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UVALDE (AP) — A Texas judge on Thursday refused to throw out criminal charges accusing the former Uvalde schools police chief of putting children at risk during the slow response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, while a lawyer for his co-defendant said they want to move the upcoming trial out of the small town where the massacre occurred.

At a court hearing in Uvalde, Judge Sid Harle rejected Pete Arredondo’s claim that was he improperly charged and that only the shooter was responsible for putting the victims in danger. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the shooting on May 24, 2022.

Harle also set an Oct. 20, 2025, trial date. An attorney for Arredondo’s co-defendant, former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales, said he will ask for the trial to be moved out of Uvalde because his client cannot get a fair trial there. Uvalde County is mostly rural with fewer than 25,000 residents about 85 miles (140 kilometers) west of San Antonio.

“Everybody knows everybody,” in Uvalde, Gonzales attorney Nico LaHood said.

Both former officers attended the hearing.

Nearly 400 law enforcement agents rushed to the school but waited more than 70 minutes to confront and kill the gunman in a fourth-grade classroom. Arredondo and Gonzales are the only two officers facing charges — a fact that has raised complaints from some victims’ families.

Both men have pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of abandoning or endangering a child, each of which carry punishment of up to two years in jail. Gonzales has not asked the judge to dismiss his charges.

A federal investigation of the shooting identified Arredondo as the incident commander in charge, although he has argued that state police should have set up a command post outside the school and taken control. Gonzales was among the first officers to arrive on the scene. He was accused of abandoning his training and not confronting the shooter, even after hearing gunshots as he stood in a hallway.

Arredondo has said he was scapegoated for the halting police response. The indictment alleges he did not follow his active shooter training and made critical decisions that slowed the police response while the gunman was “hunting” his victims.

It alleges that instead of confronting the gunman immediately, Arredondo caused delays by telling officers to evacuate a hallway to wait for a SWAT team, evacuating students from other areas of the building first, and trying to negotiate with the shooter while victims inside the classroom were wounded and dying.

Arredondo’s attorneys say the danger that day was not caused by him, but by the shooter. They argued Arredondo was blamed for trying to save the lives of the other children in the building, and have warned that prosecuting him would open many future law enforcement actions to similar charges.

“Arredondo did nothing to put those children in the path of a gunman,” said Arredondo attorney Matthew Hefti.

Uvalde County prosecutors told the judge Arredondo acted recklessly.

“The state has alleged he is absolutely aware of the danger of the children,” said assistant district attorney Bill Turner.

Jesse Rizo, the uncle of 9-year-old Jacklyn Cazares who was killed in the shooting, was one of several family members of victims at the hearing.

“To me, it’s hurtful and painful to hear Arredondo’s attorneys try to persuade the judge to get the charges dismissed,” Rizo said.

He called the wait for a trial exhausting and questioned whether moving the trial would help the defense.

“The longer it takes, the longer the agony,” Rizo said. “I think what’s happened in Uvalde … you’ll probably get a better chance at conviction if it’s moved. To hold their own accountable is going to be very difficult.”

The massacre at Robb Elementary was one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, and the law enforcement response has been widely condemned as a massive failure.

Nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents, 91 state police officers, as well and school and city police rushed to the campus. While terrified students and teachers called 911 from inside classrooms, dozens of officers stood in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. More than an hour later, a team of officers breached the classroom and killed the gunman.

Within days of the shooting, the focus of the slow response turned on Arredondo, who was described by other responding agencies as the incident commander in charge.

Multiple federal and state investigations have laid bare cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology, and questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of children and teachers. Several victims or their families have filed multiple state and federal lawsuits.

TRINITY – The City of Trinity has settled a civil lawsuit that led to the suspension of former Trinity Police Department Chief Daniel Kee. Former Trinity Police Department Officer Brittany Davis notified officials about allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct and a quota system at the department back in August, according to a statement from Davis’ legal representatives at Hightower, Franklin, and James, PLLC. According to our news partner, KETK, Kee was suspended in September after more officers came forward in support of Davis, according the statement.

The following Dec. 19 prepared statement from Davis’ lawyers said that City of Trinity Administrator, Tracy Hutto, confirmed the city and Davis have now come to a settlement:

“Officer Davis’ courageous decision to come forward and speak up brought about change in Trinity, Texas. That is never an easy decision for a law enforcement officer to make and too often these things are simply swept under the rug. Thanks to Officer Davis, that did not happen in Trinity.” – Tanner Franklin, partner at Hightower, Franklin, and James, PLLC

The City did not provide any further information about the terms of that agreed upon settlement.

Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

The 1% growth rate this year was the highest it has been since 2001, and it was a marked contrast to the record low of 0.2% set in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel to the United States, according to the annual population estimates.

Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase between 2023 and 2024.

Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by almost 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which was an improvement over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.

Immigration had a meaningful impact not only nationally but also for individual states, accounting for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out-of-state or from deaths outpacing births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.

“While some of the surge may be attributed to border crossings of asylees and humanitarian migrants in an unusual year, these numbers also show how immigration can be an important contributor to population gains in a large swath of the nation that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or declines,” Frey said.

As it has been throughout the 2020s, the South was the fastest growing region in the United States in 2024, adding more new residents — 1.8 million people — than all the other regions combined. Texas added the most people at 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation’s fastest growth rate at 2.2%.

Three states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population this year, though by tiny amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.

In 2024, there was an easing up in the number of people moving out of coastal urban states like California and New York and into the Sunbelt growth powerhouses like Florida and Texas compared with the peak pandemic years, Frey said.

Still, the large number of people moving South this decade has caused the U.S. population center to turn sharply south after drifting southwesterly for several decades in “a demographic shock to the evolving settlement pattern of the United States,” said Alex Zakrewsky, an urban planner in New Jersey who calculates the population center each year.

The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.

Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. With the revised method, last year’s immigration figures are now recalculated by the Census Bureau at almost 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.

Because the Census Bureau survey used to estimate foreign-born immigration only captured people living in households with addresses, it overlooked large numbers of immigrants who had come for humanitarian reasons this decade since it often takes them a few years to get a stable home, said Jennifer Van Hook, a Penn State demographer who worked on the change at the bureau.

“What has happened over time is that immigration has changed,” Van Hook said. “You have numbers of people coming in who are claiming asylum and being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border from across the globe.”

The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.

TEXAS BORDER – CNN reports that Tom Homan, who Donald Trump has tapped as his incoming administration’s “border czar,” said Wednesday night that plans are underway to deport undocumented immigrants at large scale and that he’ll need funding from Congress to do so. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, he said he will need a minimum of 100,000 beds to detain undocumented immigrants – more than doubling the 40,000 detention beds ICE is currently funded for – and needs more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out the president-elect’s mass deportation plans. “It all depends on the funding I get from the Hill,” Homan said on “The Source,” adding that he isn’t yet sure how much additional funding Trump’s administration will seek from the Republican-led House and Senate.

Homan also said he would ask the military for help transporting migrants. “They’re not going to be out arresting people, but they can be a force multiplier in doing things we need to do that doesn’t require a badge and a gun,” he said. The president-elect announced last month that Homan, a veteran of immigration law enforcement who served under the Obama administration and as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration, would be the “border czar” in his incoming White House. Trump said on Truth Social that Homan will be “in charge of our Nation’s Borders (‘The Border Czar’), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security.” Homan said he is “still working on” the Trump administration’s plan to carry out the president-elect’s deportation promises.

WHITE SETTLEMENT – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram says White Settlement police are investigating multiple reports of drones in the area, including near federal and military properties, on Tuesday night, police said. Officers started responding around 8:15 p.m. on Dec. 17, White Settlement Police Chief Christopher Cook said in a post on X. They saw drones flying near North Las Vegas Trail, Silver Creek Road and Bomber Road. White Settlement is located near the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth. Police coordinated with security personnel at the local military and federal properties in an attempt to find the drones’ pilot or pilots, Cook said. Multiple drones were reported in the same area shortly before 9 p.m. and again around 10:20 p.m. Areas “near federal and military properties are ‘NO FLY ZONES’ due to being a military operation area in the national airspace,” Cook said in the post.

Mystery drones recently seen in the skies over New Jersey and other states on the east coast have sparked numerous conspiracy theories on social media. As of Monday, Dec. 16, the FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 drone sightings, according to a Department of Homeland Security statement. “We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast,” officials said in the statement. According to Cook’s post, the White Settlement Police Department is working with the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations to determine who was operating the drones and their flight trajectories. Officials don’t believe the drones presented an immediate threat, but Cook said it was concerning because they were operating near federal and military properties, which are considered no-fly zones.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports a civil rights organization is calling for reform at the Houston Police Department after it hired a former detention officer who resigned from his position at the Harris County Joint Processing Center amid allegations of misconduct, according to a Tuesday news release. The Honey Brown Hope Foundation, a local civil rights nonprofit, said in the release that it will hold a news conference in front of City Hall Thursday at 10 a.m. to demand an “immediate and thorough investigation,” into the department’s hiring policies. Tammie Lang Campbell, the organization’s founder and executive director, told the Chronicle the incident highlighted systemic failures in law enforcement across Harris County.

OTHER ALLEGATIONS: New Houston police assistant chief previously suspended over car auction investigation “Our community is plagued by a crisis: law enforcement recycling of bad officers who are committing crimes and not being held accountable by their superiors.” Campbell said. “Tomorrow, we will expose the shocking reality that law enforcement officers, sworn to protect and serve, are themselves breaking the law. We will shed light on the systemic failures that allow these individuals to operate with impunity.”

PECOS (AP) — Two Union Pacific employees were killed and three people were injured when a freight train collided with a tractor-trailer and derailed in a small West Texas city, authorities said Thursday.

The train derailed around 5 p.m. Wednesday in Pecos after the collision at a railway crossing, authorities said. Union Pacific, based in Omaha, Nebraska, said Thursday that two employees had been killed. Pecos Police Chief Lisa Tarango said the other injuries were minor.

The hazardous materials that were being carried on the train included lithium ion batteries and air bags, but none were released in the derailment, city officials said.

Leaked diesel fuel was contained, officials said.

Ronald Lee, emergency services chief for Reeves County, said that some of those injured were in the Chamber of Commerce building, which was damaged in the derailment. He said damage to the building was “significant enough” that officials have advised that no one enter until an engineer can inspect it.

Railroad safety has been in the spotlight ever since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in early 2023, spilling a cocktail of toxic chemicals and catching fire. Regulators urged the industry to improve safety and members of Congress proposed a package of reforms, but railroads haven’t made many major changes to their operations and the bill has stalled.

Eddie Hall, national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union that represents engineers, said in a statement that the derailment is “a reminder that much more needs to be done to make railroading safer.”

The derailment, he said, “should serve as a wake-up call to legislators to improve rail safety.”

Images from the site of the crash in Pecos show that the train was hauling metal shipping containers that were stacked two high.

Pecos, which has a population of about 13,000, is located about 200 miles (321 kilometers) east of El Paso.

Tarango said the clean-up was underway. The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team to investigate.

FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz defended Lockheed Martin’s F-35 in a recent interview following billionaire Elon Musk’s call to stop funding program. Musk, who has been tapped to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy, has criticized the Fort Worth-built fighter jet. In recent posts on his social media company X, Musk said Lookheed Martin’s F-35 program should “stop,” calling it the “worst military value for money in history that is the F-35.” In another post, he said “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones.” Cruz addressed Musk’s criticisms and expressed support for the program in an interview with WFAA, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s media partner.

Cruz said he’s a “big fan” of the F-35. The fighter jet gives provides the U.S. an “enormous advantage against our adversaries,” Cruz said, in the interview that aired on Sunday’s “Inside Texas Politics.” Musk is correct that the country needs to be investing in next generation technology, like hypersonics, drones and drone technology, Cruz said. “There’s a lot of advanced weaponry that we need to be investing in, but I think the F-35 gives us an advantage over every one of our enemies across the globe,” Cruz said. “And if there’s one thing the last four years have shown with the mess of foreign policy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris created, is that we live in a dangerous world, and we need to be prepared to defend ourselves, and I think the F-35 is a hugely important part of doing that.” Musk, who owns X, Tesla and SpaceX, and Ramaswamy, a billionaire and former Republican presidential candidate, are tasked with recommending federal spending cuts to Trump. The Star-Telegram has reached out to spokespersons at Tesla and Space X seeking Musk’s comment on Cruz’s remarks.

MIDLAND COUNTY(AP) – The blob on the satellite image is a rainbow of colors. An analyst digitally sharpens it and there, highlighted in red, is the source: a concrete oil pad spewing methane.

In the 75,000-square-mile (194-square-kilometer) Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, the most productive oil and gas region in the world, huge amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas escape from wells, compressor stations and other equipment.

Most efforts to reduce emissions have focused on so-called “super emitters” like the one in the satellite image, which are relatively easy to find with improving satellite imaging and other aerial sensing.

Now researchers say much smaller sources are collectively responsible for about 72% of methane emissions from oil and gas fields throughout the contiguous U.S. These have often gone undetected.

“It’s really (important to) approach the problem from both ends because the high-emitting super emitters are important, but so are the smaller ones,” said James Williams, a post-doctoral science fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund and lead author on a new study that took a comprehensive look at emissions within the nation’s oil and gas basins.

Addressing methane is important because it accounts for about one third of all greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Tackling methane emissions in the Permian is especially challenging because there are more than 130,000 active well sites owned by everyone from family operators to international conglomerates, experts said. Each site can have multiple oil wells.

“The Permian is in many ways the most complicated basin in the world; it’s incredibly dense there … with big, small and everything in between,” said Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

What’s more, pipelines, processing and other activities often are owned by different companies — with tens of thousands of points where methane might escape, either through leaks or intentional venting.

An Israeli company that used satellite data and artificial intelligence to look for leaks in Midland County, Texas, the heart of the Permian Basin, found 50 separate plumes emanating from 16 of 30 sites it monitored. Most were bleeding over 4,500 kilograms of harmful gas per hour and five exceeded 10,000, far above the Environmental Protection Agency’s super emitter threshold of 100 kg/hr.

But the biggest surprise, “was seeing a lot of small emissions in this very crowded place … so close to each other, so close to an area where people actually live,” said Omer Shenhar, vice president of product at Momentick, which provides satellite-based monitoring to oil and gas companies.

Methane traps over 80 times more heat close to the Earth than carbon dioxide does, ton for ton. What’s more, concentrations have almost tripled since pre-industrial times.

A powerful new satellite called MethaneSAT that launched this year will be able to detect small emissions over wide areas that other satellites can’t. Researchers will also be able to track methane over time in all the world’s major oil-producing basins.

“We’ve never had that,” said the EDF’s Hamburg, who leads the project.

Although the satellite cannot pinpoint those smaller sources, “you don’t need to” because operators on the ground can find the sources, Hamburg said.

In the U.S., oil and gas companies will be required to routinely look for leaks at new and existing sites, including from wells, production facilities and compressor station under a new EPA rule.

The rule also phases out the practice of routinely burning off excess methane, called flaring, and requires upgrading devices that leak methane.

States have until 2026 to develop a plan to implement that rule for existing sources.

Oil and natural gas companies also would have to pay a federal fee per ton of leaked methane above a certain level under a final rule announced last month by the Biden administration, although the incoming Trump administration could eliminate that.

Methane — the primary component of natural gas — is valuable commercially, yet many operators in the Permian regard it as a nuisance byproduct of oil production and flare it because they haven’t built pipelines to carry it to market, Duren and Hamburg said.

Neither the Permian Basin Petroleum Association nor the U.S. Oil & Gas Association responded to requests for comment.

Riley Duren, CEO of the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, who was not involved in the study, said it’s always important to tackle super emitters because they have such an outsize impact. They are often fleeting but not always. Some continue for weeks, months or years.

Everything adds up.

“I think … what percentage of the total comes from a large number of small sources versus super emitters is less important than what do you do with the information,” said Duren. There are “literally thousands and thousands of pieces of equipment and they can blow a leak at any time.”