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MCALLEN, Texas (AP) — The U.S. and Mexico agreed to amend a 1944 water treaty, which might bring some relief to South Texas farmers struggling with scarce water.

The International Water and Boundary Commission, a federal agency that oversees international water treaties between the U.S. and Mexico, announced Saturday that the two countries had signed a highly-anticipated agreement that will give Mexico more options to meet its water deliveries to the U.S. Mexico still needs to give the U.S. more than a million acre-feet of water.

South Texas farmers and ranchers have been devastated lately by low rainfall and Mexico falling behind on its deliveries to the region.

Under the 1944 international treaty, Mexico must deliver 1,750,000 acre-feet of water to the U.S. from six tributaries every five years, or an average of 350,000 every year. But Mexico is at a high risk of not meeting that deadline. The country still has a balance of more than 1.3 million acre-feet of water it needs to deliver by October 2025.

The new amendment will allow Mexico to meet its delivery obligations by giving up water that was allotted to the country under the treaty. It also allows Mexico to transfer water it has stored at the Falcon and Amistad international reservoirs to the U.S.

Additionally, the agreement gives Mexico the option of delivering water it doesn’t need from the San Juan and Alamo rivers, which are not part of the six tributaries.

The amendment also addresses a current offer Mexico made to give the U.S. 120,000 acre-feet of water. South Texas farmers were wary of the offer because they worried that by accepting the water, the state would later force farmers to make up for it by giving up water they have been storing for next year.

But because the amendment allows Mexico to make use of water in its reservoirs to meet its treaty obligations, the farmers hope the country will transfer enough water for the next planting season to make up for any water they might have to give up.

“What’s more important is we need water transferred at Amistad and Falcon,” said Sonny Hinojosa, a water advocate for Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2, which distributes water to ranchers and farmers in the region. “If water gets transferred, they’ll know they’ll have a little bit of water for next year.”

U.S. officials celebrated the signing of the amendment, which was initially meant to occur in December 2023. Mexican officials said they would not sign the agreement until after their presidential elections, which happened in June.

“The last thirty years of managing over-stretched water resources in the Rio Grande basin have produced broad agreement that the status quo was not acceptable,” IBWC commissioner Maria-Elena Giner said in a statement. “ With the signing of this (amendment), Mexico has tools for more regular water deliveries that can be applied right away.”

The amendment’s provisions that address current water delivery shortfalls expire in five years unless extended. The amendment also establishes longer-term measures such as an environmental working group to explore other sources of water. It also formalized the Lower Rio Grande Water Quality Initiative to address water quality concerns, including salinity.

Hinojosa said he’s concerned that by allowing Mexico to deliver water from the San Juan River, which is downstream from the reservoirs, the country won’t feel as obligated to deliver water from the six tributaries managed by the treaty and still end up delivering less water to the Big Bend region. But he said he expects the agreement will bring some immediate relief.

“It’s going to get us some water, for now,” Hinojosa said. “Hopefully.”

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News reports that group that advocates for Texas to declare independence from the United States celebrated the election of several Republicans to the state House this week. The Texas Nationalist Movement said 190 leaders have signed its “Texas First Pledge,” including 65 current officeholders. The group said the Nov. 5 election “isn’t just a victory – it’s a revolution in Texas politics,” according to a Facebook post. “The political establishment tried to paint the Texas First Pledge as extreme. These results prove what we’ve known all along – when Texans understand their right to self-government is on the line, they’ll fight back,” said TNM President Daniel Miller in the post, which had received 75 likes three days after being posted.

In 2023, the group submitted a petition with 140,000 signatures to the state Republican Party to put an advisory vote on the 2024 GOP primary asking voters whether they think Texas should “reassert its status as an independent nation.” But the GOP rejected the petition, saying it was not delivered in time and the vast majority of the signatures were invalid. The “TEXIT” proponents fought the rejection, but the state Supreme Court declined to take up a case and also rejected the petition.

WASHINGTON – Reuters reports businessman Elon Musk, an ally of President-elect Donald Trump, endorsed Republican Senator Rick Scott for U.S. Senate majority leader on Sunday as the race to fill the influential post heats up after the party won control of the chamber. Republicans are expected to hold at least 52 seats in the 100-member Senate after capturing three previously held by Democrats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana in last Tuesday’s election. Current Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who has led his party in the chamber since 2007, has said he will step down from leadership after the election. “Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader!” Musk, a tech billionaire who has emerged as a major backer of Trump in recent months, wrote in a social media post on Sunday.

Musk is the world’s wealthiest person. Scott, who represents Florida in the Senate, is a former healthcare executive and the wealthiest sitting senator. Musk endorsed Trump on July 13, the day the former president was shot in the ear in a Pennsylvania assassination attempt. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Scott said that the Senate needs to implement real change. “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” Scott said. “That’s what Donald Trump got elected to do, to be the change.” Trump campaigned on promises, among other things, to deport immigrants who are in the United States illegally, cut taxes, impose tariffs on international trading partners and loosen fiscal policy. Scott has the backing of several hard-right Republican senators, but it remains whether he can bring Republican moderates to his side.

TEXAS BORDER (AP) – Mexico is facing a second Donald Trump presidency, and few countries can match its experience as a target of Trump’s rhetoric: There have been threats to close the border, impose tariffs and even send U.S. forces to fight Mexican drug cartels if the country doesn’t do more to stem the flow of migrants and drugs. That’s not to mention what mass deportations of migrants who are in the U.S. illegally could do to remittances — the money sent home by migrants — that have become one of Mexico’s main sources of income. But as much as this second round looks like the first round — when Mexico pacified Trump by quietly ceding to his immigration demands — circumstances have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Today, Mexico has in Claudia Sheinbaum a somewhat stern leftist ideologue as president, and Trump is not known for handling such relations well.

Back in 2019, Mexico’s then-President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador was a charismatic, plain-spoken, folksy leader who seemed to understand Trump, because both had a transactional view of politics: You give me what I want, I’ll give you what you want. The two went on to form a chummy relationship. But while López Obrador was forged in the give-and-take politics of the often-corrupt former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Sheinbaum grew up in a family of leftist activists and got her political experience in radical university student movements. “Claudia is more ideological than López Obrador, and so the problem is that I see her potentially responding to Trumpian policies, whether it’s, you know, organized crime or immigration or tariffs with a much more nationalistic, jingoistic view of the relationship,” said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s former ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. Sheinbaum made a point of being one of the first world leaders to call Trump on Thursday to congratulate him after the election, but during the call Trump did two things that may say a lot about how things will go.

DALLAS (AP) — In one Norman Rockwell painting, a family proudly welcomes a beaming Boy Scout home from camp, his duffel bag in hand. In another of Rockwell’s achingly idyllic works, a Cub Scout stands on a chair to measure the chest of his older brother, a Boy Scout who has taped his fitness record to his bedroom wall.

Many of the works from the Boy Scouts of America’s collection are as interwoven into American life as the organization itself, having been featured on magazine covers, calendars and even used to sell war bonds. Next week, the works will begin to be auctioned off to help pay the compensation owed to tens of thousands of people — mainly men — who were sexually abused while in scouting.

The collection of over 300 works, including dozens by Rockwell, is estimated to be worth nearly $60 million — a tiny amount in relation to the organization’s multibillion dollar bankruptcy plan. Campgrounds and other Boy Scouts’ properties have also been sold to help pay the survivors.

“The idea that an iconic art collection that the Boy Scouts have assembled over many years is being liquidated in order to pay survivors recoveries and to bring them some measure of justice I think is very significant,” said Barbara Houser, a retired bankruptcy judge who is overseeing the survivors’ settlement trust.

This year, the 114-year-old organization based in suburban Dallas announced it is rebranding to Scouting America, a change intended to signal the organization’s commitment to inclusivity. The group now welcomes girls, as well as gay youth and leaders.

MIAMI (AP) — From Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, areas with high numbers of Hispanics often had little in common on Election Day other than backing Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

Trump, the president-elect, made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania where the vice president spent the last full day of her campaign. Trump turned South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, a decadeslong Democratic stronghold populated both by newer immigrants and Tejanos who trace their roots in the state for several generations.

He also improved his standing with Hispanic voters along Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor linking the Tampa Bay area — home to people of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian and Puerto Rican origin — with Orlando, where Puerto Ricans make up about 43% of the local Hispanic population. Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, home to a sizable Cuban population and the country’s metropolitan area with the highest share of immigrants.

It was a realignment that, if it sticks, could change American politics.

Texas and Florida are already reliably Republican, but more Hispanics turning away from Democrats in future presidential races could further dent the party’s “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that had helped catapult it to the White House before Trump romped through all three this time. The shift might even make it harder for Democrats to win in the West, in states such as Arizona and Nevada.

Harris tried to highlight the ways Trump may have insulted or threatened Latinos.

Trump, in his first term, curtailed the use of Temporary Protected Status, which Democratic President Joe Biden extended to thousands of Venezuelans, and tried to terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He also delayed the release of relief aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 until nearly the end of his term, having long blasted the island’s officials as corrupt and inept.

Once he returns to the White House, Trump has pledge to stage the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. That could affect millions of families in mixed-status homes, where people who are in the United States illegally live with American citizens or those with legal residency.

But the Democratic warnings did not appear to break through with enough voters for Harris. Now the party must figure out how to win back votes from a critical, fast-growing group.

“Trump, he’s a very confounding figure,” said Abel Prado, a Democratic operative and pollster who serves as executive director of the advocacy group Cambio Texas. “We have no idea how to organize against him. We have no idea how to respond. We have no idea how to not take the bait.”

Ultimately, concerns about immigration did not resonate as much as pocketbook issues with many Hispanics.

About 7 in 10 Hispanic voters were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries, slightly more than about two-thirds of voters overall, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters said that they were “very concerned” about their housing costs, compared with about half of voters overall.

Trump had a clear edge among Hispanic voters who were “very concerned” about the cost of food. Half said he would better handle the economy, compared with about 4 in 10 for Harris. Among Hispanic voters who were very worried about crime in their community, Trump had a similar advantage.

“When they looked at both candidates, they saw who could improve our economy and the quality of life,” said Marcela Diaz-Myers, a Colombian immigrant who headed a Hispanic outreach task force for the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “Did he sometimes offend? Yes. But that happens in political campaigns. Many of the people who voted for President Trump were able to get past this and trust that he will move the country in the right direction.”

Harris promised to lower grocery prices by cracking down on corporate price gouging and to increase federal funding for first-time homebuyers. Also, recent violent crime rates have declined in many parts of the country.

Shen also spent many of the final days of the campaign trying to capitalize on remarks by a comic who spoke at a Trump rally in New York and joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” She even leaned on Puerto Rican celebrities — from Bad Bunny to Jennifer Lopez — to decry racism.

But Trump nonetheless gained ground in some of the areas with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the state where Harris spent more time campaigning than any other. He won the counties of Berks, Monroe and Luzerne — and lost Lehigh County by fewer than 5,000 votes against Harris. Biden had carried it by nearly three times that margin in 2020.

Trump’s victory was even wider in Florida, where nearly one-quarter of residents are Hispanic. He won the state by 13 percentage points — or about four times his 2020 margin.

Trump also flipped the central Florida counties of Seminole and Osceola, where many Venezuelans have immigrated as their home country becomes increasingly unstable, and narrowed Democrats’ advantage in Orange County, which is also heavily Venezuelan.

Farther south, Trump won Miami-Dade County with an 11-percentage point advantage after losing it by 7 percentage points to Biden and by 30 percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Miami-Dade County commissioner who was state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said Hispanics rejected the “woke ideology.” Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his campaign.

“To be clear, Hispanic voters are not buying what Democrats are selling,” Cabrera said.

The same was true in South Texas, where Hispanics are largely of Mexican descent.

Prado, the Democratic operative and pollster, lives in Hidalgo County, which is 92% Hispanic and the most populous part of the Rio Grande Valley. Trump carried it after losing by more than 40 percentage points in 2016. Trump swept all the major counties along the Texas-Mexico border.

Prado said Democratic county commissioners and state legislators helped secure funding for new bridges across the Texas-Mexico border and for other initiatives that have sparked commerce and economic and job growth in the area. Yet, he said, “the Republican Party has done a really good job of inserting themselves as an answer to nonexistent problems and then taking credit for (things) that they didn’t do.”

Prado said many Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley, particularly devoutly religious ones, were alienated by national Democrats’ focus on reproductive and transgender rights, with the latter becoming a key political weapon for Republicans.

“This nonsense about you’re going to send your son to school and he’s gonna come back a girl,” he said. “Our side scoffed because we said, ‘No one’s going to believe that.’ But, no, it struck a chord.”

Others were simply looking to cast a defiant vote, Prado said, or were inspired by the idea of self-made people embracing the American dream, even though Trump got his start in business with a large loan from his father.

Daniel Alegre, CEO of TelevisaUnivision, which owns the Spanish-language television Univision, along with other television and radio properties, said Trump’s gain among Hispanics was less about party than issues and that Hispanics were most concerned about the economy and immigration.

Alegre, whose network hosted town halls in October with both Trump and Harris, also noted that there’s a growing feeling among Hispanic citizens that new immigrants were getting more government services than were available when immigrants who have been here longer arrived in the United States — and that the Trump campaign tapped into resentment around that issue.

“The most important thing either party can do is keep their ears to the ground and stay connected to the community,” he said, and in this case, the Trump campaign clearly accomplished that.

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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.