KTBB News, Weather, Talk

WASHINGTON (AP) — Arrests for illegally crossing the border from Mexico plummeted 33% in July to the lowest level since September 2020, a result of asylum being temporarily suspended, authorities said Friday.

The Border Patrol made 56,408 arrests last month, down from 83,536 arrests in June, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, its parent agency.

Asylum was halted at the border June 5 because arrests for illegal crossings topped a threshold of 2,500 a day, though a lack of deportation flights prevents authorities from turning away everyone. U.S. authorities say arrests dropped 55% after the measure, which followed a steep decline earlier this year that was widely attributed to Mexican authorities increasing enforcement within their borders.

“In July, our border security measures enhanced our ability to deliver consequences for illegal entry,” said Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner.

The numbers, which were roughly in line with preliminary estimates, may give Democrats some breathing room on an issue that has dogged them throughout Joe Biden’s presidency.

“The Biden-Harris Administration has taken effective action, and the Republicans continue to do nothing,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández.

More than 38,000 people were admitted at land crossings through an online appointment system called CBP One, bringing the total to more than 765,000 since it was introduced in January 2023.

More than 520,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela were admitted through July under a separate policy allowing people from those four countries to apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at an airport. Permits were recently halted amid concerns about fraud by sponsors.

“(The Department of Homeland Security) is working to restart applications processing as quickly as possible, with appropriate safeguards,” CBP said in a statement.

CBP said Friday that it will expand areas where non-Mexican migrants can apply online for appointments to seek U.S. asylum on Aug. 23 to a large swath of southern Mexico.

Migrants will be able to schedule appointments on the CBP One app from the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, extending the zone from northern and central Mexico. Mexicans can apply anywhere in the country.

The move requested by Mexico could ease the strain on the Mexican government by allowing migrants to wait for their appointments in the south farther from the U.S. border and lessen dangers for people trying to reach the U.S. border to claim asylum.

U.S. Rep. Mark Green, Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, criticized the Biden administration’s new and expanded legal pathways at the border.

“This administration is orchestrating a massive shell game, encouraging otherwise-inadmissible aliens to cross at ports of entry instead of between them, thereby creating a façade of improved optics for the administration, but in reality imposing a growing burden on our communities,” he said.

DALLAS (AP) — Victims’ attorneys asked jurors Friday to hold accountable the parents of a student accused of killing 10 people in a 2018 school shooting near Houston, saying they failed to provide necessary support for his mental health and didn’t do enough to prevent him from accessing their guns.

The victims’ lawsuit seeks to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, financially liable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018. They are pursuing at least $1 million in damages.

Authorities say Pagourtzis fatally shot eight students and two teachers. He was 17 years old at the time.

“It was their son, under their roof, with their guns who went and committed this mass shooting,” Clint McGuire, representing some of the victims, told jurors during closing statements in the Galveston courtroom.

Attorneys representing the victims’ families talked of the anguish of their loved one’s deaths, including the family of Sabika Aziz Sheikh, a 17-year-old Pakistani exchange student who wanted to be a diplomat.

Attorneys representing some of those who survived talked about the trauma they still endure, including Chase Yarbrough, who has fragments of bullets embedded in his body.

Pagourtzis, now 23, has been charged with capital murder but the criminal case has been on hold since November 2019, when he was declared incompetent to stand trial. He is being held at a state mental health facility.

The lawsuit was filed by relatives of seven of the people killed and four of the 13 who were wounded in the Santa Fe attack.

The attorney representing Pagourtzis told jurors during the trial that while his client planned the shooting, he was never in control of his actions because of his severe mental illness.

But McGuire in closing statements asked jurors to hold Pagourtzis accountable, saying there is ample evidence that he intended to do what he did. McGuire said Pagourtzis decided to open fire in the art room so that students would be trapped and it would be hard for police to reach him. He said Pagourtzis wrote in his journal that he found “exhilarating” the idea of shooting his classmates and watching them “writhe on the ground in agony.”

“He knew when he went to the school that what he was doing was wrong,” McGuire said.

McGuire said during closing statements that before the shooting, Pagourtzis recorded over 50 absences from school, rarely showered, became quieter and stayed in his room — all indicators of mental illness that his parents should have recognized.

But Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’ parents, told jurors during the trial that the couple hadn’t seen any red flags, knew nothing of his online purchases and didn’t know any of their weapons were missing.

Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer that sold Dimitrios Pagourtzis more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying his age, was a defendant in the lawsuit until last year, when it reached a settlement with the families.

Kosmetatos told jurors that while her son became more introverted as he grew older, he was a bright and normal child with no significant issues. She acknowledged that he “wasn’t himself” in the months leading up to the shooting but she had hoped it would pass.

Antonios Pagourtzis testified that he wasn’t aware that his son was feeling rejected and ostracized at school, or that he might have been depressed.

The family stored firearms in a gun safe in the garage and a display cabinet in the living room. Dimitrios Pagourtzis used his mother’s .38 caliber handgun and one of his father’s shotguns during the shooting. Whether he got the weapons from the safe or cabinet, and where he found the keys, were among points debated during the trial.

“You can’t secure anything 100%,” Antonios Pagourtzis said.

Similar lawsuits have been filed following other mass shootings.

In 2022, a jury awarded over $200 million to the mother of one of four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. The lawsuit was filed against the shooter and his father, who was accused of returning a rifle to his son before the shooting despite the son’s mental health issues.

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison by a Michigan judge after becoming the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. Pagourtzis’ parents are not accused of any crime.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports Houston ISD parents brought a plethora of first-week-of-school woes to the Board of Managers Thursday, including unassigned bus routes, unkempt school grounds and inadequate air conditioning in classrooms and on buses. School kicked off Monday after a flurry of parent phone calls for bus route assignments, with many families receiving route information over email Sunday for students who were not their children. Many schools continue to have air conditioning issues, leaving classroom temperatures climbing toward the district’s heat threshold of 82 degrees Fahrenheit when the district opts to move children. Crockett Elementary parent Mychela Predium asked for cool air for her daughter, who has asthma, and her classmates. She was concerned classroom conditions could contribute to another asthma attack and emergency room visit.

“I can no longer hold my tongue because my daughter can’t hold her breath,” Predium said. Teisha Mayes, who volunteered at a Crockett dance class last year, said the air conditioning was broken numerous times then. She said this week the dance classroom had no air conditioning the first week of school, forcing the children to dance in the hallway. She called the school’s air conditioning outages unacceptable and pointed out that she spotted new spin bikes on campus, brought there as part of the New Education System reforms under state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles. “Why weren’t these funds used to fix the AC?” Mayes said. “Our priority should be creating a cool, consistent environment where children and teachers can thrive.” The district aims to keep classrooms between 70 to 75 degrees, Miles said. “I said to the board and to our community, we will fight the air conditioning battle every day until October,” Miles said, adding they had to move students due to air conditioning issues from Montgomery Elementary School to another school Thursday.

DALLAS – KERA reports that a woman who says she was sexually assaulted as a teen in the Gateway Church is suing the church and a former member of her youth group, saying pastors and counselors failed to prevent the alleged abuse. According to the suit, the woman was 13 years old when she was groomed and sexually assaulted by a high school senior in 2016. The alleged abuser is currently in prison for another assault of a minor. KERA News is withholding the identities of both, because they were minors at the time of the incident. The woman says the church did nothing to prevent the series of assaults over the span of three months despite multiple surveillance cameras in the area in which the abuse occurred. The suit also says there may be other girls who were assaulted by the same person. The woman and her family are suing for assault, negligence and breach of special relationship claims and are seeking more than $1 million in damages.

KERA News reached out to Gateway for comment and will update this story with any response. According to the suit, the two teens met during weekly youth group meetings on Wednesday nights. The meetings were held at The King’s University in Southlake, an off-site location near Gateway. The accuser says the teen boy began grooming her in December 2016, and “cynically used the biblical beliefs and teachings of Defendant Gateway’s pastor and ministers to convince 13-year-old [girl] that it was the will of God, and the leaders of Defendant Gateway, that she submit to him because he was a male and she was a female.” The suit states he took the girl outside the King’s University “into the darkness” where he sexually assaulted her multiple times. The abuse continued until February 2017 while the girl was still 13 and the boy was 18 years old, according to the suit. The youth group was geared to children ranging in age from 11 to 18 years old with at least 200 children at the nighttime youth group meetings with little or no supervision, according to the suit.

NEW LONDON – KUT reports the London Museum & Cafe is sort of in the middle of nowhere on Main Street in New London, Texas, a town of just under 1,000 people about half an hour east of Tyler. The location is a challenge that volunteers at the museum are well aware of, but they say visitors who make the trek are often surprised by what they find. “I think they don’t know what to expect. And they walk back there and they’re kind of pleasantly surprised, you know. So we do hear, ‘it’s so well done.’ We hear that quite a bit,” said archivist Becky Tyner, who’s volunteered at the museum since 1997 — even before it officially opened. The London Museum & Cafe sits to the west of the town’s four-lane Main Street. To the east is West Rusk High School, which had been known as London High School until 1965. In a grassy opening where the road splits, marked by a brown historical marker sign, is the London School Explosion Memorial. It’s a 32-foot cenotaph made of Texas pink granite to remember the lives lost on March 18, 1937 – the day the London School exploded.

JOURDANTON (AP) — A mother and stepfather have been arrested after the death of their 12-year-old daughter, who lay unconscious in their home for four days before medical treatment was sought as the pair tried to feed her smoothies, according to the county sheriff.

“They thought they could nurse her back to health,” said Atascosa County Sheriff David Soward.

Denise Balbaneda, 36, and Gerald Gonzales, 40, both of Christine, each face a felony charge of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury by omission, Soward said during a news conference Wednesday.

Gonzales remains jailed while Balbaneda is free on bond, according to online jail records, which do not list attorneys who could speak on their behalf. A phone call Friday to a number listed for Balbaneda was answered by a recording saying the call could not be completed.

The Associated Press also left a telephone message with the sheriff’s office Friday morning.

Sipps received life-threatening injuries on Aug. 8, but the parents did not seek medical care until Monday, when Balbaneda called 911 and later met an ambulance that took the girl to a hospital in Jourdanton, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of San Antonio, where she died, Soward said.

Soward said the couple were arrested Tuesday and have told investigators how the girl was injured. The sheriff declined to describe the girl’s injuries, citing an ongoing investigation and pending autopsy results.

“She was not talking, she basically could flutter her eyes and move her hands a little bit over a four-day period” until medical care was sought, Soward said.

“We do not think they wanted the attention this would draw to them if the little girl was injured, which is strangely ironic,” now that both face charges following the girl’s death, Soward said.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas Children’s Hospital notified the state that it laid off 997 employees through job cuts announced last week, the first time the hospital has officially disclosed the number of affected workers. The figure included in a Workforce Adjustment and Retraining Notification submitted to the Texas Workforce Commission includes employees from all Texas Children’s locations. The hospital system includes more than 120 locations, including its Woodlands, West Campus and Austin hospitals. The hospital previously told the Chronicle that it was laying off 5% of its approximately 20,000 employees, or roughly 1,000 workers, but declined to provide an exact number. The number disclosed in the WARN notice is in line with that approximation.

The WARN notice offers more insight into the scale of the layoffs at the nation’s largest children’s hospital. Texas Children’s attributed the job cuts to a series of financial challenges, including lower patient volumes in Houston and a two-week delay in the opening of the new Austin campus. The hospital reported an operating income loss of nearly $200 million through the first six months of its current fiscal year. The layoffs have also affected patients. Families with children with complex medical needs told the Chronicle that their appointments for speech, physical and occupational therapy were postponed or canceled in the wake of the layoffs. Texas Children’s said Friday that it is working to reschedule appointments.

TEXAS – The education news service, The 74, reports that the state won’t say. Almost three months after Texas sparked a firestorm of criticism for a new curriculum heavily infused with Bible lessons, state education officials still won’t say who authored the material or how much they were paid. And because of the pandemic, they say they don’t have to. A state official told The 74 that the work — an $84 million contract the state signed in March 2022 — falls under a disaster declaration Gov. Greg Abbott issued to speed up delivery of masks, vaccines and other critical supplies during the height of the pandemic. That means the paper trail that typically follows people who contract with the state, including work and payment reports, doesn’t exist in this case, the official said. Some members of the state board of education, which will vote on the curriculum in November, are accusing education Commissioner Mike Morath and his staff of a lack of transparency.

“I did not get a lot of my questions answered when it came to who wrote the curriculum,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member whose district includes the Fort Worth suburbs. She’s one of at least three members who asked officials at the Texas Education Agency for more details. “It’s hard and it shouldn’t be. Someone knows this information.” Morath said the overhaul will bring classical education to over 2 million K-5 students in Texas. The model is designed to strengthen kids’ reading skills while also teaching them culture, art and history, including the Bible’s influence. Interviewed in early May, the commissioner would only say that “hundreds of people” worked on the project. But that doesn’t satisfy board members who say the curriculum borders on proselytizing and promotes a distinctly evangelical view of American history. A teacher’s guide for a third-grade lesson on ancient Rome, for example, devotes eight pages to the life and ministry of Jesus — presenting many of the events as historical facts, scholars say. But the Islamic prophet Muhammad isn’t named anywhere. A kindergarten lesson on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” draws parallels to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. And an art appreciation lesson walks 5-year-olds through the creation story from the Book of Genesis. “Who are the people that sat down in this fancy room and said this is the knowledge that every Texas student should have?” asked Staci Childs, a Democrat who represents the Houston area. She said she understands teaching the importance of religion in American history, but thinks the balance is off. “I just don’t think that it’s fair to have that many biblical references in the text in public schools across the state.”

NEW YORK (AP) — A Mexican drug lord who was arrested in the U.S. could be headed to trial in New York City, after prosecutors filed a request Thursday to move him from Texas.

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, known as a top leader and co-founder of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, faces charges in multiple U.S. locales. He and a son of notorious Sinaloa kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán were arrested last month after being flown into New Mexico. Zambada has said he was kidnapped in his home country en route to what he thought was a meeting with a Mexican official.

Zambada, 76, has so far appeared in U.S. federal court in El Paso, Texas, which is in one of the jurisdictions where he has been indicted. He has pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy, drug conspiracy and other charges.

Federal prosecutors in Texas asked a court Thursday to hold a hearing to take the procedural steps needed to move him to the New York jurisdiction that includes Brooklyn, where the elder Guzmán was convicted in 2019 of drug and conspiracy charges and sentenced to life in prison.

If prosecutors get their wish, the case against Zambada in Texas would proceed after the one in New York.

A message seeking comment was sent to Zambada’s attorneys.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn declined to comment. Zambada is charged there with running a continuing criminal enterprise, murder conspiracy, drug offenses and other crimes.

Meanwhile, Joaquín Guzmán López, the “El Chapo” son arrested with Zambada, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in a federal court in Chicago.

Zambada ran the Sinaloa cartel with the elder Guzmán as it grew from a regional presence into a huge manufacturer and smuggler of illicit fentanyl pills and other drugs to the United States, authorities say.

Considered a good negotiator, Zambada has been seen as the syndicate’s strategist and dealmaker, thought to be more involved in its day-to-day doings than the more flamboyant Guzmán.

Keeping a lower profile, Zambada had never been behind bars until his U.S. arrest last month.

He has often been at odds with Guzmán’s sons, dubbed the Chapitos, or Little Chapos. Fearful that Zambada’s arrest could trigger a violent power struggle within the cartel, the Mexican government quickly dispatched 200 special forces soldiers to the state of Sinaloa, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly pleaded with the cartel factions not to fight each other.