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FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo caused a stir when she posted on social media Sunday that Democrats were registering immigrants to vote at several sites in Fort Worth and Weatherford. “From a friend …,” the post on X begins. “Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote!” The post goes on to claim that the friend’s wife (or friend of a friend’s wife — it’s unclear) saw the same thing occurring at two Department of Motor Vehicles locations in Fort Worth. It does not specify when the alleged registration activities occurred.

While Bartiromo herself did not say the word “illegal,” her followers did not hesitate to make that assumption. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Why are Democrats setting up voter registration tables outside DMV’s and registering illegal immigrants to vote?!,” said a person whose account is named Mary M33. “This is happening in Tarrant County and you can bet it’s happening across the state.” Several other commenters took Bartiromo to mean noncitizens, as well. But, is there any truth behind the claim? Bartiromo’s statement was “simply false,” according to Sgt. William Lockridge, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office. Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week. “None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.” “Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said. There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post. The Tarrant County Democratic Party did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French replied to Bartilomo’s post suggesting she invite him onto her show “to discuss.”

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports Sarah Malik used to think Houston ISD’s Lantrip Elementary School was a great fit for her daughter. But after the state takeover of the district in June 2023, Malik said the environmental science magnet school in Eastwood, which they loved for the tenured teachers and welcoming community, began to change. Her child’s art teacher was reassigned, and students were discouraged from reading books after finishing their work, she said. After the school’s principal and several teachers departed in the spring, Malik knew they had to go. Her daughter is now enrolled in The Kipling School, a private campus. “We were blindsided all year with the changes that were happening,” Malik said.

Malik is one of thousands of parents who pulled their child from HISD this year. Several told the Chronicle they were leaving the district due to the stringent reforms, plummeting morale, principal and teacher departures or cookie-cutter lessons that they said did not account for a child’s individual learning needs during the previous academic year. “I don’t want to risk another year of her being frustrated with learning,” Malik said. HISD’s reported “membership,” or the number of students enrolled in the district on a specific day, was about 170,800 on Thursday, down by about 9,000 students, or 5%, compared to the fourth day of school last year, according to district data. The early data, however, does not reflect the official enrollment count of the state’s largest school district. The district’s official enrollment will not be finalized until Oct. 25, but it appears to be on track to drop below 180,000 students this year. It reported an enrollment of about 184,000 students last year, and budget documents project enrollment to drop to about 179,600 this year, which would be its lowest enrollment in at least a decade.

(ABC) HOUSTON – A fire that ripped through a home on Sunday in suburban Houston is being investigated as a triple homicide after investigators found evidence that three people discovered dead inside the residence were killed before the blaze started, authorities said.

The fire at the two-story brick home in Cypress, Texas, northwest of Houston, was reported Sunday morning, and while extinguishing the blaze, firefighters made the grim discovery of the three bodies inside and investigators found evidence of foul play, according to Sgt. Michael Ritchie of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

The remains found inside the house were those of a mother, her adult son and his girlfriend, Ritchie said during a news conference outside the burned home on Sunday afternoon.

The victims were identified Monday afternoon by the sheriff’s office as 54-year-old Kelly Ann Masciarelli, her 23-year-old son, Kolin Paul Foster, and his girlfriend Cameryn Richards, whose age was not released.

“These individuals look like they were deceased before the fire was started. So, this is definitely a homicide, not accidental death due to fire and smoke,” Richie said.

The fire broke out around 7 a.m. at the home, which sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, prompting neighbors to call 911, the sheriff’s office said in a statement Monday.

“Once firefighters went inside, they immediately located an adult female and removed her from the house into the front yard,” according to the statement. “Once the fire was extinguished, two more bodies were discovered upstairs.”

All three victims were pronounced dead at the scene, officials said.

It remained unclear Monday if anyone else had been staying at the home, officials said.

Richie said trauma on the bodies noticed by firefighters and paramedics led investigators to launch a homicide investigation. He said investigators are waiting for autopsies to determine the exact cause of death.

Before entering the home, homicide investigators obtained a search warrant. The home also needed to be inspected to ensure the fire was completely out and it was safe to go inside, officials said.

Arson investigators advised the sheriff’s office that the blaze looked to have been deliberately started by an accelerant, officials said.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before in homicides where an individual will commit murder and then try to set a fire inside the home to cover their tracks,” Richie said.

No arrests have been announced in the incident. But Richie said investigators are pursuing several leads.

“We are reviewing some video that we’ve been able to recover,” Richie said. “We are looking for some possible suspects.”

SANTA FE (AP) – The parents of a former student accused of killing 10 people at a high school near Houston in 2018 do not bear financial responsibility for the shooting, a jury decided Monday.

A lawsuit brought by victims and their families sought to hold Dimitrios Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, accountable for the shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018. During a three-week trial, attorneys for the families argued the parents failed to provide necessary support for their son’s mental health and didn’t do enough to prevent him from accessing their guns.

Jurors instead put the responsibility with Dimitrios Pagourtzis and a firearms ammunition retailer in a verdict that awarded families more than $300 million total in damages, including for pain and mental anguish.

Attorneys for the families said they were disappointed in the outcome.

“We’ve would’ve liked to have the parents share in their responsibility for this,” said Clint McGuire, who represented several of the families.

Authorities say Pagourtzis fatally shot eight students and two teachers. 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.

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.

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 jury also assigned some responsibility to Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer that sold Dimitrios Pagourtzis more than 100 rounds of ammunition without verifying his age and reached a settlement with the families last year. The company had previously been a defendant in the lawsuit.

Jake Felde, CEO of Lucky Gunner, said in a statement that the company isn’t responsible for any of the damages awarded by the jury because it was dismissed from the lawsuit.

“Lucky Gunner wasn’t a party to the trial, so it was easy for the jury to place some of the blame on us because we weren’t there to defend ourselves,” Felde said.

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

McGuire said the parents knew their son was depressed, receiving bad grades, isolating himself, and had taken weapons from their gun cabinet and safe. McGuire said Pagourtzis also wrote disturbing Facebook posts and ordered ammunition and other items online, such as a knife with a Nazi symbol and a T-shirt that said, “Born To Kill.”

But Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’ parents, told jurors 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.

“We need to protect our children. They need to feel safe when they go to school,” Galveston County Court at Law Judge Jack Ewing said after the verdict was delivered. “They need to feel safe at home. And that message will carry even outside of the walls and the doors of this courtroom. And hopefully it will follow into the ears of our legislators.”

Both parents testified during the trial. Antonios Pagourtzis is retired but worked for years in ship maintenance and repair. Kosmetatos works as an executive assistant at an academic health science center in Galveston.

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.

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Yamat reported from Las Vegas. Associated Press writer Juan A. Lozano in Houston contributed to this report.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) – For years, Carmen Cavazos’ neighborhood in southeast Houston has voted reliably for Democrats up and down the ballot. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 68% of the vote in Cavazos’ voting precinct, a mostly residential enclave of about 3,000 people near Hobby Airport.

But something is changing in the precinct, where about nine out of 10 residents are Hispanic. President Joe Biden carried it by 20 points in his 2020 race against Donald Trump — a solid showing for Democrats, but half of Clinton’s 40-point advantage from just four years earlier against the same Republican.

Cavazos, a 44-year-old flight attendant and Republican precinct chair, said she expects the trend to continue in November. She has been trying to accelerate the political shift, helping organize regular meetings of the Saturday Menudo Club, a group that meets monthly at local Mexican restaurants to hear from conservative candidates and other speakers.

“The messaging and voter engagement in our community is critically important,” Cavazos said. “When presented with data, facts, and statistics, the false narrative of identity politics and ideology propaganda encouraged by Democrats crumbles.”

Republicans have logged historic gains in South Texas the last couple of elections, making political battlegrounds out of border communities that voted solidly Democratic for years. That sea change has largely overshadowed the more subtle rightward shift of Latino voters in cities and suburbs away from the border.

The threat of eroding Latino support in urban areas could spell even bigger trouble for Democrats’ abiding hopes of turning Texas blue, because far more Latino voters live in these areas than in South Texas. While Democrats may not lose precincts like Cavazos’ anytime soon, they will continue to be locked out of statewide elections if Republicans are able to continue peeling off nearly 40% of the vote there.

Latino voters have long been a steady Democratic voting bloc in Texas. In 2016, exit polls measured Clinton winning Latino voters by a 27-point margin statewide — virtually unchanged from Barack Obama’s 28-point edge in 2008.

But in 2020, Biden won the statewide Latino vote by only 17 points, as about four in 10 Latinos pulled the lever for Trump. Across Texas, including in Houston, San Antonio and other big cities, the Democratic margin fell an average of 17 percentage points from 2016 in precincts that were at least 80% Latino, according to The New York Times.

And heading into November, polls in Texas and elsewhere have shown Democrats atop the ticket still underperforming with Latino voters, with Biden even trailing Trump among Latinos in Texas before he dropped out of the race.

“Latinos are still a growing Democratic majority,” said Houston Democratic strategist Jaime Mercado. “Latinos are voting Democratic holistically, across the county and across the state. But we should be very aware of these precincts where we’re starting to see something go in the other direction. That should concern us, and we should engage in it.”

Republicans bullish
Texas Republicans are bullish about continuing their momentum with Latino voters this fall, betting a message focused on inflation and the economy, immigration, and crime — issues they are talking about with voters across the board — will resonate with Latinos.

In his reelection bid, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, is pouring $4.4 million into an ad campaign targeting Latino voters, a majority of which is going toward Spanish-language advertising. Cruz’s first spot aimed at Latinos — titled “El Valiente Senador,” or “The Brave Senator” in English — portrays him as a fighter battling high taxes and working to keep Texas “free and safe.”

“We see a massive opportunity to win a bigger share of the Hispanic vote,” said Cruz campaign spokesperson Macarena Martinez. “It has long been said that Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”

This election is the first since the U.S. Census Bureau reported Hispanic Texans now outnumber the state’s non-Hispanic white residents. Hispanics make up nearly one-third of Texas’ eligible voting population, more than all but two other states, according to the Pew Research Center. A quarter of Latinos in Texas will be voting in their first presidential election this fall, according to the nonprofit UnidosUS.

“That means that there’s no traditional legacy of them wanting to vote Democrat or Republican,” said Jorge Martinez, the Texas strategic director for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative Latino voter outreach group. “They are going to be voters that any side can reach out to to earn that vote.”

Robert Cardenas, outreach director for the Harris County Republican Party, said he has found a receptive audience among Hispanic voters at party-sponsored town hall events focused on crime and in settings like a recent gun show in Pasadena, where the party operated a booth where attendees could register to vote.

Most of all, Cardenas said, concerns about the inflated cost of basic goods are driving Latinos, and working-class voters of all races and ethnicities, toward the Republican Party. The issue has dogged Biden for much of his term, though Democrats are optimistic that the problem has finally begun to ease.

“Whether that’s going out, or being able to pay their bills, that is what is affecting them,” Cardenas said. “It’s the economy, and that’s why I think we’re seeing a big shift.”

In a statewide poll by Univision earlier this year, about two-thirds of undecided Latino voters put inflation, the cost of living and jobs among their top issues, more than all other topics.

Mercado said he worries that overall Democratic messaging has suffered in recent years from the influence of party elites who have spent too much time online and not enough time door-knocking. They have helped craft a message overly focused on identity politics and less on talking about jobs and opportunity, he said.

“Some of the elements of, frankly, the MAGA message, some of it has endeared itself to blue-collar, hard-working, non-college educated people,” Mercado said. “And guess who fits those demographics really well? Latino populations.”

For all the GOP gains among Latinos in urban areas, though, some Republicans think their party can do better. In urban counties across Texas, most predominantly Latino areas still lean solidly Democratic. And many of the voting precincts in these areas lack GOP precinct chairs — an issue that rankles Orlando Sanchez, founder of Texas Latino Conservatives.

Sanchez, whose group works to get Latinos more involved in politics, said that if he had to grade Texas Republicans’ recent Latino outreach efforts in urban counties, “I’d say it went from a D to a C-minus.”

“In major urban areas, we’re doing a very poor job of delivering a conservative message,” said Sanchez, a former Houston City Council member and mayoral candidate. “(Republicans) are good at criticizing communities that want to defund the police … but they’re not very good at delivering a positive message of economic opportunity to Hispanics.”

Sanchez believes Republicans should more aggressively pitch their free-market economic vision to working-class Latinos, and he said they have missed the boat on criticizing specific policies pushed by the Biden administration such as debt relief for student loans.

“Republicans are missing the opportunity to explain to Hispanics that their hard-earned paycheck is now going to pay the debt for some kid in Massachusetts who went and got a liberal arts degree at Boston University,” Sanchez said. “Explain that to the Hispanic family, and I’ll tell you, they’re not going to vote for the Democrats anymore.”

The Univision poll found that 60% of Hispanic voters in Texas “support the Biden Administration’s efforts to forgive student loans,” compared to 21% who voiced opposition.

“The Latino vote”
In 2020, some of the most astonishing political shifts anywhere in the country came along the border in Starr County, which Trump lost by 5 points after losing it by 60 points four years earlier. Neighboring Zapata County flipped red after going to Clinton by 33 points in 2016.

But while a flood of national media attention captured the changing voter sentiments there, the two predominantly Latino counties tallied only about 21,000 combined votes in 2020; in Harris County, by contrast, more than 337,000 Spanish-surname voters turned out, according to estimates from Hector de Léon, a Harris County elections official who tracks Houston-area voting patterns.

Public polling has revealed key differences between the values and attitudes of Latino voters in urban counties compared to those in South Texas — a reminder of the wide array of backgrounds, nationalities, and religious and cultural beliefs within what is often lumped together as “the Latino vote.”

An April statewide poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that Hispanic voters in major urban areas were much less likely to support GOP Gov. Greg Abbott ’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border than those in the suburbs and South Texas. The poll measured a similar regional split over the multibillion-dollar cost of Abbott’s border crackdown: 70% of Hispanic voters in border counties and South Texas supported the use of billions in state tax dollars for border security, compared to 48% in large urban counties.

Latinos in major cities are also more likely to support abortion rights than those in South Texas, the poll found. The regional disparities suggest that each party’s generic messaging on those issues will be received much differently by Latino voters depending on where they live, said Mark Jones, the Hispanic Policy Foundation’s chief information and analytics officer.

“A lot of the national Democratic policies that criticize Gov. Abbott, and sort of criticize the Republican approach to the border, are going to go over very poorly in South Texas and the (Rio Grande Valley) and, most importantly, in the two congressional races that are actually in play this cycle,” said Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, referring to the battleground races for Texas’ 15th and 34th Congressional Districts.

But there are also parallels between the regions.

Daniel Vasquez, a 35-year-old San Juan resident, regularly makes the three-hour commute to his job as a safety coordinator at a Port Lavaca refinery. He said he started paying attention to politics during Obama’s 2008 campaign and voted for him twice, along with Clinton in 2016. But he found himself aligning more with the Republican Party midway through Trump’s term, driven by a humming economy and the GOP’s petrochemical-friendly policies.

Energy politics may also be driving some of the Latino shift around Houston. Dozens of predominantly Latino precincts in east Harris County, where many residents work in petrochemical jobs around the Ship Channel, drifted to the right between 2016 and 2020.

Vasquez’s views were only solidified, he said, by some of the Biden administration’s policies aimed at combating climate change, such as an attempted pause on natural gas export permits. Vasquez said he believes environmental concerns are important, but that Biden should be striking a better balance.

“The economy, to me, it was thriving,” Vasquez said. “My paycheck had more purchasing power. And I mean, there was work all across the state. The oil and gas sector was booming.”

MIAMI (AP) — As registration opened Monday for an estimated 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens to gain legal status without having to first leave the country, Karen and Xavier Chavarria had nothing to celebrate.

Like many others, Karen left the United States voluntarily — in her case, for Nicaragua — as the price of living in the country illegally, planning to accumulate enough time away to be able reenter and reunite with her husband, Xavier, on a path to citizenship.

Joe Biden’s offer of a path to citizenship without having to first leave the country for up to 10 years is one of the biggest presidential orders to ease entry for immigrants since 2012, when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program allowed temporary but renewable stays for hundreds of thousands of people who came to the United States as young children with their parents.

To be eligible, spouses must have lived in the United States continuously for 10 years as of June 17, 2024, and been married by then. The Biden administration estimates 500,000 spouses could benefit, plus 50,000 stepchildren of U.S. citizens.

“Without this process, hundreds of thousands of noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to instead remain in the United States without lawful status, causing these families to live in fear and with uncertainty about their futures,” the Homeland Security Department said Monday in a document that details the policy. Forcing spouses to leave the country “is disruptive to the family’s economic and emotional wellbeing.”

Spouses who fall outside the prescribed dates and other eligibility criteria face an agonizing choice: leave the country voluntarily for years for the right to reenter or remain in the United States without legal status.

Karen Chavarria returned to Nicaragua in 2017 and reported to a U.S. consulate for an interview as part of her petition to reunite with her husband in the United States. She crossed the border from Mexico in 2002 and applied for legal status after marrying Xavier, 57, who works a building maintenance job in New York and lives in Garfield, New Jersey. They have two children, both U.S. citizens.

Xavier travels at least twice a year to see Karen, 41, and their 12-year-old son, who live in Jinotega, north of Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua. Xavier said he can’t live in Nicaragua because he can’t find work there, lacks treatment options for diabetes and fears for his safety because his family has been in the political opposition there for years. Their 20-year-old daughter lives in the U.S.

Karen has missed big moments, including her daughter’s high school graduation and birthdays. The Biden administration’s offer to spouses who chose to remain in the U.S. filled her with despair.

“It is something that we have been fighting for and after so much struggle, to get here without giving ourselves any hope,” she said while crying in a video interview from Nicaragua.

It is unclear how many spouses left the U.S. voluntarily. But Eric Lee, an immigration attorney with offices in Michigan and California, said it is a “massive” number. Immigrants and advocacy groups have urged the White House to include them in the new policy.

“The only reason why so many are being punished is because they tried to step out of the shadow, they tried to follow the law,” Lee said.

Homeland Security did not respond to questions about whether people who left the country voluntarily will qualify, saying only that they “may be eligible for continued processing abroad.”

Groups favoring restrictions on immigration consider the policy overly generous. The Federation for American Immigration Reform said Monday that it is a disservice to those waiting to legally immigrate and that Biden is “clearly in a hurry” to enroll people before he leaves office, making it harder for a court to overturn their benefits once they are granted.

The department said Monday that 64% of potential beneficiaries are from Mexico and 20% are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They become eligible to remain in the United States for three years under presidential authority known as parole for a $580 fee, which includes ability to apply for work authorization, a green card and, eventually, citizenship.

People deemed national security or public safety threats and those convicted of what are considered serious crimes, including felonies for driving under the influence, are disqualified, as are those found to belong to a gang.

Juan Enrique Sauceda 47, is biding time in Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. He was deported in 2019 while married to a U.S. citizen and applied to reenter. His wife and two children live in Houston.

“I want to return to the United States because I grew up there, I have my wife, my children, everything,” Saucedo said. “I don’t fit in here.”

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — On May 17, with just one week to go until the end of the school year, the superintendent of the South Texas Mission school district received an email with a list of 676 books a group of local pastors believed were “filthy and evil.”

The email came from the personal assistant of Pastor Luis Cabrera, who leads a church in Harlingen, about 30 miles east of the Mission school district.

The email was clear. Cabrera and “the community” wanted them removed.

The email cited state law, House Bill 900, that requires vendors to rate their books and materials for appropriateness, based on the presence of sex depictions or references, before selling them to school libraries.

Despite that law being blocked by a federal appeals court, then-superintendent of the Mission school district, Carol G. Perez, replied within five minutes that the district would check to see if they had the books to remove them.

Later that evening, Deputy Superintendent Sharon A. Roberts asked the district’s director for instructional technology and library services, Marissa I. Saenz, to look into removing them.

“Can you prioritize researching these books to ensure we remove them from the school libraries? Can your IT coaches help you track the location of the books to expedite this request?” Roberts wrote in an email.

The emails, which The Texas Tribune obtained through an open records request, offer a window into how close the 14,500-student district was to removing a trove of books over the summer break. It also illustrates the continued pressure — public and private — school leaders in every corner of the state face over access to books that discuss race, religion and LGBTQ+ themes.

School district and community libraries have been inundated with requests since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death. The public backlash started in the suburbs of Dallas. But communities large and small have wrestled with these questions.

Prior to the May 17 email, Cabrera had made similar requests to other school districts in the Rio Grande Valley. He spoke during public comment at several school board meetings last spring. Cabrera was following, in part, the lead of an organization called Citizens Defending Freedom.

Established in 2021, the nonprofit empowers “citizens to defend their freedom and liberty, and place local government back into the hands of the people.” Until recently, most of its work had been in North Texas counties.

Now at the dawn of a new school year, a coalition of Rio Grande Valley faith leaders are denouncing the effort to remove books from South Texas school libraries.

The McAllen Faith Leaders Network, a group of religious leaders in the upper Rio Grande Valley, wrote a letter to local school districts after hearing about the Mission school district’s “knee jerk response” to the Christian conservative group’s request.

The local faith leaders’ open letter had specifically taken issue with the inclusion of “Anne Frank’s Diary” on the book list. A spokesperson for Citizens Defending Freedom, Dan Thomas, clarified that that title referred to the graphic novel, an adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

This month, seven members of the McAllen Faith Leaders Network signed the letter, which called for a separation between religious organizations and public entities.

“We don’t believe that a religious organization should exert decision making power over our public schools or any public body,” the religious leaders said.

Rabbi Nathan Farb of Temple Emanuel in McAllen said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that this coalition does not have a political agenda and members of the group often disagree politically and on other topics.

“We thought it was important as faith leaders to speak up and let our educators know that this individual was not speaking on behalf of all faiths, not speaking on behalf of all Christians, was not representing the religious voice of the entire Valley.”

Rev. Joe Tognetti of St. Mark United Methodist Church in McAllen said limits on what is accessible to schoolchildren can be appropriate. However, the process to determine which books are appropriate should be determined among parents, students and teachers — not a national conservative nonprofit.

Ultimately, the Mission school district did not remove any books, the district told the Tribune late last week.

A few days after the district received the request to remove the books, Saenz, the library director, replied she would review the list against the district’s collection to ensure any books that did meet the standards set in state law were weeded out.

However, Saenz noted that Cabrera appeared to misunderstand the extent of state law and pointed out that some of the books on the list might not be sexually explicit.

For books that do not meet the criteria in state law, Saenz said board policy states only parents, students 18 years or older, an employee or a resident of the school district can challenge the appropriateness of books.

The school district assured that no books had been reconsidered, restricted, or removed at this time.

“Mission CISD understands the concerns that have been raised regarding this situation,” a district spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain committed to meeting the educational needs of our students within the district.”

Mission was not the only school district to receive requests to remove books last spring. At a May 7 meeting, Cabrera threatened to sue the Brownsville school district if it did not remove certain books.

The district, which serves about 38,000 students, removed five books from its shelves, according to a May 24 email from the district’s chief operations officer to the superintendent.

Cabrera had just begun his partnership with Citizens Defending Freedom when he began contacting Rio Grande Valley school districts, according to Thomas, the spokesman for the citizens group. The group did not supply the list of books and Thomas said the manner in which Cabrera had approached the school districts was not their usual process.

Cabrera did not respond to a request for comment.

Thomas said they typically take action when people within school districts reach out to them with their concerns.

Thomas also argued that they were not exerting decision-making power on school districts, as the local faith leaders had accused, by trying to remove “vulgar” books.

“Our position is simple,” Thomas said. “We would like school libraries to contain books that have educational value. We do not think it’s appropriate to have vulgar books with no educational value in public school libraries.”

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports that the Central Texas housing market remains on its cooling streak, the latest figures show. The median sales price of a home in all five Austin-area counties declined last month compared with the same month last year, according to the Austin Board of Realtors’ monthly report for July released Wednesday. Experts have said the lower closing prices are due mainly to higher mortgage interest rates that have chipped away at many buyers’ purchasing power. And the supply of housing in the five-county Austin region is climbing (active listings were up 20.3% this July over July 2023), giving prospective buyers more choice and leverage in negotiations, industry experts and real estate agents say. In the five-county Austin-Round Rock region, half of the homes sold for more than $450,000 in July and half sold for less, for a 2.8% decline in the median closing price.

Though mortgage rates declined last week to their lowest level since May 2023, sharply higher rates overall for the past 2½ years have meant some buyers aren’t able to afford the home they once could afford, while others no longer can afford to buy at all. Along with higher rates, demand for housing also has eased due to a slowing influx of new residents moving into the Austin area in recent months, experts have said. That has led to a correction in the local market, which experts say is returning to more normal levels following a period of unsustainable growth after the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020. “With rates around 6.5%, only about half of homeowners in our market can afford a median-priced home and only about a quarter of renters can afford a starter home,” Clare Knapp, housing economist for the Austin Board of Realtors, said in a news release. “Consistently high mortgage rates continue to impact buyer’s purchasing power, but July’s increase in sales in four of the five counties (in the Austin region) shows the strength of Central Texas housing demand,” Knapp said.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that an administrative law judge has denied CenterPoint Energy’s motion to withdraw its pending request to increase rates, a win for consumer advocacy groups and cities that want the Houston-area utility to continue with its application and to possibly see regulators order its rates to decline. CenterPoint filed an application in March to increase its portion of the average residential customer’s monthly electricity bill by $1.25. The company filed a notice to withdraw the request in August after withering criticism over its preparation and response to Hurricane Beryl, which left a record 2.26 million of the utility’s customers without power. When CenterPoint first filed its withdrawal notice, CEO Jason Wells said the company wanted to focus instead on immediately improving its operations during this hurricane season.

Representatives for consumer advocacy groups and municipalities, including the city of Houston, countered that if approved the withdrawal would deny them the chance to “claw back” certain expenditures. The judge’s ruling is final unless it is appealed to the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which has its next open meeting Aug. 29, according to Thomas Brocato, a lawyer representing the Gulf Coast Coalition of Cities. The group is seeking a rate reduction for CenterPoint and is supported by the Texas Consumer Association, the Houston Coalition of Cities and the Texas Coast Utilities Coalition. “For CenterPoint to say we’re withdrawing, it probably made many people feel like it was an act of kindness,” said Sandie Haverlah, president of the Texas Consumer Association. “But when you dig deeper into the details, it’s better for the customers to continue this case so they could see a rate decrease sooner rather than later.” In a statement, CenterPoint spokesperson John Sousa didn’t answer whether the company planned to appeal the decision, only that it was “reviewing the ruling and assessing potential next steps.”

HOUSTON – Negotiations around a new farm bill that would increase government support for Texas farmers and ranchers are at a standstill, threatening to push back what could be a $1 trillion piece of legislation until next year, according to the Houston Chronicle. Amid a spike in the cost of agricultural supplies and equipment, farmers say they are struggling to hold on and without an immediate increase in crop support programs they will be unable to secure the loans and other financing they need to plant their crops. But Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked over spending on food stamps and other nutrition programs for low-income families, which make up the bulk of the farm bill’s cost, along with almost $20 billion in funding for climate-related conservation programs under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. With Congress in recess and November’s election less than three months away, farming lobbyists are urging members to work out a deal before year’s end.

Agriculture contributes close to $30 billion a year to the Texas economy, spanning the rice fields between Houston and San Antonio, cotton fields in the Panhandle and West Texas ranches, employing 1 in 7 Texas workers. “Congress needs to wake up and get something done,” said Laramie Adams, associate director of government affairs at the Texas Farm Bureau. “We’re expressing to everyone there’s problems in farm country right now. Input prices are extremely high, so are gasoline prices, and you have equipment that runs a million dollar plus and something breaks the parts are very expensive. But (crop) prices are way down.” Crop prices soared during the pandemic but have since dropped sharply — even as grocery prices remain high. Cotton, for instance, soared to $1.83 a pound in 2022 but now sells for less than 84 cents per pound. Likewise, corn rose to almost $350 per metric ton in 2022 before falling to close to $190 a metric ton in June. Leadership from both parties have expressed support for increasing funding to agricultural programs such as federal crop insurance, but the two sides have made little progress since House Republicans introduced their version of a farm bill in May.

HOUSTON – A South Texas coal mine and coal-fired power plant will host a new geothermal energy storage facility as part of a local electric utility’s energy transition, according to the Houston Chronicle. Sage Geosystems, a Houston-based startup founded by former executives from Shell, first announced plans to build a 3 megawatt geothermal energy storage facility, capable of providing enough electricity to power 750 Texas homes on the hottest summer days, in February. The company said Tuesday that the project would be built in Christine, about an hour south of San Antonio. Sage has leased 10 acres for the facility from San Miguel Electric Cooperative, a utility that powers up to 78,200 South Texas homes, Sage CEO Cindy Taff said. The geothermal project will be on the same site as San Miguel’s coal mine and coal-fired power plant.

The project could be the first geothermal facility in Texas and comes as the state’s grid faces twin pressures from unprecedented power demand growth and extreme weather. Grid experts say energy storage systems can help stabilize the grid by providing electricity when it’s most needed and by storing excess renewable energy for use when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. San Miguel CEO Craig Courter said the utility began to take an interest in geothermal energy, and in Sage Geosystems in particular, as it grappled with how to provide cleaner yet still affordable and reliable electricity to its customers in rural South Texas. San Miguel has faced lawsuits from local ranchers over water and soil pollution from the Christine mine. The coal-fired power plant and lignite coal mine are supposed to close in 2037. That end date could come sooner if cheap solar and wind power make it uneconomic to produce coal-fired power, or if federal regulations aiming to limit climate-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants are enacted, Courter said. “We have to be ready at any time between now and 2037 and have a game plan for how we are going to continue producing this power, and it doesn’t happen overnight,” he said.