Worth Report, Dan Buhman, who chairs the Region C water planning group, said board members have twice previously declared a conflict regarding the reservoir, once in 2011 and in 2015. That involved keeping the proposed reservoir in Region C’s plan and removing language mentioning conflict from the water plan for Region D, which represents 19 counties in Northeast Texas. Region C represents the Dallas-Fort Worth region. “I don’t know what the solution will be, but we want to mediate in good faith and create something that creates a win-win,” said Buhman. Both groups are responsible for choosing four representatives from regions C and D to take part in a meeting, with both sides proposing solutions until a consensus is reached, said Buhman. The decision to declare conflict came after Region D water planning group chair Jim Thompson, representing Northeast Texas, sent a letter in April to the board, requesting they determine whether a conflict exists stemming from the Marvin Nichols Reservoir in Dallas-Fort Worth’s water plan and, if so, to identify a resolution. The letter says the proposed reservoir would hurt Northeast Texas’ economy, agriculture and natural resources.

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Flood victims demand Harris County prioritize overdue protection projects. They may get their wish.

Frustrated flood victims packed Harris County’s commissioners court session last week to demand results while county leaders debated which flood infrastructure plans to put on hold as they grapple with a $1.15 billion shortfall. “We’re tired of flooding. The bond we voted for in 2018 requires equity,” said Doris Brown, a Trinity Gardens resident who helped found the Northeast Action Collective. “The system that came before was not working to resolve the historic neglect communities of color had endured for decades.” For nearly two hours on Thursday, Brown’s frustrations were echoed by dozens of other county residents. They said that seven years after voters passed a record $2.5 billion flood bond and two years after the Harris County Flood Control District secured its target $2.7 billion in matching funds, they had expected to see more progress in the most flood-prone areas. Of the 181 line items in the original bond, 137 are still in progress, and many have yet to start construction.

After the bond was passed in 2018, the court introduced two different frameworks spearheaded by Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis that he thought would prioritize projects based on factors like equity and flood vulnerability. The first framework was set in 2019, with an update in 2022. But data and records reviewed by the Houston Chronicle and confirmed by the flood control district show that its staff never changed the original flood bond budget to follow the equity rankings. This left an estimated funding gap of nearly $240 million to complete projects that commissioners thought would be the county’s top priorities under the 2022 framework. An additional shortfall of over $910 million could kneecap projects that scored lower on the equity framework, and projects that have not been ranked. By Thursday afternoon, three of four county commissioners voted to instruct the flood control district to go back to the drawing board and find a way to pull bond funding from lower-ranking projects, ensuring that at least the top-priority work could be completed. If the district acts on the commission’s new order, this will mark the first time it moves bond money between unfinished line items since they were first budgeted in 2018.

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Garrett W. Fulce: KP George needs to say the magic words: 'I resign'

(Garrett W. Fulce of Sugar Land hosts "Seeing Red," a Texas politics podcast, and owns Fulce Consulting LLC, a Texas-based public relations and public affairs firm.) At a press conference this month, embattled Fort Bend County Judge KP George unveiled his latest magic trick: Presto! Change-o! He transformed himself into a Republican. For George, this is only the latest in a long line of impersonations and magic words. In the past, his act involved fake posts and invented racism. Now he’s throwing around what he seems to believe are magic words: "lawfare," "Soros," "MAGA." Say the right thing, George seems to believe, and Republicans will forget everything else. Say the right thing, and accountability disappears. But those words aren’t magic; they’re just props in his latest con. Let’s review. George’s former chief of staff, Taral Patel, created a fake persona, "Antonio Scalywag," and in that guise, posted race-baiting social-media attacks against himself, George and others. George and Patel then used the posts in their campaigns to garner support by insinuating that Fort Bend Republicans were racists. Patel eventually pled guilty to two misdemeanor charges of impersonation, and confessed that he’d coordinated with George. Text messages showed Patel asking for George’s approval before posting. George stood at the center of the deception.

That scheme was built on magic words too — statements designed to provoke outrage, drive division and cast George as the victim of a GOP mob. Every post was a spell cast in bad faith. In Fort Bend, where races are tight and stakes are high, even one lie can change the outcome. Now George also faces a felony indictment for campaign-related money laundering. Against that stark backdrop, George tried his most audacious illusion yet. He stepped onto the stage dressed as a Republican, reciting the script. Freedom. Family. Faith. Trump. All of it rehearsed. And all of it, we can safely assume, as fake as Antonio Scalywag. What began as digital fraud has become political theater. The costume has changed, but the scam remains. Many former Democrats have crossed over to the Republican Party with integrity — among them, Eric Johnson, Ryan Guillen, J.M. Lozano and Rick Perry. In those cases, the party switch aligned with the politicians’ legislative records and long-standing beliefs. None arrived with charges pending and a record of fraud.

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Joaquin Castro and Beto O'Rourke draw 1,000 at San Antonio rally

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke used a rally in San Antonio on Friday night to blister Republicans in Congress as they prepare to vote on a spending and tax cut plan in Washington that they warn will cut Medicaid and food stamps for hundreds of thousands of Texans. While Republicans have downplayed the impact of the potential cuts and said they are focusing on rooting out fraud and abuse, Democrats have warned it will still lead to funding cuts for rural hospitals and clinics that rely on Medicaid and ultimately push tens of thousands more in Texas off health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “We have to stand up for Medicaid and beat back this reconciliation bill because people’s lives are at stake,” Castro told more than 1,000 people packed into a music venue near downtown.

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Will who knows Trump best become the key to Texas attorney general race?

If next year's GOP primary comes down to who has the best ties to the Trump administration, Aaron Reitz likes his chances in the race for attorney general. While he doesn’t have the campaigning history of state Sens. Mayes Middleton or Joan Huffman, who have also entered the race, Reitz told me he is convinced he can one-up them when it comes to working with the White House and current U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What Texans want out of their next AG is someone who can really deeply integrate, at least for the first two years of his term as AG, with the Trump administration,” said Reitz, who just left his fledgling post as assistant attorney general with the U.S. Justice Department under Bondi. “When I’m the next AG you’re going to see very tight coordination with the Trump administration.” Reitz, 38, said his opponents are surely going to say they are allies of Trump as well, but he thinks he has a better case to make.

“Frankly, that’s what no one else can credibly bring to the table,” Reitz said. The other two candidates certainly aren’t ceding that territory to Reitz. Middleton, 47, has pictures on his campaign website of him with Trump and declares he is “a steadfast ally of President Trump and a proven champion of the America First movement.” Huffman is leaning into her legal experience, which includes having been a prosecutor and, later, district court judge before becoming a state senator. “You want an experienced attorney, not someone who’s never seen the inside of a courtroom or is simply a young politician climbing the political ladder,” Huffman, 68, said in announcing her campaign last week. But Reitz said he's not afraid to put his record up against Huffman's or Middleton's. He said when campaign finance reports come out next month, they’ll show he raised more than $1.7 million in just a couple of weeks on the campaign trail. “My opponents, on the other hand, are career politicians with experience doing what career politicians do best: all talk, no action, and self-congratulatory photo ops,” he said.

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Reality Winner rebuilds in Kingsville

On April 5 at 4 p.m., Reality Winner was hustling: She’d just learned she was needed to find additional last-minute female competitors for a Crossfit competition in Corpus Christi—a hassle for the 33-year-old who was already busy with other duties that day, including cleaning out dog kennels as one of the many requirements for her veterinary technology program at Texas A&M-Kingsville. Winner told the organizers that her two-person team would compete against anyone, even men, in contests designed to test people’s limitations, including lifting gigantic barbells and running and swimming races. In the end, her team tied for second place. Crossfit has become a way for Winner to blow off steam after returning to Kingsville, where she launched an eclectic but quiet new life after first earning international publicity—and then becoming a convicted felon—for leaking classified information about attacks on U.S. elections.

In 2018, Winner, a decorated U.S. Air Force veteran and a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to five years and three months, America’s longest prison sentence ever for the crime of leaking a secret document to journalists. In 2017, Winner was working for the NSA when she spotted a classified document that revealed that there had been a coordinated attempt by Russians to hack a voting software company in the 2016 elections. The document showed that hackers used the information they obtained to conduct spear-phishing attacks against more than 100 election officials nationwide. Winner anonymously mailed that information to The Intercept, but the leak was quickly traced to her. During her trial, prosecutors attempted to prove that Winner was a dangerous rogue at risk of being recruited by foreign adversaries if ever released on bail. They questioned everything from her gun collection to her diary entries. When Winner was released early in June 2021, she chose to return to Kingsville—the town that she’d once hoped to leave forever. Winner grew up there with interests in both shooting guns and practicing yoga. Early in life, she became fascinated with Arabic and international relations, which made her an attractive Air Force recruit and earned her medals for her military service after she used those skills to help identify enemy targets. Later, they landed her a job at the NSA.

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National Stories

Trump says he will move aggressively to undo nationwide blocks on his agenda

An emboldened Trump administration plans to aggressively challenge blocks on the president’s top priorities, from immigration to education, following a major Supreme Court ruling that limits the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions. Government attorneys will press judges to pare back the dozens of sweeping rulings thwarting the president’s agenda “as soon as possible,” said a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. Priorities for the administration include injunctions related to the Education Department and the U.S. DOGE Service, as well as an order halting the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the official said, detailing efforts to implement plans President Donald Trump announced Friday.

“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said at a news conference, during which he thanked by name members of the conservative high court majority he helped build. Trump on Friday cast the narrowing of judicial power as a consequential, needed correction in his battle with a court system that has restrained his authority. Scholars and plaintiffs in the lawsuits over Trump’s orders agreed that the high court ruling could profoundly reshape legal battles over executive power that have defined Trump’s second term — even as other legal experts said the effects would be more muted. Some predicted it would embolden Trump to push his expansive view of presidential power. “The Supreme Court has fundamentally reset the relationship between the federal courts and the executive branch,” Notre Dame Law School professor Samuel Bray, who has studied nationwide injunctions, said in a statement. “Since the Obama administration, almost every major presidential initiative has been frozen by federal district courts issuing ‘universal injunctions.’” Nationwide injunctions put a freeze on an action until a court can make a decision on its legality. They have became a go-to tool for critics of presidential actions in recent times, sometimes delaying for years the implementation of an executive order the court ultimately approves.

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UN nuclear watchdog chief says Iran could again begin enriching uranium in ‘matter of months’

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog says US strikes on Iran fell short of causing total damage to its nuclear program and that Tehran could restart enriching uranium “in a matter of months,” contradicting President Donald Trump’s claims the US set Tehran’s ambitions back by decades. Rafael Grossi’s comments appear to support an early assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported on by CNN, which suggests the United States’ strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites last week did not destroy the core components of its nuclear program, and likely only set it back by months. While the final military and intelligence assessment has yet to come, Trump has repeatedly claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program.

The 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran began earlier this month when Israel launched an unprecedented attack it said aimed at preventing Tehran developing a nuclear bomb. Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. The US then struck three key Iranian nuclear sites before a ceasefire began. The extent of the damage to Tehran’s nuclear program has been hotly debated ever since. US military officials have in recent days provided some new information about the planning of the strikes, but offered no new evidence of their effectiveness against Iran’s nuclear program. Following classified briefings this week, Republican lawmakers acknowledged the US strikes may not have eliminated all of Iran’s nuclear materials – but argued that this was never part of the military’s mission. Asked about the different assessments, Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told CBS’s “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan”: “This hourglass approach in weapons of mass destruction is not a good idea.”

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After criticism from MAGA world, Amy Coney Barrett delivers for Trump

As President Donald Trump reveled in a major Supreme Court victory that curbed the ability of judges to block his policies nationwide, he had special praise for one of the justices: Amy Coney Barrett. “I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,” he said at a White House press conference soon after Friday’s ruling. Barrett’s majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, which at least temporarily revived Trump’s plan to end automatic birthright citizenship, is a major boost to an administration that has been assailed by courts around the country for its broad and aggressive use of executive power. It also marks an extraordinary turnaround for Barrett’s reputation among Trump’s most vocal supporters.

Just a few months ago, she faced vitriolic criticism from MAGA influencers and others as she sporadically voted against Trump, including a March decision in which she rejected a Trump administration attempt to avoid paying U.S. Agency for International Development contractors. CNN also reported that Trump himself had privately complained about Barrett. That is despite the fact that she is a Trump appointee with a long record of casting decisive votes in a host of key cases in which the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has imposed itself, most notably with the 2022 ruling that overturned the abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade. One of those outspoken critics, Trump-allied lawyer Mike Davis, suggested that the pressure on Barrett had the desired effect. “Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,” he said in a text message. Quickly U-turning, MAGA influencers on Friday praised Barrett and turned their anger on liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson instead.

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Trump threatens to back primary challenge against GOP Sen. Thom Tillis over 'big, beautiful bill' vote

President Donald Trump on Saturday attacked Sen. Thom Tillis for opposing the party’s sweeping domestic policy bill, threatening to meet with potential primary challengers to the North Carolina Republican. Tillis, who faces re-election next year in a battleground state, was one of two Republicans, along with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, to vote against advancing the “big, beautiful bill” in the Senate on Saturday evening. “Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote Saturday night. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America.”

Trump’s social media criticism came hours after Tillis said in a statement that he “cannot support this bill in its current form,” pointing to expected cuts to Medicaid he said would “result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.” Trump accused the two-term senator of grandstanding “in order to get some publicity for himself, for a possible, but very difficult re-election.” “Looks like Senator Thom Tillis, as usual, wants to tell the Nation that he’s giving them a 68% Tax Increase, as opposed to the Biggest Tax Cut in American History!” Trump wrote, adding, “Thom Tillis is making a BIG MISTAKE for America, and the Wonderful People of North Carolina!” Tillis is one of Democrats’ top targets for defeat in the 2026 midterm elections. He won his previous two Senate races by less than 2 percentage points. Prior to Trump’s post, Tillis told reporters Saturday evening that he gave the president a heads up about his opposition during a call he characterized as “very professional” and “very respectful.”

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What Democratic swings in special elections mean for 2026

It’s not too early to talk about 2026, when the first national elections will be held since Donald Trump was voted into the White House for a second time. It’s the first opportunity for Americans to register their approval or disapproval of Trump’s agenda by deciding whether to maintain a Republican congressional majority. As such, politicos are scouring the landscape for any signs hinting at which way voters may be leaning in the 2026 midterms. If history is any guide, Democrats should gain seats in the House and Senate, since that has been the pattern of the party out of power in off-year contests, with a few notable exceptions. Beyond what the historical record suggests, there is an additional warning sign for Trump allies who want to continue single-party GOP rule in Washington: Democrats have made big gains in special elections since Trump took office in January 2025. A Washington Post analysis of these races suggests Democrats might be on track for a very good 2026.

Among all special elections this year, Democrats have outperformed Kamala Harris’s vote share in 2024 by 13 percentage points, based on Harris-Trump baselines calculated by the Downballot, an election data newsletter. That’s the largest shift toward any party in years. In fact, all but four of the 31 special elections have seen movement toward Democrats. Most of the special elections we looked at were state legislative elections, and while Democrats have flipped only two of the seats (Pennsylvania’s 36th state Senate district and Iowa’s 35th state Senate district), the size of the shift compared with last year’s presidential election is noteworthy. Democrats are overperforming in districts across the map, from Pennsylvania to Florida and California. Some of the largest swings toward Democrats were in states that Trump won in 2024, while the four races that shifted toward Republicans were in more Democratic-leaning states. But Democrats aren’t only performing well in state legislative special elections. They also delivered huge swings in the April special elections for Florida’s 1st and 6th Congressional Districts, exceeding Harris’s vote share by 15 and 23 percentage points, respectively. There are a few caveats to keep in mind, though. Any Democratic swing in 2025 could look exaggerated, following the party’s popular vote loss and overall poor showing last November. It’s a lot easier to overperform when the baseline is lower. And, of course, special elections aren’t necessarily predictive of voter behavior over a year from now. Many things can change — from swings in the economy to Trump’s approval rating; and Democrats are themselves very unpopular with voters.

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The first rule in Trump’s Washington: Don’t write anything down

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, some employees had to sign nondisclosure agreements before reviewing plans for firings and organizational shake-ups. At the Administration for Children and Families, career staff were told not to respond in writing to panicky grant recipients whose funding had been shut off to avoid a “paper trail,” one employee said. And at the Environmental Protection Agency, several months after Elon Musk began requiring federal workers to submit weekly emails detailing five things they’d accomplished, some managers began calling staff to say they no longer had to comply — but refused to put it in writing, according to an employee who received one of the calls. “What’s particularly weird for me is that, as a regulatory agency, we tend to operate with the idea that ‘if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen,’” said the employee, who has since left the government. “But we are very much moving away from things being in writing.”

Across President Donald Trump’s administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. No one wants to put anything in writing anymore, federal workers said: Meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, even on anodyne topics. Workers prefer to talk outdoors, as long as the weather cooperates. And communication among colleagues — whether work-related or personal — has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete. It’s not just career staffers who are clamming up, fearful they will be tagged as rebellious or resistant to Trump’s policies and dismissed amid the administration’s push to trim the workforce, fulfilling the president’s promise to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse. Trump’s own political appointees are also resistant to writing things down, worried that their agency’s deliberations will appear in news coverage and inspire a hunt for leakers, federal workers said. Every administration comes in urging at least some confidentiality, usually to protect presidential priorities or encourage the candid airing of views in decision-making, federal workers noted. Government employees’ devices have long been monitored, and the law prevents workers from publicly espousing political opinions or taking part in political activity while on duty. But this shift is different, workers said — more far-reaching, affecting every aspect of external and internal communications. The overall effect has been to impede honest discussion, slow work, stir confusion and depress morale. “I’ve never seen this much secrecy and lack of transparency from any leadership, including in the military,” said a nearly 10-year veteran of the General Services Administration. “We don’t know anything until it happens.”

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Copyright July 06, 2025, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved