KTBB News, Weather, Talk

As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.

No one is waiting there now.

Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.

In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.

It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star – $11 billion since 2021.

Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other elected officials often refer to the country’s “open border” with Mexico. Immigration is a top issue in the presidential election, and most American voters say it should be reduced.

But conditions on the border often shift more rapidly than political rhetoric. Arrests for illegal crossings plummeted nearly 80% from December to July. Summer heat typically reduces migration, but on top of that Mexican authorities sharply increased enforcement within their borders in December. Plus, President Joe Biden introduced major asylum restrictions in June.

Crossings are still high by historical standards and record numbers of forcibly displaced people worldwide — more than 117 million at the end of last year, according to the U.N. refugee agency — may make the drop temporary. And some Republican critics say Biden’s new and expanded legal pathways to enter the U.S. are “a shell game” to reduce illegal crossings — along with the chaotic images and headlines they spawn — while still allowing people in.

The Texas Tribune and The Associated Press spent 24 hours in five cities on Texas’ 1,254-mile border with Mexico to compare rhetoric with reality.
11 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 8

On the riverbanks of Ciudad Juárez, there are no migrants in sight, but evidence of previous crossings still litters the ground. Discarded clothes entangled in razor wire. A toothbrush and a Mexico City train-bus pass littering the riverbed.

A van from Mexico’s immigration agency is parked nearby, the driver keeping an eye on the river. It is a reminder of intensified Mexican enforcement that followed a plea for help by senior U.S. officials in late December.

On the opposite bank in El Paso, Texas National Guard members in unmarked pickup trucks and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers are watching the river too. “You can’t be in this area,” a rifle-toting American soldier shouts in Spanish to journalists across the river.

In the preceding week, the Border Patrol was processing and releasing an average of fewer than 200 migrants a day in El Paso, down from a daily average of nearly 1,000 in December and nearly 1,500 in December 2022. Migrants are no longer sleeping overnight in large numbers on downtown streets, once a common occurrence.

At El Paso International Airport, a shuttle van unloads dozens of migrants at 3:30 a.m. The terminal is quiet but, not long ago, hundreds of migrants slept there nightly, including many who missed their flights because it was their first time flying, and short-staffed airlines were unprepared to answer their questions.

Border Servant Corps, a nonprofit group from nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico, says it has helped more than 130,000 migrants with more than $18 million in shelter and travel support to their final destinations in the U.S. Nearly one of four migrants are from Venezuela, followed by Colombia and Cuba. The leading destinations are cities in Florida, Texas, New York and Illinois.

Ceci Herrera, a retired social worker and Border Servant Corps staffer who helps migrant families navigate the airport, says she knows what it’s like to lack a sense of belonging.

“In immigration, it’s important to say you belong to a country instead of feeling like you’re neither from there nor over there,” she says at the airport after helping migrant families get their boarding passes.

Many migrants are released with notices to appear in immigration court, where they can request asylum. They can apply for work permits in six months while their cases take years to decide in bottlenecked courts.

Additionally, more than 765,000 have legally entered from January 2023 to July through an online appointment system called CBP One, which allows them to stay for two years with work authorization. The federal government offers 1,450 appointments a day across the southern border, including about 400 in Brownsville, about 200 each in El Paso and Hidalgo, near McAllen, and smaller numbers in Eagle Pass and Laredo.

At the airport, 39-year-old Yenny Leyva Bornot, who fled Cuba with her husband and their 14-year-old son, was still absorbing the fact that they had gotten one of the treasured appointments and made it to the U.S. “We are in a country of freedom,” she said.

The family flew to Nicaragua in November then traveled over land to Mexico, the only country from which migrants can apply online for appointments. They got one in El Paso after seven months of trying, relying on an uncle in Germany, an aunt in Spain and a brother-in-law in Sarasota, Florida, to help cover their expenses.

Now their flight to Florida is delayed.

“What’s two more hours after seven months?” Leyva Bornot said. “This is the dream for most Cubans: Come to the United States to work and help your family back home.”
5 a.m. Friday, Aug. 9

Hundreds of miles away near McAllen, Border Patrol agents Christina Smallwood and Andrés García leave their station two hours before sunrise. They drive along a levee road near where a towering border wall built during the Trump administration is lit up like a baseball stadium. After years of wall building, the Texas-Mexico border still has only about 175 miles of barriers, covering less than 15% of its length.

The agents peer through overgrown stands of carrizo, searching for makeshift rafts and ladders that are abandoned there by people who make it across the river.

The area near the Hidalgo bridge is a known hotspot for border crossers seeking to elude capture, as opposed to the asylum-seekers who quickly surrender to agents, because it is near a heavily-traveled road. They can easily hop into a car and get lost in the traffic.

It’s quiet now. The agents don’t see a single migrant in nearly five hours.

“Compared with numbers over the last decade, it’s insane the difference right now,” Garcia said.
10 a.m. Friday

Roughly 150 miles upriver in Laredo, the sound of rumbling motors from tractor-trailers and the smell of diesel and exhaust fill the warm air as vehicles line up on the World Trade Bridge — one of four international bridges in the city.

“It starts getting busy for us, 10 o’clock, 10 or 11. And it’ll be pretty constant up until about four or five in the afternoon,” said Alberto Flores, director of the Laredo port of entry.

On the Mexican side of the border, what appear to be tiny white boxes stretch toward the horizon. They are tractor-trailers, filled with goods from warehouses in Nuevo Laredo.

Laredo is by far the busiest entry point for cargo in the United States, funneling more than twice as many tractor-trailers as second-place Detroit over the last year.

About 8,000 tractor-trailers filled with goods from flowers to lettuce to car parts pass each day through 19 lanes at World Trade Bridge, northwest of downtown Laredo. It is a straight shot on Interstate 35 to San Antonio and Dallas.

At a booth for prescreened truckers, a Customs and Border Protection officer opens a sliding window and takes a sheet of paper from the driver. The computer brings up a manifest that says the truck carries 20 pallets of a solution used for dialysis.

“We’re verifying everything is basically accurate. And if it’s accurate and there’s no anomalies, anything in the system, then he’s good to go,” the officer says.

The next vehicle is a tractor-trailer cab, likely going to pick up an empty container on the U.S. side and bring it back to Mexico. The officer tries to limit each inspection to 45 seconds.

Flores wants to “make sure that cargo is constantly flowing” – a challenge when illegal crossings are unusually high. In December, cargo crossings temporarily closed in Eagle Pass and El Paso – as well as a crossing in Lukeville, Arizona – as officers were diverted from ports of entry to deal with the surge in migrants arriving at the border. Local businesses said the closures sent business plummeting, and a related five-day closure of two border rail crossings cost industries $200 million per day, according to Union Pacific.

Flores visits a small mobile home inside the bridge’s inspection area to congratulate an employee who searches images on a large X-ray machine known as a Multi-Energy Portal. The officer was inspecting a shipment of flowers when he spotted something unusual. It turned out to be more than 700 pounds of methamphetamine.

The rectangular machine produces detailed, black-and-white scans of tractor-trailers and their cargo that look like charcoal drawings. CBP will have four more such machines by October for use on most commercial traffic.

“Can I have the day off?” the officer asks Flores. The room full of CBP officers erupts in laughter.

“I’ll get back to you,” Flores says.

The recent decrease in migrant apprehensions has not slowed the flow of drugs across the border. Mexican cartels are at the heart of what the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration calls a crisis of deadly synthetic drugs, with chemicals originating in China being mixed in Mexico and taken across the U.S. border, often by U.S. citizens. Federal statistics show that 46% of drug seizures nationally happened at the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2021-23 fiscal years.

The largest seizures of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine occur at border crossings in Arizona and California, but Flores says methamphetamine and cocaine often come through Laredo. The DEA says a faction of the Sinaloa cartel called “Los Chapitos” favors an El Paso crossing for smuggling narcotics.

The methamphetamine is examined with a small handheld device inside a refrigerated storage facility with loading docks. There were no arrests in the incident, which is under investigation, but the drugs were confiscated, a CBP spokesperson said.

Other trucks called aside for closer inspection include one filled with plastic cups for the popular Texas-based fast food chain Whataburger and another with cans of tuna. A K-9 German Shepherd named Magi inspects one filled with marble tile.

Laredo’s other international bridges funnel visitors, students and commuters in cars and on foot, a lifeblood of the local economy here and in other border cities. But Laredo stands out because it has no border wall, a result of opposition from private landowners. And cartel-related violence in Nuevo Laredo has long made it unattractive for migrants to cross.

Monica Ochoa, who waited with her 5-year-old daughter at the historic San Agustin Plaza for her mother to pick them up, says her living arrangements are “very complicated,” working as a schoolteacher in Mexico while her daughters, both U.S. citizens, attend school in Laredo. Though she says media depictions of Mexican violence are often overblown, she said safety was one reason she wants her children to live in the U.S.
11:30 a.m. Friday

Webb County Judge Leticia L. Martinez is wrapping up a morning session that started on Zoom with 49 tiny screens. Migrants and their lawyers filled the virtual courtroom as Martinez runs through criminal charges filed against the migrants under Operation Lone Star. The state announced that day that it has made more than 45,000 arrests since the crackdown began in 2021 and filed nearly 40,000 felony charges, often for trespassing on private property.

Some defendants dial in from Latin America with spotty connections that interrupt exchanges, showing up for court even though they have already left the country. Some who have been deported are no-shows, their lawyers saying they couldn’t be found. Those who show up are often confused.

One man is lying down as Martinez starts calling names. Another stands in front of lush green trees.

A court interpreter asks one man to remove his baseball cap when his case is called. The man turns the cap backwards, complying only after the interpreter impatiently repeats the command in a raised voice.

As the judge plows through the list, she dismisses the case of another migrant after a prosecutor acknowledges the state has no evidence to charge him.

“Muchas gracias,” a voice says on the other end with a camera just showing the back of a van.

The judge tells two men who appear on camera in orange jumpsuits from a prison in Edinburg that they will be turned over to federal authorities for deportation. One pleads for an urgent transfer, claiming he’s been threatened by violent jail gangs.

“I’m scared,” he says, to no avail. “I want to make it to Mexico to see my kids, my grandkids. They’re little.”

He went on, “I don’t know how to read. I don’t know how to write. I just came not knowing what would happen. Please forgive me. I will never again…”

The judge tells the man that he’ll likely be removed from the jail and turned over to the federal government the next day.

Before adjourning, the judge hears from the attorney of a man who has apparently been kidnapped. Prosecutor Steven Todd says the case should not be continued because the man is a no-show, but Martinez disagrees.

“Well, he’s not absconded. He was kidnapped. Very big difference,” the judge says.
12:30 p.m. Friday

At an El Paso church kitchen, a woman cooks beef with red chile, beans and rice while a 22-year-old Guatemalan man in a wheelchair sets tables. The man said he experienced brain injury from smoke inhalation in a fire last year at a immigrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez that killed 40 people, impairing his ability to walk and talk.

The church is part of a network of migrant shelters called Annunciation House, a group founded in 1978 by Ruben García, a well-known local Catholic humanitarian who has worked with federal immigration officials to house recently arrived migrants. A state judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against Annunciation House by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who accused the group of illegally sheltering migrants and refusing to turn over records. Despite the outcome, the charges sent shockwaves throughout the community of migrant advocates along the border. Using similar allegations, Paxton has pursued others, including Catholic Charities of Rio Grande Valley.

Early that morning, García received his daily text message from a Border Patrol agent: The agency would release 25 people in El Paso that day. García said he could take them.

It is the lowest daily number García has seen in four years. The most the Border Patrol has sent to the shelters was 1,100 in a single day; earlier this year García said they took in 600 one day.

“This February, I will have been doing this for 47 years,” he said, sitting on a chair in the church. “My experience tells me this never lasts.”

The attorney general’s office said in court documents that Annunciation House appears “to be engaged in the business of human smuggling,” operating an “illegal stash house” and encouraging immigrants to enter the country illegally because it provides legal orientation. The state sought logs of clients’ names, a grant application the shelter has filed with the federal government, materials it has provided to migrants, and a list of all the shelters Garcia operates.

Paxton’s office has appealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court. Garcia says some volunteers have decided not to help out of concern they could be prosecuted.

“I would hope that instead, it would galvanize people to say, ‘I’m not going to look the other way. I’m going to go and offer myself to work with refugees and to be part of the process of providing what is imminently a humanitarian response,’” he said.
1:30 p.m. Friday

Shelby Park in Eagle Pass is ground zero for Operation Lone Star, Texas’ unprecedented challenge to the long-standing principle that immigration policy is the federal government’s sole domain. Texas argues that it has a constitutional right to defend against an “invasion” and that the migrant influx has been a drain on public coffers.

Under Lone Star, Texas has bused about 120,000 migrants to cities including New York, Chicago and Denver. State troopers and the Texas National Guard have become a massive presence in towns on the state’s border with Mexico, which is about two-thirds the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, defended the governor’s immigration enforcement efforts — including transporting migrants to other cities — and claimed that illegal crossings have recently dropped because of Operation Lone Star.

Maheleris said in a statement that until Biden and Harris “step up and do their jobs to secure the border, Texas will continue utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to the Biden-Harris border crisis.”

The state has put razor wire in many areas, including a triple-layer barrier in Eagle Pass. The state installed a floating barrier made of buoys and submerged netting near Shelby Park to deter river crossings.

The park, a flat expanse of playing fields and a boat ramp at the end of the downtown business district and next to a golf course, has been closed since Texas seized it from the city in January and made it into a riverfront staging area. U.S. Border Patrol agents are denied entry. Texas authorities did not respond to requests to enter the park on this day.

Eagle Pass, a town of 30,000 people filled with warehouses and aging houses, was for much of 2022 the busiest of the Border Patrol’s nine sectors on the Mexican border. Daily arrests for illegal border crossings in the sector averaged 255 in June, down from nearly 2,300 six months earlier.

Shelby Park, once a place where local kids played soccer and the city hosted big events — and more recently a spot where large groups of migrants crossed the border almost daily — is now a dusty makeshift military base. Armed soldiers walk atop shipping containers and stand guard at its entrance with long guns.

Across the street from the park, George Rodriguez, a 72-year-old Eagle Pass native, prepares to beat the afternoon heat and close his stand at a flea market, where he sells pink typing keyboards, a vacuum cleaner and a television mount. He says blocking Border Patrol from part of the border is senseless.

“Once in a while, the governor and his cronies come over here and make a big deal,” Rodriguez said over music crackling on the radio, furniture scraping pavement and clothes hangers pattering in the wind. “It’s just a political stunt.”

Roughly a mile up the Rio Grande, two workers at the city water treatment plant come across a bag filled with socks. There are no fresh footprints on the sand road. A few months ago, they would have found piles of clothing and garbage that could gum up the pumps.
3:30 p.m. Friday

Stories of why migrants come have changed little in recent years, often a mix of wanting to improve their lives economically and fear of violence in their home countries. What has changed is the numbers – and perhaps nowhere more than in Rio Grande Valley.

The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, the nation’s busiest from 2013 to 2022, saw arrests plunge to an average of 133 a day in June from more than 2,600 in July 2021. Many are released with orders to appear in immigration court, where a backlog of 3.7 million cases means it takes several years to decide asylum claims.

In Brownsville, Jose Castro Lopez, 32, sat inside the main bus station more than four hours before an 8 p.m. ride to Florida. His partner and their children arrived following a two-month journey from Honduras that took him to Mexico City, where he applied for entry on the CBP One app.

He said construction work in Honduras didn’t pay enough to support a family.

“I’m sleep deprived and stressed,” he said. “But, thank God, we’re fine now. God allowed us the privilege to be here.”

Another passenger at the bus station, Lilibeth Garcia, 32, said she graduated in 2016 from medical school in Venezuela, where she studied to be a surgeon, but the country’s economic tailspin made it difficult to earn a living wage there.

Garcia arrived at the station with her year-old daughter and a cousin, Robert Granado, after a two-month journey from the city of Guarico through the Darién Gap, a 60-mile jungle trek that straddles the Colombia-Panama border. Garcia said she felt guilty about putting her daughter, Cataleya, through the dangerous journey but the toddler remained calm and in good spirits, despite a bout with fever.

“I’m happy,” Granado said as they waited for a bus to New York City. “The journey is over.”

At the other end of the Texas-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez, a journey that has stretched for five months still isn’t over for Gloria Lobos of Guatemala. Lobos said she fled her physically abusive husband and settled in Chiapas in southern Mexico, where she worked on a farm and cleaned rooms at a hotel. In March, as the family walked to a grocery store, she said two men on a motorcycle attempted to kidnap her daughter.

After she reported the attempt to police, Lobos said the men returned days later with a gun and fired a shot at her daughter — the bullet missed. She said she raced to the bus station with her children and other relatives. Ciudad Juárez was the first ticket available.

Now she and her daughter live at a local shelter run by a Methodist church led by pastor Juan Fierro García, 65, while they wait for a CBP One appointment. The shelter has 63 migrants who will spend the night, down from 180 recently.

Sitting in a metal chair in the church, she said, “I never imagined God would want us to face this type of violence.”
7 p.m. Friday

In Glendale, Arizona, Kamala Harris — making her first visit to a border state since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee — touches on immigration 20 minutes into a 30-minute speech. It’s her fourth day of campaigning in swing states with running mate Gov. Tim Walz. She references her work as attorney general of another border state, California, and then repeats a line that Democrats have been espousing for many years.

“We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it: Comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship,” she says, sparking applause.

Harris jabs her Republican rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, noting that he opposed a bill this year that would have, among other things, imposed asylum limits, added Border Patrol agents and changed asylum procedures to speed up decisions.

A short time later at a rally in Bozeman, Montana, Trump wastes no time getting to immigration, his signature issue. He uses “border” more than 30 times during his 100-minute speech.

Harris, he tells the crowd, “wants to allow millions of people to pour into our border through an invasion! … Four more years of crazy Kamala Harris means 50, probably it means 50 million illegal aliens pouring into our country.” (The Border Patrol has made about 7.1 million apprehensions from February 2021 through July 2024 — often the same person more than once — while an unknown number have eluded capture.)

Trump, who has promised mass deportations during his campaign, talks for several minutes about “illegal aliens” being sent to the U.S. from other countries’ prisons, a claim that lacks evidence. He connects migration with rising crime and speaks of migrants stampeding, overrunning, destroying, ruining, ravaging, preying.

After 11 p.m., he mentions the border for the last time: “Next year, America’s borders will be strong, sealed and secure. Promise.”

___

This story is part of a collaboration among The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to promoting civic engagement; FRONTLINE, through the PBS series’ Local Journalism Initiative funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and The Associated Press. Berenice Garcia, Uriel J. Garcia, Maurer and Serrano are with the Tribune; Lozano and Spagat are with the AP.

Organizations that help pay abortion costs are capping how much they can help as travel costs rise and the wave of “rage giving” that fueled them two years ago has subsided.

Abortion funds, which have operated across the U.S. for decades, in many cases as volunteer groups, ramped up their capacity fast after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending a national right to abortion. Donations rolled in from supporters who saw the groups as key to maintaining abortion access as most Republican-controlled states implemented bans.

The expansion of the funds and increasing access to abortion pills are major reasons the number of abortions has risen slightly despite bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states and after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, in another four.

But the funds have found that even with record budgets, it’s not enough to fill all the gaps between the cost of obtaining abortions and what women seeking them can afford as they have to travel farther for legal procedures.

The National Abortion Federation, which helps people seeking abortions across the country, used to cover half the cost of the abortion for callers who couldn’t afford it. Since July, it’s pulled back to 30%. Brittany Fonteno, the organization’s president and CEO, said the allocations had to be cut because of the rising demand and costs — even though the fund has a record $55 million budget this year.

“We’re at the point now where we know that people who are most impacted by funding shifts — and by abortion bans which have caused the funding shifts — are the people who can least afford to be kept away from care,” Fonteno said. “And that includes people of color, younger people, immigrants and people with lower incomes.”

Other groups have also imposed limits on aid to keep from exhausting their funds.

The Blue Ridge Abortion Fund, based in Virginia, hits its budget limit nearly every week and has to put requests on hold until the next week.

The Cobalt Abortion Fund in Colorado has had to cap how much it can spend. Its president, Karen Middleton, said groups like hers are used to being scrappy.

“It’s the bake sale of the abortion rights movement,” she said.

Abortion funds have existed for decades out of the spotlight. Many were — and some remain — volunteer-run. Nearly all of them ramped up as the abortion landscape shifted.

Cobalt, for instance, spent $206,000 in 2021. Of that, only about $6,000 was for for travel costs — and much of that came in the form of gas cards to help people in outlying parts of Colorado get to clinics.

This year, the group expects to spend $2.2 million — 10 times as much as in 2021. In the first six months of this year, it spent more than $600,000 on travel and other logistical costs. Now they’re booking hotel rooms and flights — mostly on short notice.

“We’re a travel agency as much as we’re an abortion fund,” Middleton said.

In Colorado, like other states between the coasts, the influx of patients began late in 2021 when a ban on abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Texas. That’s since been replaced by a ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.

For the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund, a big change arrived after May 1, when Florida’s ban on abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect. Before that, Florida, the nation’s third most populous state, was a destination for people traveling from other Southern states that had stricter limits.

Greene said her fund helped 20 people from Florida from January through April. When the ban took effect, it left Virginia as the nearest state where abortion was available past 12 weeks and without a 72-hour waiting period. Greene said the fund helped about 40 Florida residents from May through August.

Their average travel cost per Floridian has been about $3,000, she said — more than any other state.

Fonteno said the spike in requests from Florida — six times as many each month since the ban began — was an impetus for its abrupt policy change earlier this year. Blue Ridge and other funds have been trying to make up the difference.

“We’re seeing more and more patients with more funding gaps,” Greene said.

To try to stick to its weekly aid budget, the fund has cut back when it accepts calls requesting help to two mornings a week instead of two full work days. Greene said her fund collaborates with others to try to cover costs.

The New Jersey Abortion Access Fund responded to the National Abortion Federation’s cuts by increasing what it sends every week to a solidarity fund to help people seeking abortions from other states to $5,000 from $3,000, said Quadira Coles, the group’s president.

The organization also sends block grants to New Jersey abortion clinics to use to help pay for patients who cannot afford their fees. Coles said the group has increased that funding, too, after hearing from clinics that it had been running out halfway through the month.

The groups could see some of their financial pressure eased depending on the outcomes of measures on the November ballots that would add a state constitutional right to abortion in nine states.

In four of the states — Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota — passage would overturn current bans and potentially mean that many people could access abortion without traveling.

In other states, the change would be more subtle. For instance, part of the Colorado amendment would allow state government employee health plans to cover abortion — possibly reducing the number of people who would seek help paying.

In the meantime, organizers of some of the funds say that some supporters have been contributing to the ballot measure campaigns, at the expense of the funds.

Joan Lamunyon Sanford, executive director of Faith Roots, which helps pay the costs of people traveling to New Mexico for abortion, said many donors who started around the time of Texas’ restrictions, often called Senate Bill 8, or the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling make recurring gifts — though others gave just once.

“For those who felt that, whether it was the righteous anger or compassion, that led them to donate after S.B. 8 and after Dobbs, we’re still here, and the need is still here,” she said. “We still need them.”

BOSTON (AP) — The U.S. Senate approved a resolution Wednesday intended to hold Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre in criminal contempt for failing to testify before a Senate panel.

The senate approved the measure by unanimous consent.

Members of a Senate committee looking into the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care adopted the resolution last week after de la Torre refused to attend a committee hearing last week despite being issued a subpoena. The resolution was sent to the full Senate for consideration.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said de la Torre’s decision to defy the subpoena gave the committee little choice but to seek contempt charges.

The criminal contempt resolution refers the matter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to criminally prosecute de la Torre for failing to comply with the subpoena.

A representative for de la Torre did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sanders said he wanted de la Torre to explain how at least 15 patients at hospitals owned by Steward died as a result of a lack of medical equipment or staffing shortages and why at least 2,000 other patients were put in “immediate peril,” according to federal regulators.

He said the committee also wanted to know how de la Torre and the companies he owned were able to receive at least $250 million in compensation over the past for years while thousands of patients and health care workers suffered and communities were devastated as a result of Steward Health Care’s financial mismanagement.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the committee, said communities were harmed because of the actions of Steward and de la Torre.

“Steward’s mismanagement has nationwide implications affecting patient care in more than 30 hospitals across eight states including one in my home state,” he said.

In a letter sent to the committee ahead of last week’s hearing, Alexander Merton, an attorney for de la Torre, said the committee’s request to have him testify would violate his Fifth Amendment rights.

The Constitution protects de la Torre from being compelled by the government to provide sworn testimony intended to frame him “as a criminal scapegoat for the systemic failures in Massachusetts’ health care system,” Merton wrote, adding that de la Torre would agree to testify at a later date.

Texas-based Steward, which operates about 30 hospitals nationwide, filed for bankruptcy in May.

Steward has been working to sell a half-dozen hospitals in Massachusetts. But it received inadequate bids for two other hospitals, Carney Hospital in Boston and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in the town of Ayer, both of which have closed as a result.

A federal bankruptcy court this month approved the sale of Steward’s other Massachusetts hospitals.

Steward has also shut down pediatric wards in Massachusetts and Louisiana, closed neonatal units in Florida and Texas, and eliminated maternity services at a hospital in Florida.

Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts said over the past decade, Steward, led by de la Torre, and its corporate enablers, “looted hospitals across the country for profit, and got rich through their greedy schemes.”

“Hospital systems collapsed, workers struggled to provide care, and patients suffered and died. Dr. de la Torre and his corporate cronies abdicated their responsibility to these communities that they had promised to serve,” he added.

Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston, testified before the committee last week that under Steward management, patients were subjected to preventable harm and even death, particularly in understaffed emergency departments.

She said there was a time when Steward failed to pay a vendor who supplied bereavement boxes for the remains of newborn babies who had died and had to be taken to the morgue.

“Nurses were forced to put babies’ remains in cardboard shipping boxes,” she said. “These nurses put their own money together and went to Amazon and bought the bereavement boxes.”

DALLAS (AP) — Leaders of Southwest Airlines are set to explain how they plan to remodel the airline to change with consumer tastes — and maybe keep their own jobs.

They will give more details at an investor meeting Thursday about dumping so-called open seating, charging a premium for the best seats, and launching red-eye flights.

The changes to some of Southwest’s quirky habits are designed to reverse its shrinking profits and slumping stock price. It’s unclear whether the changes will work, but they could leave an airline that bears little resemblance to Southwest over the last 50 years — a carrier that still has a core of rabid fans.

Southwest has been contemplating an overhaul for months, but the push for radical change became even more important to management this summer, when Elliott Investment Management targeted the company for its dismal stock performance since early 2021.

Elliott now owns more than 10% of Southwest shares and is the airline’s second-biggest shareholder. The hedge fund wants to fire Chairman Gary Kelly and CEO Robert Jordan and replace two-thirds of Southwest’s board.

Southwest gave ground this month, when it announced that six directors will leave in November and Kelly will step down next year. The airline is digging in to protect Jordan, however.

Despite its demand that heads roll, Elliott has said it wants to work with Southwest to improve the company’s financial results. Southwest doesn’t seem interested in collaboration. It adopted a poison-pill defense to make an Elliott takeover more difficult.

Elliott, the hedge fund controlled by billionaire financier Paul Singer, increased its pressure on Southwest this week by saying that it intends to call a special shareholder meeting as soon as next week to make the case for a board overhaul. Elliott has a slate of 10 potential nominees, including former airline CEOs.

“We do not support the company’s current course, which is being charted in a haphazard manner by a group of executives in full self-preservation mode,” Elliott said this week in a letter to other shareholders.

CEO Jordan fired back on Wednesday, saying it is Elliott that wants to fly solo by lobbing “another negative press public ambush” instead of contributing to Southwest’s “transformational plan.”

“We’re willing to compromise, but acquiescing to a single shareholder’s demand for control of the company is not a compromise,” Jordan said. “There’s a lot to be excited about in Southwest, and we will not allow Elliott’s public attacks to distract us.”

While Thursday’s event is aimed at investors, it will also be of keen interest to consumers, who should learn new details about how assigned seating and premium seats will work on Southwest. The open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years will disappear, and passengers will be assigned seats, just like on all the other big airlines.

Southwest says its surveys show that 80% of its customers now want to know their seat before they get to the airport instead of picking among the open seats when they board the plane.

Southwest still lets passengers check two bags for free. Jordan said recently that Southwest has no plans to end that policy, but the airline has surveyed customers about it.

U.S. airlines brought in more than $7 billion in revenue from bag fees last year, with American and United reaping more than $1 billion apiece. Wall Street has long argued that Southwest is leaving money behind.

But Southwest has built years of advertising campaigns around bags-fly-free. Taking away that perk could change the airline’s DNA as much as — or maybe more — than dumping open seating.

Tom Fitzgerald, an airline analyst with TD Cowen, said investors will be interested to see if Southwest introduces bag fees, a cut-rate “basic economy” fare, or offers changes to its Rapid Rewards frequent-flyer program.

The analyst said a major topic of interest to investors will be whether Southwest plans to reduce its flying next year instead of growing, and whether it plans to keep shrinking the workforce. Southwest expects to cut about 2,000 jobs this year through attrition.

Company management heads into the investor day having angered an important interest group: its own workforce. The airline told employees Wednesday that it will make sharp cuts to service in Atlanta next year, resulting in the loss of 340 pilot and flight attendant positions.

The pilots’ union said it was “simply amazing” that Southwest was retreating in such a huge market “because this management group has failed to evolve and innovate.” That echoed a key Elliott talking point.

“Our flight attendants are overwhelmed. They are paying the price for poor management decisions on behalf of Southwest Airlines,” added Alison Head, a flight attendant and union official in Atlanta.

The unions are watching the fight between Elliott and airline management, but they are not taking sides. “That’s between Southwest and Elliott, and we’ll see how it plays out,” Head said.

However, the unions are concerned that more of their members could be forced to relocate or commute long distances to keep their jobs. Southwest’s chief operating officer told employees last week that the airline will have to make “difficult decisions” about its network to improve its financial performance.

Elliott seized on that comment, saying that Southwest leaders are now “taking any action – no matter how short-sighted – that they believe will preserve their own jobs.”

Elliott’s demands include that Southwest bring in new leaders from outside the company, overhaul its board, and conduct a comprehensive business review to consider all options for increasing profitability.

The hedge fund succeeded in seeing its favored candidate become the new CEO at Starbucks earlier in September.

Shawn Cole, a founding partner of executive-search firm Cowen Partners, whose firm has worked for other airlines but not Southwest, believes Southwest is too insular and should follow the recent examples of Starbucks and Boeing and hire an outsider as CEO. He thinks many qualified executives would be interested in the job.

“It would be a challenge, no doubt, but Southwest is a storied airline that a lot of people think fondly of,” Cole said. “If Boeing can do it, Southwest can do it.”

HOUSTON (AP) — A Black high school student in Texas who was punished for nearly all of his junior year over his hairstyle has left his school district rather than spend another year of in-school suspension, according to his attorney.

But Darryl George, 18, would like to return to his Houston-area high school in the Barbers Hill school district for his senior year and has asked a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order that would prevent district officials from further punishing him for not cutting his hair. It would allow him to return to school while a federal lawsuit he filed proceeds.

George’s request comes after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown in August dismissed most of the claims the student and his mother had filed in the federal lawsuit alleging school district officials committed racial and gender discrimination when they punished him.

The judge only let the gender discrimination claim stand and questioned whether the school district’s hair length rule causes more harm than good.

“Judge Brown please help us so that I can attend school like a normal teenage student during the pendency of this litigation,” George said in an affidavit filed last month.

Brown has scheduled an Oct. 3 court hearing in Galveston on George’s request.

In court documents filed last week, attorneys for the school district said the judge does not have jurisdiction to issue the restraining order because George is no longer a student in the district.

“And George’s withdrawal from the district does not deprive him of standing to seek past damages, although the district maintains that George has not suffered a constitutional injury and is not entitled to recover damages,” attorneys for the school district said.

The district defends its dress code, which says its policies for students are meant to “teach grooming and hygiene, instill discipline, prevent disruption, avoid safety hazards and teach respect for authority.”

In court documents filed last week, Allie Booker, one of George’s attorneys, said the student was “forced to unenroll” from Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu and transfer to another high school in a different Houston area district because Barbers Hill officials placed him on in-school suspension on the first and second day of the new school year, which began last month.

This “caused him significant emotional distress, ultimately leading to a nervous breakdown. As a result, we had no choice but to remove him from the school environment,” Booker said.

George’s departure “was not a matter of choice but of survival” but he wishes to return, as his mother moved to the area because of the quality of the district’s schools, Booker said.

George was kept out of his regular high school classes for most of the 2023-24 school year, when he was a junior, because the school district said his hair length violated its dress code. George was forced to either serve in-school suspension or spend time at an off-site disciplinary program.

The district has argued that George’s long hair, which he wears to school in tied and twisted locs on top of his head, violates its policy because if let down, it would fall below his shirt collar, eyebrows or earlobes. The district has said other students with locs comply with the length policy.

George’s federal lawsuit also alleged that his punishment violates the CROWN Act, a recent state law prohibiting race-based discrimination of hair. The CROWN Act, which was being discussed before the dispute over George’s hair and which took effect in September 2023, bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, locs, twists or Bantu knots.

In February, a state judge ruled in a lawsuit filed by the school district that its punishment does not violate the CROWN Act.

Barbers Hill’s hair policy was also challenged in a May 2020 federal lawsuit filed by two other students. Both withdrew from the high school, but one returned after a federal judge granted a temporary injunction, saying there was “a substantial likelihood” that his rights to free speech and to be free from racial discrimination would be violated if he was barred. That lawsuit is still pending.

HOUSTON (AP) — A former Houston police officer was convicted Wednesday of murder in the deaths of a couple during a 2019 drug raid that revealed systemic corruption problems within the police department’s narcotics unit.

A jury found Gerald Goines guilty of two counts of murder in the January 2019 deaths of Dennis Tuttle, 59, and his 58-year-old wife Rhogena Nicholas. The couple, along with their dog, were fatally shot after officers burst into their home using a “no-knock” warrant that didn’t require them to announce themselves before entering.

Goines faces up to life in prison. The same jury that convicted him will also decide his sentence after hearing additional testimony and evidence during the trial’s punishment phase.

During the trial — which began on Sept. 9 — prosecutors presented testimony and evidence they said showed Goines lied to get a search warrant that falsely portrayed the couple as dangerous drug dealers.

During closing arguments in the trial, prosecutor Keaton Forcht said Goines’ actions wrongly led officers to the couple’s home, resulting in a violent confrontation in which the couple was killed and four officers were shot and wounded and a fifth was injured.

Goines’ lawyers had acknowledged the ex-officer lied to get the search warrant but minimized the impact of his false statements. They said his actions did not merit a murder conviction and he had been overcharged. Nicole DeBorde, one of Goines’ attorneys, portrayed the couple as armed drug users and said they were responsible for their own deaths because they fired at officers who entered their home.

The couple, along with their dog, were killed after officers burst into their home using a “no-knock” warrant that didn’t require them to announce themselves before entering.

Prosecutors said Goines falsely claimed that an informant had bought heroin at the couple’s home from a man with a gun. Goines would later change his story to claim he had bought the drugs himself but authorities said that also was a lie. After the raid, investigators said they only found small amounts of marijuana and cocaine in the house.

During the trial, Jeff Wolf, a Texas ranger who investigated the shooting, testified officers fired first when they entered the home and shot the couple’s dog. Wolf said the gunfire and Nicholas screaming at officers likely resulted in Tuttle coming from his bedroom and opening fire at the officers. Goines’ attorneys have said that officers had identified themselves before entering the home but Wolf testified the couple might never have heard this before gunfire erupted.

Goines’ attorneys argued during the trial that the first to fire at another person was Tuttle and not police officers. Prosecutors placed the blame for the shootout between Tuttle and officers on Goines’ actions.

An officer who took part in the raid and the judge who had approved the search warrant testified the raid would never have happened had they known that Goines had lied to get the warrant.

The probe into the drug raid also uncovered allegations of systemic corruption.

A dozen officers tied to the narcotics squad that carried out the raid, including Goines, were later indicted on other charges following a corruption probe. A judge in June dismissed charges against some of them.

Since the raid, prosecutors have reviewed thousands of cases handled by the narcotics unit.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned at least 22 convictions linked to Goines, who also faces federal charges.

One of the other cases tied to Goines that remains under scrutiny is his 2004 drug arrest in Houston of George Floyd, whose 2020 death at the hands of a Minnesota police officer sparked a nationwide reckoning on racism in policing. A Texas board in 2022 declined a request that Floyd be granted a posthumous pardon for his drug conviction stemming from his arrest by Goines.

Federal civil rights lawsuits the families of Tuttle and Nicholas have filed against Goines and 12 other officers involved in the raid and the city of Houston are set to be tried in November.

___

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, agree that Texas can expect new jobs and economic development from a bill easing permitting requirements on new semiconductor manufacturing facilities. The two sparred sharply this week, however, over which of them deserves credit for getting the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk. Allred’s camp noted that he co-sponsored the original House bill. Cruz said he rewrote it in the Senate and convinced House GOP leaders to push his version over the finish line. The dispute comes as the two candidates are locked in a competitive race, with each pitching himself as the best option to deliver on job creation.

“A win for Texas! The House passed our bill, the Building Chips in America Act, to streamline permitting and advance CHIPS Act projects,” Allred said on X. “Thanks to a team from both sides of the aisle, we got this done.” Repeating his criticism that Cruz is more interested in self-promotion than finding solutions, Allred added: “Ted Cruz is trying to claim credit. Classic Ted acting like a ‘me guy.’ ” A prime example, Allred says, was Cruz’s vote against the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act that was intended to boost domestic production of microchips and is helping bring billions of dollars to new Texas facilities. Cruz says he enthusiastically supported the 2022 bill’s tax and regulatory incentives for new manufacturing facilities but strongly objected to its direct corporate subsidies. “I am not a fan of giving taxpayer money directly to private corporations, and I think history has shown that it can lead to bad results,” Cruz said. “Once the bill passed, I have actively urged as many of those dollars as possible to go to Texas.” Cruz said he was particularly interested in speeding those new manufacturing facilities through a federal environmental review process that can delay projects for years. He recounted seeing an Allred news release announcing the original proposal to ease those requirements.