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DALLAS (AP) — Texas lawmakers hope to rein in homeowners’ rising insurance bills even as they acknowledge there’s only so much they can do to tackle costs.

Legislators have advanced bills to limit how much insurance companies can hike rates and help homeowners make their homes more insurable. They’ve also sought to compel insurers to be more upfront with homeowners when they decide to yank coverage, or deny it in the first place.

Texans pay some of the highest insurance premiums in the country. On average, Texas homeowners saw their insurance rates spike by double digits in recent years — a far cry from the previous decade when such increases were unheard of. Homeowners’ insurance rates climbed by nearly 19% in 2024, according to the Texas Department of Insurance, slightly down from more than 21% the previous year.

A number of factors have spurred insurance costs in recent years, insurance experts say. For one, property values in Texas surged amid the state’s population boom — raising the cost to ensure homes and businesses. Climate change has intensified extreme weather events like hailstorms, hurricanes, and winter freezes and made severe weather more common. With the state’s population growth, more people have moved into the path of that severe weather. Higher labor and construction material costs have driven up the cost of repairing damage when severe weather events damage a home.

Buying homeowners insurance isn’t an optional cost. Lenders require homebuyers to purchase insurance to obtain a mortgage. Even if a home is paid off, insurance experts say it’s unwise to go without coverage in case disaster strikes.

Even as lawmakers look for ways to tackle the insurance crisis, they acknowledge many of the drivers of insurance costs are beyond lawmakers’ control, they say.

“We can’t control the weather, we can’t control inflation,” state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican behind one such proposal, told a House committee last month. “I can’t control the availability of building materials, and I can’t control how the houses that are already built were built, what standard they were built to.”

And they find themselves in the position of trying to rein in exorbitant insurance costs without scaring off insurers and cratering the state’s insurance market.

One proposal by state Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, aims to give policyholders a check against steep rate increases. In Texas, insurers can file proposed rate increases with the Texas Department of Insurance, the state’s insurance regulator, and implement the new rates right away. If the agency later decides the increase is unreasonable, they can disapprove it.

Senate Bill 1643, which has cleared the Senate but awaits a committee hearing in the House, would require the insurance department to approve any rate increase above 10% before it can go into effect.

“As companies make significant rate changes, it is incumbent upon the Legislature to ensure that the regulatory environment is giving these filings the level of scrutiny they necessitate,” Schwertner said ahead of a Senate vote on the bill in April.

That proposal has drawn pushback from the insurance industry. Capping rate increases does nothing to address the underlying drivers of the rising cost of providing insurance, said Beaman Floyd, who heads the Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions, a group that represents major insurance companies including Allstate, State Farm and USAA. Insurers might pursue lower rate increases than they otherwise would have if they worry regulators wouldn’t approve larger ones, Floyd said — leaving them with mounting financial liabilities that could lead to policy cancellations because insurers can’t afford to provide coverage.

“That’s not good for consumers,” Floyd said.

Requiring the state insurance regulator to review rate increases above 10% doesn’t necessarily mean the regulator will automatically reject those increases, Schwertner said in a statement. The bill “simply seeks to curb unchecked rate filing and review practices,” he said.

Consumer advocates argue the state’s current system doesn’t provide a real check on insurers — one that Schwertner’s proposal could theoretically help create. But they also worry insurers will thwart the intent of the law simply by asking for multiple rate increases, a practice the bill doesn’t cap. Ware Wendell, executive director of the consumer rights group Texas Watch, posited that an insurer could theoretically file a 9% increase one month and seek the same increase the next month.

“Insurance companies could come in and nibble,” Wendell said.

The Texas Department of Insurance would still require insurers to justify their rate increases even if they filed multiple increases a year, Schwertner said. If those increases aren’t justified, the state could still reject the increase, he said.

Insurers and consumer groups agree on some proposals. House Bill 1576, authored by Oliverson, would create a state grant program to help homeowners retrofit their homes to withstand hurricanes and windstorms, modeled after a similar program in Alabama. The idea is that insurers will be more likely to insure a home if it’s hardened against severe weather, and the cost of insuring that home will be lower.

“It’s a very unique way for us to basically drive the cost of insurance down by encouraging folks — not mandating, this isn’t a mandate — to rebuild your home to a higher standard that experiences less risk and less cost,” Oliverson told the House Insurance Committee in April.

That bill cleared the House late last month. The Senate has yet to take action. How much money the state would spend on the program depends on the bill clearing both chambers, and on the outcome of budget negotiations between the House and Senate.

Lawmakers have considered other ideas. The state insurance department is overseen by a single commissioner appointed by the governor. Another Schwertner proposal would expand that to three commissioners, one of which would be required to have expertise in consumer advocacy. Lawmakers have also advanced bills to prevent insurers from forcing consumers seeking homeowners insurance to also purchase auto insurance, and to require insurers to actively disclose why they may deny coverage to homeowners or cancel their policies.

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit Thursday asking the courts to halt new Trump Administration vetting procedures for reuniting children who crossed into the U.S. without their parents, saying the changes are keeping families separated longer and are inhumane.

The lawsuit was filed by the National Center for Youth Law and Democracy Forward in federal court in the District of Columbia. It names the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement and seeks a return to prior reunification procedures.

Critics note the government data shows the average time that the children are held in custody before release by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to their sponsors grew from 37 days in January to over 112 days by March.

In February, the Trump administration changed the way it reviews sponsors who want to care for migrant children in government custody, whether parents or relatives of the minors — or others. More changes followed in March and April when the government started to require identification or proof of income that only those legally present in the U.S. could acquire. Advocates for the families affected are asking a judge to declare the changes unlawful and return the agency to the policies in place before that.

“The government has dramatically increased the burden on families in a way that deeply undermines children’s safety. These policy changes are part of a broader unraveling of a bi-partisan, decades-long commitment to support the best interests of unaccompanied children,” said Neha Desai, a managing director at National Center for Youth Law.

Attorneys said they had heard from families who were moments away from receiving their children back when the rules were abruptly changed. Now, many say they are left waiting indefinitely.

“The administration has reversed years of established children’s welfare protections and replaced them with fear, prolonged detention, and bureaucratic cruelty,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward in a statement.

One Mexican woman who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of fears of deportation said she and her 8-year-old son were led to believe repeatedly that they would be reunited, only to find out the new policy changes would derail their plans.

The mother, who arrived first across the border from Mexico, has noticed her son lose hope over the last 11 months, even refusing to unpack after the last time he thought his release from a government-run shelter was imminent.

“He’s seen so many children who have come, leave, and he’s stayed behind,” said the mother, who wasn’t part of the lawsuit.

The Trump administration says it is increasing scrutiny of parents and other sponsors before giving them custody of their children who have crossed the border as unaccompanied minors.

HHS did not immediately respond to emails from AP seeking comment in response to the lawsuit filed Thursday afternoon.

Similar restrictions were imposed in 2018 under Trump’s first presidency during the rollout of a zero-tolerance policy that separated families and required fingerprinting for all members of a household receiving a child. The administration scaled back the requirements after custody times increased.

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This story has been updated to correct that the Department of Homeland Security was not named in the lawsuit as previously stated.

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — An asbestos screening clinic in a small Montana town where thousands have been sickened by toxic dust from a nearby mine has been abruptly shuttered by authorities following a court order to seize the clinic’s assets to pay off a judgment to the railroad BNSF.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office closed on Wednesday the Center for Asbestos Related Disease in Libby, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the U.S.-Canada border. The town of about 3,000 people is near a mine that produced asbestos dust for decades, and the clinic has been at the forefront of efforts to help victims.

Courts in Montana have said BNSF contributed to the pollution when it brought contaminated material from the mine through town, and the railway separately faces numerous lawsuits from asbestos victims in Libby and surrounding communities.

But the Texas-based railway prevailed in a 2023 lawsuit alleging the clinic fraudulently made some patients eligible for government benefits when it knew they were not sick. The railway challenged the validity of over 2,000 diagnoses by the clinic and 337 were ruled false.

The railway brought the lawsuit on behalf of the federal government, which provides specialized Medicare services to Libby’s asbestos victims. BNSF was entitled to a share of the $6 million judgment against the clinic, and after adding in attorney fees, court costs and interest, the railway says it’s now owed $3.1 million.

“The judge determined the amount of damages to be repaid, and the process for recovery is set by law,” BNSF spokesperson Kendall Kirkham Sloan said in a statement.

Clinic Executive Director Tracy McNew said the closure would have a broad impact on public health in the Libby area as fewer people are screened for asbestos-related health problems.

“CARD remains committed to its patients and the Libby community and will fight to reopen as soon as possible,” McNew said in a statement.

The clinic for more than 20 years has provided health screenings, monitoring and treatment of patients with problems caused by asbestos exposure. It declared bankruptcy after the judgment in the fraud case was handed down. It kept operating and didn’t pay the money under a settlement reached in bankruptcy court with the federal government that included BNSF.

CARD bankruptcy attorney James “Andy” Patten said the railway’s attempts to collect on the fraud judgment violated the bankruptcy settlement, which was approved by a federal court.

Sloan declined to comment on the bankruptcy settlement.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Texas man associated with a neo-Nazi group was convicted on Wednesday of posting threats to lynch and kill Nashville District Attorney General Glenn Funk after another group member was charged with attacking a downtown bar worker.

David Aaron Bloyed, 60, of Frost, Texas, was found guilty by a federal jury in Nashville of one count of communicating a threat in interstate commerce, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice. He faces up to five years in prison at sentencing.

Bloyed was found to have posted a photograph of Funk with the caption, “Getting the rope,” and an emoji finger pointed towards Funk’s image. A second post included a drawing of a person hanging by the neck from a gallows, with the phrase, “The ‘Rope List’ grew by a few more Nashville jews today.” Both included swastika symbols.

Funk was targeted after a group of white supremacist, antisemitic and neo-Nazi provocateurs came to Nashville last summer and began livestreaming antics for shock value — waving swastika flags through crowded streets, singing hate songs on the downtown courthouse steps, and even briefly disrupting a Metro Council meeting.

At one point, a fight broke out between a bar worker and a member of the group, who used metal flagpole with a swastika affixed to the top to hit the employee. The group member was charged with aggravated assault. The bar worker was also charged in the tussle.

“Antisemitic hate has no place in Nashville or anywhere, and this verdict shows these hateful threats for what they are: a crime,” Acting U.S. Attorney Robert E. McGuire for the Middle District of Tennessee, said in a news release.

AUSTIN – Texas lawmakers want to help young learners who are lagging behind in math and reading, an early setback that threatens to derail their path to high school graduation.

More than half of third graders in the state are not at grade level in reading or math, meaning they lack the key foundational skills they need to thrive as learners.

Students who are behind in third grade rarely catch up, which can lead to serious consequences later in life. Research shows students who struggle to read by third grade are more likely to drop out of high school. Math proficiency is tied to economic mobility as an adult.

The Texas House gave final approval Wednesday to House Bill 123, which aims to provide struggling students extra learning support as early as kindergarten, before learning gaps compound.

“The whole bill presupposes…there’s nothing wrong with these children, but there was simply something wrong with what we were giving them,” state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, said from the House floor on Tuesday.

Last month, the Senate passed a similar bill, Senate Bill 2252. Members from both chambers are now expected to reconcile differences in their proposals in a closed-door conference committee.

The legislation would require districts to use literacy and numeracy screeners to identify students who are struggling early on. The screeners would assess students three times a year between pre-K and 3rd grade on skills like phonics, vocabulary and spelling. Those who are furthest behind would get extra tutoring in small group settings.

The Texas Education Agency would develop a screener that districts could use for free, though districts would be allowed to continue using their own screening methods.

Students are assessed on school readiness when they first enter kindergarten. After that, the state has limited visibility into literacy development until the third-grade STAAR test, with two dyslexia screenings currently acting as the only formal checkpoints.

“We simply cannot afford to wait past third grade to intervene,” said Amber Shields with the education policy nonprofit Commit Partnership, in testimony before lawmakers last month.

Both the House and Senate bills would require schools to share the screening results with parents. Advocates say the information could improve parent engagement and encourage them to help build their children’s skills after school.

Gabe Grantham, an education policy adviser for the think tank Texas 2036, said the information from the screenings could bridge discrepancies between how students are performing in school and how their parents think they are performing.

The legislation would also expand educators’ access to math and reading instructional materials. Teachers often work unpaid hours to complete training known as math and reading academies, which give them the tools to help build students’ skills in those subjects. HB 123 would give districts funding to pay teachers who take those courses after their regular workday.

The efforts to reduce financial barriers for teachers to take this training come at a time when lawmakers are also trying to limit uncertified teachers from leading classes in foundational skills like math and reading. School districts around the state have increasingly leaned on uncertified teachers to lead classrooms as they’ve struggled to hire and retain trained instructors.

The Texas legislation mimics literacy interventions in Louisiana and Mississippi, states that have made significant leaps in student achievement in recent years. Mississippi fourth-grade reading scores soared — a phenomenon referred to as the Mississippi Miracle — after the state implemented regular literacy screening and provided intensive literacy training to K-3 teachers.

Meanwhile, Texas’ fourth-grade reading scores ranked 37th in the nation, even as students have started to rebound from learning disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday said he’ll order the Trump administration to provide more information about the terms under which dozens of Venezuelan immigrants are being held at a notorious prison in El Salvador, moving a step closer to deciding whether to require the men to be returned to the United States.

District Court Judge James E. Boasberg said he needed the information to determine whether the roughly 200 men, deported in March under an 18th century wartime law, were still effectively in U.S. custody. Boasberg noted that President Donald Trump had boasted in an interview that he could get back one man wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador in a separate case by simply asking. The government’s lawyer, Abishek Kambli, said that and other public statements by administration officials about their relationship with El Salvador lacked “nuance.”

Kambli would not give Boasberg any information about the administration’s deal with El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, who once called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and is holding immigrants deported from the U.S. at his country’s CECOT prison. He would not even confirm the terms of the deal, which the White House has said are a $20 million payment to El Salvador.

Boasberg wants the information to establish whether the administration has what’s called “constructive custody” of the immigrants, meaning it could return them if he ordered it. The ACLU has asked that Boasberg order the return of the men, who were accused of being members of a gang Trump claimed was invading the country. Minutes after Trump unveiled his proclamation in March, claiming wartime powers to short-circuit immigration proceedings and remove the men without court hearings, the immigrants were flown to El Salvador.

That happened despite Boasberg’s ruling that the planes needed to be turned around until he could rule on the legality of the move, and he is separately examining whether to hold the government in contempt for that action.

After the March flights, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that no one could be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without a chance to challenge it in court. Since then, three separate federal judges have ruled that Trump’s invocation of the act was illegal because the gang he named is not actually at war with the U.S. It’s likely that those rulings will be appealed all the way back up to the Supreme Court.

Kambli on Wednesday acknowledged that the men deported on the March flights did not get the chance to contest their designation under the Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, as the high court requires. But he argued that Boasberg cannot conclude the United States still has custody of the men. If the U.S. asks for them back, Kambli said, “El Salvador can say ‘No.'”

When it required court hearings for those targeted by the act, the high court also took much of the AEA case away from Boasberg, ruling that immigrants have to contest their removal in the places they’re being detained, not Boasberg’s Washington, D.C., courtroom. Boasberg, who’d blocked removals nationwide initially, has held onto some of the case, including the fate of the men who were first deported.

Trump and some Republican allies have called for impeaching Boasberg, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama. Those calls prompted a rare statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Boasberg hinted Wednesday he may ultimately require that the deported men receive the due process the high court requires, be it by bringing them back or ordering them moved to another facility, like Guantanamo Bay, fully under U.S. control.

There was also a hint that Boasberg was aware of the way Trump and his supporters have spun the legal decisions in the case. He noted that some in the government have described the initial Supreme Court ruling as a victory in which the court upheld the legality of Trump’s proclamation.

Noting that there was an open line so the public could listen to the hearing, Boasberg read from that ruling, which states explicitly that it does not address the legality of labeling the gang a foreign invader.

“We agree,” Kambli said. “they did not handle that precise issue.”

A federal judge has ruled that a Georgetown scholar’s petition challenging the constitutionality of his arrest should be heard in Virginia, denying the Trump administration’s request to move the case to Texas.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said she would hear arguments in mid-May on whether Badar Khan Suri should be returned to Virginia while his deportation case proceeds in Texas, where he’s now detained. His next hearing in the immigration case is in June.

The judge’s late Tuesday memo says that by swiftly moving Khan Suri from Virginia to Louisiana and then Texas within days of his arrest, the government appeared to be trying to thwart his lawyers’ efforts to challenge his detention in the jurisdiction where it happened.

Khan Suri’s lawyers went to court the day after masked, plain-clothed officers arrested him on the evening of March 17 outside his apartment complex in Arlington, Virginia. Officials said his visa was revoked because of his social media posts and his wife’s connection to Gaza as a Palestinian American. They accused him of supporting Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

By the time Khan Suri’s petition was filed, authorities had already put him on a plane to Louisiana without allowing him to update his family or lawyer, Khan Suri’s attorneys said. A few days later, he was moved again to Texas.

“This atypical movement would make it difficult for any diligent lawyer’s filings to ’catch up’ to their client’s location,” and followed a pattern now evident in multiple efforts to deport students based on their speech, Giles wrote.

The judge noted that Columbia University scholar Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident with no criminal record who was detained in March over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations was moved within 48 hours of his arrest in Manhattan through lockups in New York, New Jersey, Texas and, then, Louisiana.

She also cited the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was arrested in a Boston suburb, driven New Hampshire and then Vermont, and then flown to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered ICE to return Ozturk to Vermont.

Each scholar “was arrested on different days and in different regions,” Giles wrote. “What is similar? … the Government attempted to move each outside of their jurisdictions to Louisiana or Texas.”

Unlike the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, the courts in Texas and western Louisiana are dominated by Republican-appointed judges, and any appeals go to the reliably conservative 5th Circuit, where 12 of the 17 full-time appellate judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including six by President Donald Trump.

Khan Suri came from India to the U.S. in 2022 on a J-1 visa. A visiting scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, he taught a course on majority and minority human rights in South Asia, and lived with his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and three children.

U.S. attorneys argued that Khan Suri was quickly moved because a facility in Farmville, Virginia, was overcrowded and a nearby detention center in Caroline County had “no available beds and only had limited emergency bedspace.”

But the judge observed that for weeks thereafter, Khan Suri had to sleep on a plastic cot on the floor of an overcrowded detention center in Texas, and that according to his attorneys, he now sleeps on a bed in an overcrowded dormitory with about 50 other people. The government’s representations, she wrote, “are plainly inconsistent and are further undermined by the fact that Prairieland Detention Center, where Petitioner (Khan Suri) is currently held, is overcrowded.”